You remember how it was begun, one spring morning two years ago, with the opening scene of the first chapter gay before my eyes as I wrote. You remember the excitement of ending it before the Christmas of 1913; so that we could start with free consciences, early in the New Year, on our Egyptian journey.

C'est bien loin, tout cela! War overtook it in its serial course; and now, in book form, it must go out to the world as an expression of the moods and fancies almost of a past incarnation.

These dream figures with whom we delighted, like children, to people our home, are now replaced by other guests tragically real, as big-hearted as those most loved of our shadow-folk. Yet sometimes they seem still to live. . . . While correcting the final proofs we have been tempted to modify the end, to bring the story of Jaffery more or less up to date; but we have felt that any addition would be out of key, so far are we from that happy Christmastide when, in gaiety of heart, I wrote the last words.

Yet we know, you and I, that Jaffery Chayne is even now over there, across the Channel; no longer writing of war, but doing his soldier's work in the thick of it, like a gallant gentleman. And don't you feel that one day he will come again and we shall hear his mighty voice thundering across the lawn. . . ?

W.J.L.

CONTENTS

[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[CHAPTER III]
[CHAPTER IV]
[CHAPTER V]
[CHAPTER VI]
[CHAPTER VII]
[CHAPTER VIII]
[CHAPTER IX]
[CHAPTER X]
[CHAPTER XI]
[CHAPTER XII]
[CHAPTER XIII]
[CHAPTER XIV]
[CHAPTER XV]
[CHAPTER XVI]
[CHAPTER XVII]
[CHAPTER XVIII]
[CHAPTER XIX]
[CHAPTER XX]
[CHAPTER XXI]
[CHAPTER XXII]
[CHAPTER XXIII]
[CHAPTER XXIV]
[CHAPTER XXV]

ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing
Page
It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with
extraordinary sureness and gentleness[Frontispiece]
Where the lonely figure in black and white sat brooding[64]
Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, handled the cleek[78]
He drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs[186]
"Go! You're nothing but a brute"[228]
Before I realized the danger . . . I was flung aside[300]
And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and
strewn papers, . . . lay a tiny, black, moaning
heap of a woman[316]
There is war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is there
as war correspondent. Liosha is there, too[350]