[Illustration: It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with extraordinary sureness and gentleness. (_See page 165_)] JAFFERY BY WILLIAM J. LOCKE ILLUSTRATIONS BY F. MATANIA NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY 1915 Press of J.J. Little & Ives Company New York, U.S.A. TO MY WIFE This book on which it has pleased you to bestow your especial affection I dedicate to you with my love. It is a memory of many happy hours and many dreams that we have shared. 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. 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 THE WILLIAM J. LOCKE YEAR-BOOK A _bon-mot_ for each day in every year, selected from this popular author's works. _Decorated Cloth. $1.00 net_ CHAPTER I