When Mary arrived home, she found Cynthia and Captain Alec still in
possession of the drawing-room; their manner accused her legitimate entry
into the room of being an outrageous intrusion. She took no heed of that,
and indeed little heed of them. To tell the truth, she was ashamed to
confess, but it was the truth, she felt rather tired of them that
evening. Their affair deserved every laudatory epithet, except that of
interesting; so she declared peevishly within herself as she tried to
join in conversation with them. It was no use. They talked on, and in
justice to them it may be urged that they were fully as bored with Mary
as she was with them; so naturally their talents did not shine their
brightest. But they had plenty to say to one another, and dutifully threw
in a question or a reference to Mary every now and then. Sitting apart
at the other end of the long low room--it ran through the whole depth of
her old-fashioned dwelling--she barely heeded and barely answered. They
smiled at one another and were glad.

She was very tired; her feelings were wounded, her nerves on edge; she
could not even attempt any cool train of reasoning. The outcome of her
talk with Beaumaroy filled her mind rather than the matter of it; and,
more even than that, the figure of the man seemed to be with her, almost
to stand before her, with his queer alternations of despair and mirth, of
defiance and pleading, of derision and alarm. One moment she was
intensely irritated with him; in the next she half forgave the plaintive
image which the fancy of her mind conjured up before her eyes.

Her eyes closed--she was so very tired, the fight had taken it out of
her! To have to do things like that was an odious necessity, which had
never befallen her before. That man had done--well, Captain Alec was
quite right about him! Yet still the shadowy image, though thus
reproached, did not depart; it was smiling at her now with its old