him from talking!--I mean you confuted him, you put him in the wrong, but
you certainly didn't convince him."

"Of what?" he asked in a tone of surprise.

"You know that. Let us suppose his idea was all nonsense; yet your
immediate object was to put it out of his head." She suddenly added, "I
think your last question was a diplomatic blunder, Mr. Beaumaroy. You
must have known what I meant. What was the good of pretending not to?"

Beaumaroy stopped still in the road for a moment, looking at her with a
rueful amusement. "You're not so easily silenced, after all!" he said,
starting to walk on again.

"You encourage me." To tell the truth, Mary was not only encouraged, she
was pleased by the hit she had scored, and flattered by his
acknowledgment of it. "Well, then, I'll put another point. You needn't
answer if you don't like."

"I shall answer if I can, depend on it!" He laughed, and Mary, for a
brief instant, joined in his laugh. His sudden lapses into candor seemed
somehow to put the serious hostile questioner ridiculously in the wrong.
Could a man like that really have anything to conceal?

But she held to her purpose. "You're a friendly sort of man, you offer
and accept attentions and kindnesses, you're not stand-offish, or
haughty, or sulky; you make friends easily, especially, perhaps, with
women; they like you, and like to be pleasant and kind to you. There are
men--patients, I mean--very hard to deal with; men who resent being ill,
resent having to have things done to them and for them, who especially