"Pity her if you like," the Doctor said, with a strong emphasis, on the
first word, "but--"

He hesitated. Something in his friend's face stopped him from saying
more, told him that perhaps it would be much wiser to say nothing more.
Opposition drives some natures blindly forward. Such natures should not
be opposed.

"I pity Mrs. Chepstow, too," he concluded. "Poor woman!"

And in saying that he spoke the truth. But his pity for her was not of
the kind that is akin to love.

The black coffee Mrs. Chepstow had persuaded Meyer Isaacson to take kept
him awake that night. Like some evil potion, it banished sleep and
peopled the night with a rushing crowd of thoughts. Presently he did not
even try to sleep. He gave himself to the crowd with a sort of
half-angry joy.

In the afternoon he had been secretly puzzled by Mrs. Chepstow. He had
wondered what under-reason she had for seeking an interview with him.
Now he surely knew that reason. Unless he was wrong, unless he
misunderstood her completely, she had come to make a curiously
audacious _coup_. She had seen Nigel Armine, she had read his strange
nature rightly; she had divined that in him there was a man who, unlike
most men, instinctively loved to go against the stream, who
instinctively turned towards that which most men turned from. She had
seen in him the born espouser of lost causes.