He had cast a speculative eye on Cynthia Walford, Irechester had caught him at it, but, as he observed her more, she did not altogether satisfy him.  Alec needed someone more stable, stronger, someone in a sense protective; somebody more like Mary Arkroyd; that idea passed through his thoughts; if only Mary would take the trouble to dress herself, remember that she was, or might be made, an attractive young woman; and, yes, throw her mortar and pestle out of the window without, however, discarding with them the sturdy, sane, balanced qualities of mind which enabled her to handle them with such admirable competence.  But he soon had to put this idea from him.  His son’s own impulse was to give, not to seek, protection and support.

Of Cynthia’s woeful experience Alec had spoken to his father once only:  “It makes me mad to think the fellow who did that wore a British uniform!”

How unreasonable!  Since by all the laws of average, when millions of men are wearing a uniform, there must be some rogues in it.  But it was Alec’s way to hold himself responsible for the whole of His Majesty’s Forces.  Their honor was his; for their misdeeds he must in his own person make reparation.  “That fellow Beaumaroy may have lost his conscience, but my boy seems to have acquired five million,” the old man grumbled to himself—­a grumble full of pride.

The father might analyze; with Alec it was all impulse, the impulse to soothe, to obliterate, to atone.  The girl had been sorely hurt; with the acuteness of sympathy he divined that she felt herself in a way soiled and stained by contact with unworthiness and by a too easy acceptance of it.  All that must be swept out of her heart, out of her memory, if it could be.

Doctor Mary saw what was happening, and with a little pang to which she would not have liked to own.  She had set love affairs, and all the notions connected therewith, behind her; but she had idealized Alec Naylor a little; and she thought Cynthia, in homely phrase, “hardly good enough.”  Was it not rather perverse that the very fact of having been a little goose should help her to win so rare a swan?

“You’re taking my patient out of my hands, Captain Alec!” she said to him jokingly.  “And you’re devoting great attention to the case.”

He flushed.  “She seems to like to talk to me,” he answered simply.  “She seems to me to have rather a remarkable mind, Doctor Mary.” (She was “Doctor Mary” to all the Old Place party now, in affection, with a touch of chaff.)

O sancta simplicitas!  Mary longed to say; that Cynthia was a very ordinary child.  Like to talk to him, indeed!  Of course she did; and to use her girl’s weapons on him; and to wonder, in an almost awestruck delight, at their effect on this dazzling hero.  Well, the guilelessness of heroes!

So mused Mary, on the unprofessional side of her mind, as she watched, that Christmastide, Captain Alec’s delicate, sensitively indirect, and delayed approach toward the ripe fruit that hung so ready to his hand.  “Part of his chivalry to assume she can’t think of him yet!” Mary was half-impatient, half-reluctantly admiring; not an uncommon mixture of feeling for the extreme forms of virtue to produce.  In the net result, however, her marked image of Alec lost something of its heroic proportions.