“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 resent the services of women, even of nurses—­I mean in quite indifferent things, not merely in things where a man may naturally shrink from their help.  Well, you don’t seem that sort of man in the least.”  She looked at him, as she ended this appreciation of him, as though she expected an answer or a comment.  Beaumaroy made neither; he walked on, not even looking at her.

“And you can’t have been troubled long with that wound.  It evidently healed up quickly and sweetly.”

Beaumaroy looked for an instant at his maimed hand with a critical air; but he was still silent.

“So that I wonder you didn’t do as most patients do—­let the nurse, or, if you were still disabled after you came out, a friend or somebody, cut up your food for you without providing yourself with that implement.”  He turned his head quickly towards her.  “And if you ask me what implement I mean, I shall answer—­the one you tried to snatch from the sideboard at Tower Cottage before I could see it.”

It was a direct challenge; she charged him with a lie.  Beaumaroy’s face assumed a really troubled expression, a thing rare for it to do.  Yet it was not an ashamed or abashed expression; it just seemed to recognize that a troublesome difficulty had arisen.  He set a slower pace and prodded the road with his stick.  Mary pushed her advantage.  “Your—­your improvization didn’t satisfy me at the time, and the more I’ve thought over it, the less have I found it convincing.”