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 mockery—­the kindly mockery which his face wore before they quarrelled, and before its light was quenched in that forlorn bewilderment.  And it seemed as though the image began to say some words to her, disconnected words, not making a sentence, but yet having for the image a pregnant meaning, and seeming to her—­though vaguely and very dimly—­to be the key to what she had to understand.  She was stupid not to understand words so full of meaning—­just as stupid as Beaumaroy had thought.

Then Doctor Mary fell asleep, sound asleep; she had been very near it for the last ten minutes.

Captain Alec and Cynthia were in two chairs, close side by side, in front of the fire.  Once Cynthia glanced over her shoulder; the Captain had glanced over his in the same direction already.  One of his hands held one of Cynthia’s.  It was well to be sure that Mary was asleep, really asleep.