“Well, why shouldn’t—­” old Naylor began; but he stopped as he saw Mary’s eyes meet Beaumaroy’s in a rapture of quick and delighted understanding.

“And then perhaps you’ll own to being sorry, Doctor Mary!”

“So that’s what you were up to, was it?” said Mary.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE GOLD AND THE TREASURE

Old Mr. Naylor called on Mary two or three days later—­at an hour when, as he well knew, Cynthia was at his own house—­in order to hear the story.  There were parts of it which she could not describe fully for lack of knowledge—­the enterprise of Mike and Big Neddy, for example; but all that she knew she told frankly, and did not scruple to invoke her imagination to paint Beaumaroy’s position, with its difficulties, demands, obligations—­and temptations.  He heard her with close attention, evidently amused, and watching her animated face with a keen and watchful pleasure.

“Surprising!” he said at the end, rubbing his hands together.  “That’s to say, not in itself particularly surprising.  Just a queer little happening; one would think nothing of it if one read it in the newspaper!  Things are always so much more surprising when they happen down one’s own street, or within a few minutes’ walk of one’s garden wall—­and when one actually knows the people involved in them.  Still I was always inclined to agree with Dr. Irechester that there was something out of the common about old Saffron and our friend Beaumaroy.”

“Dr. Irechester never found out what it was, though!” exclaimed Mary triumphantly.

“No, he didn’t; for reasons pretty clearly indicated in your narrative.”  He sat back in his chair, his elbows on the arms and his hands clasped before him.  “If I may say so, the really curious thing is to find you in the thick of it, Doctor Mary.”

“That wasn’t my fault.  I couldn’t refuse to attend Mr. Saffron.  Dr. Irechester himself said so.”

He paid no heed to her protest.  “In the thick of it—­and enjoying it so tremendously!”

Mary looked thoughtful.  “I didn’t at first.  I was angry, indignant, suspicious.  I thought I was being made a fool of.”

“So you were—­a fool and a tool, my dear!”

“But that night—­because it all really happened in just one night—­the chief mourners, as Mr. Beaumaroy always calls them, were more than—­”

“Just a rather amusing epilogue—­yes, that’s all.”

“That night, it did get hold of me.”  She laughed a little nervously, a little uneasily.

“And now you tell it to me—­I must say that your telling made it twice the story that it really is—­now you tell it as if it were the greatest thing that ever happened to you!”

For a moment Mary fenced.  “Well, nothing interesting ever has happened in my humdrum life before.”  But old Naylor pursed up his lips in contempt of her fencing.  “It did seem to me a great—­a great experience.  Not the burglars and all that—­though some of the things, like the water-butt, did amuse me very much—­but our being apart from all the world, there by ourselves, against the whole world in a way, Mr. Naylor.”