“Aren’t people horrible sometimes?  They seem to think one is—­” She checked herself.  “I’m a fool!” she said.  “Good night.  Thank you both for coming.  It has done me good.”

“Don’t mind those brutes!” Armine almost whispered to her, as he held her hand for a moment.  “Don’t think of them.  Think of—­the others.”

She looked at him in silence, nodded, and went quietly away.

Directly she had gone Meyer Isaacson said to his friend: 

“Well, good night, Armine.  I am glad you’re back.  Let us see something of each other.”

“Don’t go yet.  Come to my sitting-room and have a smoke.”

“Better not.  I have to be up early.  I ride at half-past seven.”

“I’ll ride with you, then.”

“To-morrow?”

“Yes, to-morrow.”

“But have you got any horses up?”

“No; I’ll hire from Simonds.  Don’t wait for me, but look out for me in the Row.  Good night, old chap.”

As they grasped hands for a moment, he added: 

“Wasn’t I right?”

“Right?”

“About her—­Mrs. Chepstow?  She may have been driven into the Devil’s hands, but don’t you see, don’t you feel, the good in her, struggling up, longing for an opportunity to proclaim itself, to take the reins of her life and guide her to calm, to happiness, to peace?  I pity that woman, Isaacson; I pity her.”

“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.

She was a lost cause.  Armine was her opportunity.