"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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 a.s.sumed 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."

He stopped again, turning round to her. He slapped his left hand against the side of his leg. "Well, there it is, Doctor Mary! You must make what you can of it."

It was complete surrender as to the combination knife-and-fork. He was beaten, on that point at least, and owned it. His lie was found out.

"It's dashed difficult always to remember that you're a doctor," he broke out the next minute.

Mary could not help laughing; but her eyes were still keen and challenging as she said, "Perhaps you'd better change your doctor again, Mr. Beaumaroy. You haven't found one stupid enough!"

Again Beaumaroy had no defense; his nonplussed air confessed that maneuver, too. Mary dropped her rallying tone and went on gravely: "Unless I'm treated with confidence and sincerity, I can't continue to attend Mr. Saffron."

"That's your ultimatum, is it, Doctor Mary?"

She nodded sharply and decisively. Beaumaroy meditated for a few seconds. Then he shook his head regretfully. "It's no use. I daren't trust you," he said.

Mary laughed again, this time in amazed resentment of his impudence. "You can't trust me! I think it's the other way round. It seems to me that the boot's on the other leg."

"Not as I see it." Then he smiled slowly, as it were tentatively. "Or would you--I wonder if you could--possibly--well, stand in with me?"

"Are you offering me a--a partnership?" she asked indignantly.

He raised his hand in a seeming protest, and spoke now hastily and in some confusion. "Not as you understand it. I mean, as you probably understand it, from what I said to you that night at the Cottage. There are features in the--well, there are things that I admit have--have pa.s.sed through my mind, without being what you'd call settled. Oh, yes, without being in the least settled. Well, for the sake of your help and--er--co-operation, those--those features could be dropped. And then perhaps--if only your--your rules and etiquette--"

Mary scornfully cut short his embarra.s.sed pleadings. "There's a good deal more than rules and etiquette involved. It seems to me that it's a matter of common honesty rather than of rules and etiquette--"

"Yes, but you don't understand--"

She cut him short again. "Mr. Beaumaroy, after this, after your suggestion and all the rest of it, there must be an end of all relations between us--professionally and, so far as possible, socially too, please.

I don't want to be self-righteous, but I feel bound to say that you have misunderstood my character."

Her voice quivered at the end, and almost broke. She was full of a grieved indignation.

They had come opposite the cottage now. Beaumaroy stopped, and stood facing her. Though dusk had fallen, it was a clear evening; she could see his face plainly; obviously he was in deep distress. "I wouldn't have offended you for the world. I--I like you far too much, Doctor Mary."

"You imputed your own standards to me. That's all there is about it, I suppose," she said in a scornful sadness. He looked very miserable.

Compa.s.sion, and the old odd attraction which he had for her, stirred in her mind. Her voice grew soft, and she held out her hand. "I'm sorry too, very sorry, that it should have to be good-bye between us."

Beaumaroy did not take her proffered hand, or even seem to notice it. He stood quite still.

"I'm d.a.m.ned if I know what I'm to do now!"

Close on the heels of his despairing confession of helplessness--for such it undoubtedly seemed to me--came the noise of an opening door, a light from the inside of the Cottage, a patter of quick-moving feet on the flagged path that led to the garden gate. The next moment Mary saw the figure of Mr. Saffron, in his old gray shawl, standing at the gate. He was waving his right arm in an excited way, and his hand held a large sheet of paper.

"Hector! Hector, my dear, dear boy! The news has come at last. You can be off tomorrow!"

Beaumaroy started violently, glanced at his old friend's strange figure, glanced once, too, at Mary; the expression of utter despair which his face had worn seemed modified into one of humorous bewilderment.

"Yes, yes, you can start tomorrow for Morocco, my dear boy!" cried old Mr. Saffron.

Beaumaroy lifted his hat to her, cried, "I'm coming, sir!" turned on his heel, and strode quickly up to Mr. Saffron. She watched him open the gate and take the old gentleman by the arm; she heard the murmur of his voice speaking soft accents as the pair walked up the path together. They pa.s.sed into the house, and the door was shut.

Mary stood where she was for a moment, then moved slowly, hesitatingly, yet as though under a lure which she could not resist. Just outside the gate lay something that gleamed white through the darkness. It was the sheet of paper. Mr. Saffron had dropped it in his excitement, and Beaumaroy had not noticed.

Mary stole forward and picked it up stealthily; she was incapable of resisting her curiosity or even of stopping to think about her action.

She held it up to what light there was, and strained her eyes to examine it. So far as she could see, it was covered with dots, dashes, lines, queerly drawn geometrical figures--a ma.s.s of meaningless hieroglyphics.

She dropped it again where she had found it, and made off home with guilty swiftness.

Yes, there had been, this time, a distinctly metallic ring in old Mr.

Saffron's voice.

CHAPTER X

THE MAGICAL WORD MOROCCO!

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.

She had gone to sleep on the name of Beaumaroy; on it she awoke. It came from Captain Alec's lips. He was standing on the hearthrug with his arm round Cynthia's waist, and his other hand raising one of hers to his lips. He looked admirably handsome--strong, protecting, devoted. And Cynthia, in her fragile appealing prettiness, was a delicious foil, a perfect complement to the picture. But now, under stress of emotion--small blame to a man who was making a vow of eternal fidelity!--under stress of emotion, as, on a previous occasion, under that of indignation, the Captain had raised his voice!

"Yes, against all the scoundrels in the world, whether they're called Cranster or Beaumaroy!" he said.

Mary's eyes opened. She sat up. "Cranster and Beaumaroy?" They were the words which her ears had caught. "What in the world has Mr. Beaumaroy to do with--" But she broke off, as she saw the couple by the fire. "But what are you two doing?"

Cynthia broke away from her lover, and ran to her friend with joyous avowals.