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.

Armine had talked to her four days ago of Meyer Isaacson. The Doctor
guessed how, knowing the generous enthusiasm of his friend. And she, a
clever woman, made distrustful by misfortune, had come to Cleveland
Square, led by feminine instinct, to spy out this land of which she had
heard so much. The Doctor's sensation of being examined, while he sat
with Mrs. Chepstow in his consulting-room, had been well-founded. The
patient had been reading the Doctor, swiftly, accurately. And she had
acted promptly upon the knowledge of him so rapidly acquired. She had
"given herself away" to him; she had shown herself to him as she was.
Why? To shut his mouth in the future. The revelation, such as it was,
had been made to him as a physician, under the guise of described
symptoms. She had told him the exact truth of herself in his
consulting-room, in order that he might not tell others--tell Nigel
Armine--what that truth was.

Her complete reliance upon her own capacity for reading character
surprised and almost delighted the Doctor. For there was something
within him which loved strength and audacity, which could appreciate
them artistically at their full value. She had given a further and a
fuller illustration of her audacity that evening in the restaurant.

Now, in the night, he could see her white face, the look in her