andor
carried to the verge of self-betrayal. Oh, he would be full of retorts,
supple and dexterous ones! As this hostile accusation passed through her
mind, she awoke to the fact that she was, at the same moment, regarding
his profile (he, too, was silent, no doubt lying in wait to trip up her
opening!) with interest, even with some approval. He seemed to feel her
glance, for he turned towards her quickly--so quickly that she had no
time to turn her eyes away.

"Doctor Mary"--the familiar mode of address habitually used at the house
which they had just left seemed to slip out without his consciousness of
it--"You've got something against me; I know you have! I'm sensitive that
way, though not, perhaps, in another. Now, out with it!"

"You'd silence me with a clever answer. I think that you sometimes make
the mistake of supposing that to be silenced is the same thing as being
convinced. You silenced Captain Naylor--oh, I don't mean you've prevented
him from talking!--I mean you confuted him, you put him in the wrong, but
you certainly didn't convince him."

"Of what?" he asked in a tone of surprise.

"You know that. Let us suppose his idea was all nonsense; yet your
immediate object was to put it out of his head." She suddenly added, "I
think your last question was a diplomatic blunder, Mr. Beaumaroy. You
must have known what I meant. What was the good of pretending not to?"

Beaumaroy stopped still in the road for a moment, looking at her with a
rueful amusement. "You're not so easily silenced, after all!" he said,
starting to walk on again.

"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