e must be some rogues in it. But it was Alec's
way to hold himself responsible for the whole of His Majesty's Forces.
Their honor was his; for their misdeeds he must in his own person make
reparation. "That fellow Beaumaroy may have lost his conscience, but my
boy seems to have acquired five million," the old man grumbled to
himself--a grumble full of pride.

The father might analyze; with Alec it was all impulse, the impulse to
soothe, to obliterate, to atone. The girl had been sorely hurt; with
the acuteness of sympathy he divined that she felt herself in a way
soiled and stained by contact with unworthiness and by a too easy
acceptance of it. All that must be swept out of her heart, out of her
memory, if it could be.

Doctor Mary saw what was happening, and with a little pang to which she
would not have liked to own. She had set love affairs, and all the
notions connected therewith, behind her; but she had idealized Alec
Naylor a little; and she thought Cynthia, in homely phrase, "hardly good
enough." Was it not rather perverse that the very fact of having been a
little goose should help her to win so rare a swan?

"You're taking my patient out of my hands, Captain Alec!" she said to
him jokingly. "And you're devoting great attention to the case."

He flushed. "She seems to like to talk to me," he answered simply. "She
seems to me to have rather a remarkable mind, Doctor Mary." (She was
"Doctor Mary" to all the Old Place party now, in affection, with a touch
of chaff.)

_O sancta simplicitas_! Mary longed to say; that Cynthia was a very
ordinary child. Like to talk to him, indeed! Of course she did; and to
use her girl's weapons on him; and to wonder, in an almost awestruck
delight, at their effect on this dazzling hero. Well, the guilelessness
of heroes!

So mused Mary, on the unprofessional side of her mind, as she watched,
that Christmastide, Captain Alec's delicate, sensitively indirect, and
delayed approach toward the ripe fruit that hung so ready to his hand.
"Part of his chivalry to assume she can't think of him yet!" Mary was
half-impatient, half-reluctantly admiring; not an uncommon mixture of
feeling for the extreme forms of virtue to produce. In the net result,
however, her marked image of Alec lost something of its heroic
proportions.

But professionally (the distinction must not be pushed too far, she was
not built in watertight compartments) Tower Cottage remained obstinately
in the center of h