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.
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