Beaumaroy Home from the Wars by Antonio Hope

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 just then 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.