For half an hour Alan sat smoking his cigar.

Mentally he was not at ease.

Mary Standish had come to him like a soldier, and she had left him like a soldier.

But in that last glimpse of her face he had caught for an instant something which she had not betrayed in his cabin--a stab of what he thought was pain in her tear-wet eyes as she smiled, a proud regret, possibly a shadow of humiliation at last--or it may have been a pity for him.

He was not sure.