His heart. For in the place behind the coachman, in the very seat which Mary Smith had occupied on that far-off April morning, sat Mary Vermuyden! For an infinitely small fraction of a second, as he turned himself to drop into his seat, his eyes swept her face. The rain had ceased to fall, the umbrellas were furled; for that infinitely short space his eyes rested on her features. Then his back was turned to her. Her eyes had been fixed elsewhere, her face had been cold—she had not seen him. So much, in the confused pounding rush of his thoughts, as he sat tingling in every inch of his frame, he could remember; but nothing else except that in lieu of the plain Quaker-like dress which Mary Smith had worn—oh, dress to be ever remembered!—she was wearing rich furs, with a great muff and a small hat of sable, and was Mary Smith no longer. Probably she had been there from the start, seated behind him under cover of the rain and the umbrellas. If so—and he remembered that that seat had been occupied when he got to his place—she had perceived his coming, had seen him mount, had been aware of him from the first. She could see him now, watch every movement, read his self-consciousness in the stiff pose of his head, perceive the rush of colour which dyed his ears and neck. And he was planted there, he could not escape. And he suffered. Asked beforehand, he would have said that his uppermost feeling in such circumstances would be resentment. But, in fact, he could think of nothing except that meeting in Parliament Street, and the rudeness with which he had treated her. If he had not refused to speak to her, if he had not passed her by, rejecting her hand with disdain, he might have been his own master now; he would have been free to speak, or free to be silent, as he pleased. And she who had treated him so ill would have been the one to suffer. But, as it was, he was hot all over. The intolerable _gêne_ of the situation rested on him and weighed him down.