Mary was thirty, an age at which many women are still young, an age at which some who have heads under their hair are still rising towards the zenith of their charm. But Mary was not one of these. Her youth was clearly on the wane. She bore the imprint of that which ages--because if unduly prolonged it enfeebles--the sheltered life, a life centred in conventional ideas, dwarfed by a conventional religious code, a life feebly nourished on cut and dried charities sandwiched between petty interests and pettier pleasures. She showed the mark of her twelve seasons, and of what she had made of life, in the slight fading of her delicate complexion, the fatigued discontent of her blue eyes, the faint dignified dejection of her manner, which was the reflection of an unconscious veiled surprise that she of all women--she the gentle, the good, the religious, the pretty Mary Carden was still--in short was still Mary Carden. The onlooker would perhaps have shared that surprise. She was indubitably pretty, indubitably well bred, graceful, slender, with a delicate manicured hand, and fair waved hair. Her fringe, which seemed inclined to grow somewhat larger with the years, was nearly all her own. She possessed the art of dress to perfection. You could catalogue her good points. But somehow she remained without attraction. She lacked vitality, and those who lack vitality seldom seem to get or keep what they want, at any rate in this world. She was the kind of woman whom a man marries to please his mother, or because she is an heiress, or because he has been jilted and wishes to show how little he feels it. She was not a first choice. She was one of that legion of perfectly appointed women who at seventeen deplore the rapacity of the older girls in ruthlessly clutching up all the attention of the simpler sex; and who at thirty acidly remark that men care only for a pink cheek and a baby face. Poor Mary was thinking of a man now, of a certain light-hearted simpleton of a soldier with a slashed scar across his hand, which a Dervish had given him at Omdurman, the man as commonplace as herself, on whom for no particular reason she had glued her demure, obstinate, adhesive affections twelve years ago.