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+Project Gutenberg's The Tyranny of Weakness, by Charles Neville Buck
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Tyranny of Weakness
+
+Author: Charles Neville Buck
+
+Illustrator: Paul Stahr
+
+Release Date: June 6, 2007 [EBook #21689]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TYRANNY OF WEAKNESS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Garcia, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Kentuckiana Digital Library)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TYRANNY OF WEAKNESS
+
+BY
+
+CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK
+
+AUTHOR OF
+
+"THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS,"
+"DESTINY," Etc.
+
+Frontispiece by
+PAUL STAHR
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
+
+NEW YORK
+W. J. WATT & COMPANY
+PUBLISHERS
+
+[Illustration: Stuart was a memory and she was trying very hard to make
+him even less than that]
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
+W. J. WATT & COMPANY
+
+_OTHER BOOKS BY_ CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK
+
+     THE KEY TO YESTERDAY
+     THE LIGHTED MATCH
+     THE PORTAL OF DREAMS
+     THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS
+     THE BATTLE CRY
+     THE CODE OF THE MOUNTAINS
+     DESTINY
+
+
+PRESS OF
+BRAUNWORTH & CO.
+BOOK MANUFACTURERS
+BROOKLYN. N. Y.
+
+
+
+
+THE TYRANNY OF WEAKNESS
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+They were types in embryo, but of course they did not know it. No more
+would a grain of wheat and a poppy seed dropping side-by-side in a
+fallow place reflect upon their destinies, though one might typify a
+working world's dependence for bread; the other a dreaming world's
+reliance for opium.
+
+They were a boy and a girl stepping artlessly into the wide chances of a
+brand-new and vastly interesting adolescence. Just now her young eyes
+were provocative with the starry light of mischief. His were smoldering
+darkly under her badgering because his pride had been touched to the
+quick. His forefathers had been gentlemen in England before they were
+gentlemen in the Valley of Virginia and his heritage of knightly blood
+must not be made a subject of levity. But the girl reflected only that
+when his dark eyes blazed and his cheeks colored with that dammed-up
+fury she found him a more diverting vassal than in calmer and duller
+moods. A zoo is more animated when the beasts are stirred into action.
+
+"What was it that General Breckinridge said, Stuart?" She put the
+question innocently. "When the Newmarket cadets made their charge?"
+
+"He said--" Suddenly the boy caught the riffled mockery of her eyes and
+abruptly his inspired recital broke off in exasperation, "May I ask just
+why you find that such a funny story?" he inquired with ironical
+dignity. "Most people seem to think it was rather pitiful than comic to
+send to their slaughter boys almost young enough to be in the nursery."
+
+The eyes of Conscience Williams twinkled. "Maybe it isn't the story
+itself that's funny," she deigned to admit. "When your father told it, I
+cried--but when you tell it your face is so furious that--that you seem
+about to begin the war between the states all over again."
+
+"Of course that makes it perfectly clear." Into the manner of young Mr.
+Stuart Farquaharson came now the hauteur of dignified rebuke. He
+enveloped himself in a sudden and sullen silence, brooding as he sat
+with his eyes fixed on his riding boots.
+
+"What did General Breckinridge say?" She prompted persistently. Such
+sheer perversity maddened him. He had been reciting to her a story of
+exalted heroism--the narrative of how the boy cadets had hurled their
+young bodies against the Northern cannon and of how General Breckinridge
+had prayed for forgiveness as he gave the command which sent this
+flowering youth to its fate. And she found it amusing! He could not see
+how genuinely comic was his own unreconstructed ardor--how exaggerated
+was his cocksure manner--how thoroughly he spoke as though he himself
+had bled on the field of honor.
+
+From her hammock she watched him with serene and inscrutable
+complacency, from under long, half-closed lashes. In his gaze was
+inarticulate wrath, but back of that--idolatry. He had from birth
+breathed an atmosphere of traditions in which the word "chivalry" was
+defined, not as an obsolete term, but as a thing still kept sacredly
+aflame in the hearts of gentlemen. To the stilted gallantry of his
+boyhood, ideals had meant more than ideas until Conscience Williams had
+come from her home on Cape Cod and turned his life topsy-turvy. Since
+her advent he had dreamed only of dark eyes and darker hair and crimson
+lips. He had rehearsed eloquent and irresistible speeches, only to have
+them die on a tongue which swelled painfully and clove to the roof of
+his mouth when he essayed their utterance. Then had come an inspiration.
+The stirring narration of how the Newmarket cadets had charged the
+Northern guns was to have been his cue, carrying him with the momentum
+of its intrinsic heroism over the ramparts of tongue-tied shyness. That
+was what he had essayed this morning, aided and abetted by the tuneful
+fragrance of June in Virginia. The stage had been set--his courage had
+mounted--and before he had reached his magnificent peroration, she had
+laughed at him. Ye Gods! She had affronted the erstwhile Confederate
+States of America and his spirit was galled.
+
+Suddenly Conscience looked up and met his gaze penitently. It was a
+change from mockery so swift and complete that he should have suspected
+it, but he saw only a flash of sun through dark clouds.
+
+"Do you like poetry?" she abruptly demanded.
+
+"Like poetry!" Again the boy's countenance needed a twinkle of merriment
+to redeem it from a too serious acceptance of self. "Not to like
+poetry--if it's real poetry--is simply to be a plain clod." He spoke
+with an oracular and pedantic assurance which challenged the girl's
+mischief afresh.
+
+"Shall I recite you something?" was her mild and seemingly placating
+suggestion, "just to see if it is real poetry?"
+
+"Will you? I wish you would." He bent forward in eager anticipation.
+Verse should pave the way with music for the avowal which he had so far
+failed to force across the barrier between heart and lips.
+
+She rose from the hammock and stood beside one of the broad verandah
+pillars, very straight and slender and flower-like, with the June sun on
+her hair. Stuart's heart was conscious of a sudden glow. A boy new to
+love, like a man new to drink, can recognize from a sip an elation that
+the jaded taste has forever forfeited. Then in a rich voice with a
+slightly exaggerated elocution, Conscience began:
+
+
+     "Up from the meadows, rich with corn, clear in the cool September
+       morn,
+     The clustered spires of Frederick stand, green-walled by the hills
+       of Maryland."
+
+
+Those schools wherein the last of the Farquaharsons had derived his
+primary education had not starred or featured the poems of John
+Greenleaf Whittier. Stuart's eyes dwelt devouringly on the
+elocutionist--as yet unruffled by suspicion. They were doing their best
+to say the things at which his lips balked. But as the recitation
+proceeded their light died from hope to misery and from misery to the
+anger of hurt pride. He stood very rigid and very attentive, making no
+effort to interrupt, but holding her gaze defiantly as she went on:
+
+
+     "Up the street came the Rebel tread, Stonewall Jackson riding
+       ahead.
+     Under his slouch hat left and right, he glanced and the old flag
+       caught his sight."
+
+
+At these lines the boy flinched, but still he said nothing. Like a
+soldier who stands at attention under the threat of a firing squad he
+listened to the end--or rather to the stanzas which recite:
+
+
+     "'Shoot, if you must at this old gray head, but spare your
+       country's flag,' she said.
+     A flush of manhood, a look of shame, into the face of their leader
+       came...."
+
+
+That was too much! The man of whom these impious words were spoken was
+that gallant knight, without reproach, whose name is hallowed in every
+Southern heart. Very slowly Stuart Farquaharson raised his hand.
+
+"I think," he announced with a shake of repressed fury in his voice,
+"I'll have to go home now. Good afternoon."
+
+"Then you don't like poetry?"
+
+"I don't consider that poetry," he said with a dignity which an
+archbishop might have envied. "I consider it slander of a dead hero."
+
+"You mean, then," Conscience seemed a little frightened now and her
+utterance was hurried and fluttering, "that you are mad and are going?
+You never go until later than this."
+
+It was difficult to be both courteous and honest, and Stuart's code
+demanded both.
+
+"I expect there wasn't ever the same reason before."
+
+This time it was the girl's eyes that leaped into flame and she stamped
+a small foot.
+
+"Did you ever have any _fun_ in your life?" she demanded. "You know
+perfectly well that I teased you just because you were such a solemn owl
+that you're not far from being a plain, every-day prig. All right; go if
+you like and don't come to see me again until you get over the idea that
+you're a--a--" she halted for a word, then added scornfully--"a
+combination high priest and Prince of Wales."
+
+Stuart Farquaharson bowed stiffly.
+
+"All right," he said. "I won't forget. Good-by."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the dinner table that evening Mrs. Farquaharson noted with concern
+the trance-like abstraction in which her son sat, as one apart. Later as
+she mixed for the General the night-cap toddy, which was an institution
+hallowed by long usage, she commented on it.
+
+"I'm afraid Stuart isn't well," she volunteered. "He's not a moody boy
+by nature, and he doesn't seem himself to-day. Perhaps we had better
+send him to Doctor Heathergill. It wouldn't do for him to fall ill just
+when he's starting to college."
+
+The General studied the toddy as though it held the secrets of a seer's
+crystal. "Your very good health, my dear." He raised the glass and about
+his gray eyes came the star-point wrinkles of an amused smile, "I
+noticed that Stuart didn't ride over to see the little Williams girl
+to-night. Wasn't that unusual?"
+
+Mrs. Farquaharson nodded her head. "He must have been feeling positively
+ill," she declared. "Nothing less could have kept him away."
+
+But the father, who had never before shown evidence of a hard heart,
+permitted his quizzical twinkle to broaden into a frank grin, "With
+every confidence in Dr. Heathergill, I doubt his ability to aid our
+declining son."
+
+"Then you think--?"
+
+"Precisely so. The little girl from the North has undertaken a portion
+of the boy's education which is as painful to him as it is essential."
+
+"He's been perfectly lovely to her," defended the mother indignantly.
+"It's a shame if she's hurt him."
+
+The General's face grew grave.
+
+"It's a God's blessing, I think." He spoke thoughtfully now. "Stuart is
+a sentimentalist. He lives largely on dreams and poetry and ideals."
+
+"Surely, General--" Sometimes in the moment of serious connubial debate
+Mrs. Farquaharson gave her husband his title. "Surely you wouldn't have
+him otherwise. The traditions of his father and grandfathers were the
+milk on which he fed at my breast."
+
+"By which I set great store, but a child must be weaned. Stuart is
+living in an age of shifting boundaries in ideas and life.
+
+"I should hate to see him lower his youthful standards, but I should
+like to see him less in the clouds. I should like to see him leaven the
+lump with a sense of humor. To be self-consciously dedicated to noble
+things and yet unable to smile at one's ego is to be censorious, and to
+be censorious is to be offensive."
+
+"But he's just a child yet," argued Stuart's mother. "For all his height
+and strength he's hardly more than a boy after all."
+
+"Quite true, yet to-night he's tossing in his bed and breathing like a
+furnace because his heart is broken for all time. It's all very well to
+swear:
+
+
+           "To love one maiden only, cleave to her
+     And worship her by years of noble deeds,
+
+
+but for him that day is still far off. Meanwhile he's got to have his
+baptism of fire. It's a mighty good thing for a boy like Stuart to begin
+taking a little punishment while he's young. Young hearts, not less than
+young bones, mend quicker and better. He's over intense and if he got
+the _real_ before he's had his puppy loves it would go hard with him."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+When Stuart presented himself at breakfast the next morning his eyes
+were black-ringed with sleeplessness, but his riding boots were freshly
+polished and his scarf tied with extra precision. It was in the mind of
+the youngest Farquaharson to attain so personable an appearance that the
+lady who had cast aside his love should be made to realize what she had
+lost as they passed on the highway.
+
+Then he went to the stables to have Johnny Reb saddled and started away,
+riding slowly. When he came in view of the house which she sanctified
+with her presence, a gray saddle mare stood fighting flies and stamping
+by the stone hitching post in front of the verandah, and each swish of
+the beast's tail was a flagellation to the boy's soul. The mare belonged
+to Jimmy Hancock and logically proclaimed Jimmy's presence within.
+Heretofore between Stuart and Jimmy had existed a cordial amity, but now
+the aggrieved one remembered many things which tainted Jimmy with
+villainy and crassness. Stuart turned away, his hand heavy on the bit,
+so that Johnny Reb, unaccustomed to this style of taking pleasure sadly,
+tossed his head fretfully and widened his scarlet nostrils in disgust.
+
+Ten minutes later the single and grim-visaged horseman riding north came
+upon a pair riding south. Johnny Reb's silk coat shone now with sweat,
+but his pace was sedate. The love-sick Stuart had no wish to travel so
+fast as would deny the lady opportunity to halt him for conversation.
+Conscience and Jimmy were also riding slowly and Stuart schooled his
+features into the grave dignity of nobly sustained suffering. No
+Marshal of France passing the Emperor's reviewing stand ever rode with a
+deeper sense of the portentous moment. With his chin high and his face
+calm in its stricken dignity he felt that no lady with a heart in her
+soft bosom could fail to extend proffers of conciliation. In a moment
+more they would meet in the narrow road. His face paled a shade or two
+under the tension--then they were abreast and his heart broke and the
+apple of life was dead sea fruit to his palate. She had spoken. She had
+even smiled and waved her riding crop, but she had done both with so
+superlative an indifference that it seemed she had not really seen him
+at all. She was chatting vivaciously with Jimmy and Jimmy had been
+laughing as raucously as a jackal--and so they had passed him by. The
+event which had spelled tragedy for him; robbed him of sleep and
+withered his robust appetite had not even lingered overnight in her
+memory. The dirk was in Stuart Farquaharson's breast, but it was yet to
+be twisted. Pride forbade his shaking Johnny Reb into a wild pace until
+he was out of sight. The funereal grandeur of his measured tread must
+not be broken, and so he heard with painful distinctness the next remark
+of Jimmy Hancock.
+
+"What in thunder's eatin' on Stuty--" (sometimes, though not encouraged
+to do so, young Mr. Farquaharson's intimates called him by that shameful
+diminutive.) "He looks like a kid that's just been taken back to the
+barn and spanked."
+
+"Did he?" asked the young lady casually, "I really didn't notice."
+
+Ye Gods! He, wearing his misery like a Caesar's toga, compared by this
+young buffoon to a kid who had been spanked! _She_ had not noticed it.
+Ye Gods! Ye Gods!
+
+
+Ten days passed and the visit of Conscience Williams was drawing to an
+end. Soon she would go back to those rock-bound shores of New England
+where in earlier days her ancestors had edified themselves with burning
+witches. She would pass out of his life but never out of his memory. His
+heart would go with her, but though it killed him he would never modify
+the rigors of his self-appointed exile from her presence until an
+advance came from her.
+
+Each night he secretly stole over to a point of ambuscade from which he
+could see the shimmery flash of her dress as she moved about the porch,
+cavaliered by the odious Jimmy and his fellows. On these nocturnal
+vigils he heard the note of her heedless laughter while he crouched
+embittered and hidden at a distance. There was in those merry peals no
+more symptom of a canker at her heart than in the carol of a bird
+greeting a bright day. She did not care and when the one maiden whom he
+wished to worship by years of noble deeds did not care--again the only
+answer was "Ye Gods!"
+
+These were not matters to be alleviated by the comforting support of a
+confidant and he had no confidant except Cardinal Richelieu. The
+cardinal was more frequently addressed as Ritchy and his nature was as
+independent of hampering standards as his origin warranted. The
+Cardinal's face--a composite portrait of various types of middle-class
+dog-life--made pretense useless and early in his puppy career he seemed
+to realize it and to abandon himself to a philosophy of irresponsible
+pleasure. But Ritchy's eye had taken on a saddened cast since the blight
+had fallen on his master. He no longer frisked and devised, out of his
+comedian's soul, mirth-provoking antics. It was as though he understood
+and his spirit walked in sorrow.
+
+A night of full-mooned radiance came steeping the souls of the young
+Knight and the young Cardinal in bitter yet sweet melancholy. Two days
+more and Conscience would be gone from the Valley of
+Virginia--returning to Cape Cod. Then Stuart would write over the door
+of his life "Ichabod, the glory is departed." To-night he would stalk
+again to his lonely tryst beneath the mock-orange hedge, which gave
+command of the yard and porch, and when she had gone to her room, he
+could still gaze upon the lighted window which marked a sacred spot. At
+a sedate distance in the rear proceeded the Cardinal, who had
+judiciously made no announcement of his coming. He knew that there was
+an edict against his participation in these vigils, based on a theory
+that he might give voice and advertise his master's presence, but it was
+a theory for which he had contempt and which he resented as a slur upon
+his discretion.
+
+When Stuart Farquaharson crouched in the lee of heavily shadowed
+shrubbery the Cardinal sat on his haunches and wrinkled his unlovely
+brow in contemplative thought. Not far away masses of honeysuckle
+climbed over a rail fence festooned with blossom. Into the night stole
+its pervasive sweetness and the old house was like a temple built of
+blue gray shadows with columns touched into ivory whiteness by the
+lights of door and window. A low line of hills loomed beyond, painted of
+silver gray against the backdrop of starry sky and the pallor of moon
+mists. From the porch came the desultory tinkle of a banjo and the
+voices of young people singing and in a pause between songs more than
+once the boy heard a laugh--a laugh which he recognized. He could even
+make out a scrap of light color which must be her dress. Such were the
+rewards of his night watch, a melancholy and external gaze upon a
+Paradise barred to him by a stubbornness which his youth mistook for
+honorable pride.
+
+At last two buggies rattled down the drive with much shouting of
+farewells and ten minutes later Jimmy's saddle horse clattered off at a
+gallop. The visitors were gone silence was left behind them. But
+Conscience did not at once turn into the house and close the door behind
+her. She stood by one of the tall pillars and the boy strained his gaze
+to make out more than the vague outline of a shadow-shape. Then slowly
+she came down the stairs and out onto the moonlit lawn, walking
+meditatively in the direction of Stuart Farquaharson's hiding place. The
+boy's heart leaped into a heightened tattoo and he bent eagerly forward
+with his lips parted. She moved lightly through the luminance of a world
+which the moon had burnished into tints of platinum and silver, and she
+was very lovely, he thought, in her child-beauty and slenderness, the
+budding and virginal freshness that was only beginning to stir into a
+realization of something meant by womanhood. He bent, half kneeling, in
+his ambuscade with that dream of love which was all new and wonderful: a
+thing of such untarnished romance as only life's morning can give to the
+young.
+
+Then into the dream welled a futile wave of resentment and poisoned it
+with bitterness. She had played with him and mocked him and cast him
+aside and to her he was less than nothing. A few moments ago her voice
+had drifted to him in an abandonment of merriment though she was going
+away without seeing him. Night after night he had come here, merely for
+the sad pleasure of watching her move through the shadows and the
+distance.
+
+Now, unconscious of his nearness, the girl came on until she halted
+beyond the fence, not more than ten yards away. Cardinal Richelieu
+fidgeted on his haunches and silenced, with a difficult self-repression,
+the puzzled whine which came into his throat. The tempered spot-light of
+the moon was on Conscience's lashes and lips, and the boy stiffened into
+a petrified astonishment, for quite abruptly and without warning she
+carried both slim hands to her face and her body shook with something
+like a paroxysm of sobs.
+
+In a moment she took her hands away and her eyes were shining with a
+tearful moisture. A lock of hair fell over her face. She tossed it back,
+then she moved a few steps nearer and rested both arms on the top rail
+of the fence. In them she buried her cheeks and began to cry softly.
+Stuart Farquaharson could almost have touched her but he was quite
+invisible. He felt himself an eavesdropper, but he could not escape
+without being seen.
+
+The case was different with Cardinal Richelieu. Repressed emotions have
+been said to kill strong men. They did not kill the Cardinal, but they
+conquered him. From his raggedly whiskered lips burst a growl and a yawp
+which, too late, he regretted.
+
+The girl gave a little scream and started back and Stuart realized it
+was time to reassure her. He rose up, materializing into a tall shape in
+the shadows like a jinn conjured from empty blackness.
+
+"It's only me--Stuart Farquaharson," he said, and Conscience gave a
+little outcry of delight in the first moment of surprise. But that she
+swiftly stifled into a less self-revealing demeanor as she demanded with
+recovered dignity, "What are you doing here?"
+
+The boy vaulted the fence and stood at her side while the mollified
+Cardinal waved a stubby tail, as one who would say--"Now you see it took
+my dog sense to bring you two together. Without me you were quite
+helpless."
+
+"Why were you crying, Conscience?" Stuart asked, ignoring alike her
+question and the rebuke in her voice, but she reiterated, "What are you
+doing here?"
+
+The moon showed a face set with the stamp of tragedy which he imagined
+to have settled on his life, but his eyes held hers gravely and he was
+no longer hampered with bashfulness. The sight of her tear-stained
+faced had freed him of that.
+
+"I come here every night," he acknowledged simply, "to watch you over
+there on the porch--because--" He balked a moment there, but only a
+moment, before declaring baldly what he had so often failed to announce
+gallantly--"Because I'm crazy about you--because I love you."
+
+For a moment she gazed up at him and her breath came fast, then she
+suggested, a little shaken, "It isn't much farther on to the house. You
+used to come the whole way."
+
+"You told me not to."
+
+"If you had--had cared very much you would have come any way."
+
+"I've cared enough," he reminded her, "to sit out here every night until
+you put out your light and went to sleep. If you had wanted me you'd
+have said so."
+
+Impulsively she laid a trembling hand on his arm and spoke in rushing
+syllables. "I thought you'd come without being sent for--then when I
+knew you wouldn't, I couldn't hear it. I wrote you a note to-night.... I
+was going to send it to-morrow.... I'm going home the next day."
+
+A whippoorwill called plaintively from the hillside. He had spoken and
+in effect she had answered. All the night's fragrance and cadence merged
+into a single witchery which was a part of themselves. For the first and
+most miraculous time, the flood tide of love had lifted them and their
+feet were no longer on the earth.
+
+"But--but--" stammered the boy, moistening his lips, "you were singing
+and laughing with Jimmy Hancock and the rest ten minutes ago, and now--"
+
+The girl's delicately rounded chin came up in the tilt of pride.
+
+"Do you think I'd show them how I felt?" she demanded. "Do you think
+I'd tell anybody--except you."
+
+Stuart Farquaharson had a sensation of hills and woods whirling in
+glorified riot through an infinity of moon mists and star dust. He felt
+suddenly mature and strong and catching her in his arms he pressed her
+close, kissing her hair and temples until she, fluttering with the
+wildness of her first embrace of love, turned her lips up to his kisses.
+
+But soon Conscience drew away and at once her cheeks grew hot with
+blushes and maidenly remorse. She had been reared in an uncompromising
+school of puritanism. Her father would have regarded her behavior as
+profoundly shocking. She herself, now that it was over, regarded it so,
+though she wildly and rebelliously told herself that she would not undo
+it, if she could.
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed in a low voice, "oh, Stuart, what were we thinking
+about!"
+
+"We were thinking that we belong to each other," he fervently assured
+her. "As long as I live I belong to you--and to no one else, and you--"
+
+"But we're only children," she demurred, with a sudden outcropping of
+the practical in the midst of romanticism. "How do we know we won't
+change our minds?"
+
+"I won't change mine," he said staunchly. "And I won't let you change
+yours. You will write to me, won't you?" he eagerly demanded, but she
+shook her head.
+
+"Father doesn't let me write to boys," she told him.
+
+"At least you'll be back--next summer?"
+
+"I'm afraid not. I don't know."
+
+Stuart Farquaharson drew a long breath. His face set itself in rigid
+resolve.
+
+"If they send you to the North Pole and stop all my letters and put a
+regiment of soldiers around you, and keep them there, it won't alter
+matters in the long run," he asseverated, with boyhood assurance, "You
+belong to me and you are going to marry me."
+
+A voice from the house began calling and the girl answered quickly, "I'm
+just in the garden. I'll be right in." But before she went she turned to
+the boy again and her eyes were dancing incorrigibly.
+
+"You won't go out and join any Newmarket cadets or anything and get
+killed meanwhile, will you?"
+
+"I will not," he promptly replied. "And when we have a house of our own
+we'll have framed copies of Barbara Freitchie hanging all over the place
+if you want them."
+
+To Stuart Farquaharson just then the future seemed very sure. He had no
+way of knowing that after to-morrow years lay between the present and
+their next meeting--and that after that--but of course he could not read
+the stars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+The sand bar rose like a white island beyond the mild surf of the shore,
+distant enough to make it a reservation for those hardier swimmers who
+failed to find contentment between beach and float. Outside the bar the
+surf boiled in spume-crowned, and went out again sullenly howling an
+in-sucking of sands and an insidious tug of undertow.
+
+One head only bobbed far out as a single swimmer shaped his course in
+unhurried strokes toward the bar. This swimmer had come alone from the
+hotel bath-houses and had strolled down into the streaming bubbles of an
+outgoing wave without halting to inspect the other bathers. There was a
+businesslike directness in the way he kept onward and outward until a
+comber lifted him and his swimming had begun.
+
+The young man might have been between twenty and twenty-five and a Greek
+feeling for line and form and rhythmic strength would have called his
+body beautiful. Its flesh was smooth and brown, flowing in frictionless
+ease over muscles that escaped bulkiness; its shoulders swung with a
+sort of gladiatorial freedom. But the Hellenic sculptor would have found
+the head suited to his use as well as the torso and limbs, for it was a
+head well shaped and well carried, dominated by eyes alert with
+intelligence, and enlivened with humor.
+
+As he rocked between crest and trough, the swimmer's glance caught the
+shattered form of a breaker at the end of the bar. He liked things to be
+the biggest of their sort. If there was to be surf, he wanted it to be
+like that beyond, with a fierce song in its breaking and the foam of the
+sea's endless sweat in its lashings.
+
+When at last he let himself down and his feet touched bottom, he wiped
+the brine out of his eyes and hurried up the shallow rise--then halted
+suddenly. The bar had appeared empty of human life, but now he caught a
+glimpse of a head and a pair of shoulders and they were feminine. A
+normal curiosity as to further particulars asserted itself. He had a
+distinct feeling of apprehension lest the face, when seen, should prove
+a disappointment, because unless it was singularly attractive--more
+attractive than wits warranted by any law of probability--it would be
+distressingly out of keeping with the charm and grace of the figure
+which came into full view as he waded ashore in spite of the masses of
+dark and lustrous hair which fell free. The unknown lady was sitting on
+the sand with her back half turned and, in the soaked and clinging silk
+of her bathing dress, she had an alluring lissomness of line and curve.
+If her face _did_ match her beauty of body she would have rather more
+than one woman's share of Life's gifts, he philosophized, and by
+Nature's law of compensation she would probably be vapid and insipid of
+mind.
+
+But while he was engaging himself in these personal speculations the
+lady herself was obviously quite serene in her ignorance of his presence
+or existence. She conceived herself to be in sole possession of her
+island kingdom of an hour and was complacently using it as an exclusive
+terrain.
+
+She had removed her blue bathing cap and tossed it near by on the sand.
+She had let her hair out free to the sun, in whose light it glowed
+between the rich darkness of polished mahogany and the luster of jet.
+
+After all perhaps he had better announce himself in some audible fashion
+since, secure in her supposed isolation, the other occupant of the bar
+proceeded to remove a silk stocking, which matched the cap in color,
+and to examine with absorbed interest what he supposed to be a
+stone-bruise on an absurdly small and pink heel. Discreetly he coughed.
+
+The young woman looked quickly over her shoulder and their eyes met. A
+perfunctory apology for invasion shaped itself in his mind, but remained
+unuttered. He stood instead, his lips parted and his eyes brimming with
+astonishment. The face not only met the high requirements set for it by
+his idea of appropriateness, but abundantly surpassed the standard.
+Moreover, it was a face he recognized. He was not at first quite certain
+that her recognition of him had been as swift. A half dozen years,
+involving the transition from boyhood to manhood might have dimmed his
+image in her memory, so he hastened to introduce himself, striding
+across as she came a little confusedly to her feet--one silk shod and
+one bare.
+
+"Heaven be praised, Conscience," he shouted with an access of boyish
+elation in his voice. "This is too lucky to believe. Don't say you've
+absolutely forgotten me--Stuart Farquaharson."
+
+She stood there before him, dangling a stocking in her left hand as she
+extended her right. Dark hair falling below her waist framed a face
+whose curves and feature-modelings were all separate delights uniting to
+make a total of somewhat gorgeous loveliness. Her lips were crimson
+petals in a face as creamy white as a magnolia bloom, and her dark eyes
+twinkled with inward mischief. It was a face which in repose held that
+serenely grave quality which a painter might have selected for his study
+of a saint--and which, when her little teeth flashed and her eyes
+kindled in a smile, broke into a dazzling and infectious gayety. She was
+smiling now.
+
+"'Up from the meadows rich with corn'?" she inquired, as though they had
+parted yesterday.
+
+Stuart Farquaharson broke into a peal of laughter as he caught the
+extended hand in both his own and finished the quotation.
+
+
+     "Clear in the cool September morn, the clustered spires of
+       Frederick stand,
+     Green-walled by the hills of Maryland ...
+
+
+By the way," his voice took on a note of sudden trepidation--"you aren't
+married, are you?"
+
+It was a point upon which she did not at the moment resolve his doubts.
+She was standing at gaze herself, critically taking him in. She let her
+appraisal begin at the dark hair which the water had twisted into a
+curling lawlessness and end at his feet which were somewhat small for
+his stature. The general impression of that scrutiny was one which she
+secretly acknowledged to be startlingly, almost thrillingly, favorable.
+Then she realized that while one of her hands continued to dangle a wet
+stocking, the other was still tightly clasped in his own and that he was
+repeating his question.
+
+"Why do you ask?" she naively inquired, as she quietly sought to
+disengage her imprisoned fingers.
+
+"Why!" he echoed, in a shocked voice, pretending unconsciousness of her
+efforts at self-liberation. "Why does one ever ask a vital question? The
+last time I saw you I told you candidly that I meant to marry you. If
+you're already married--why, it might complicate matters, don't you
+think?"
+
+"It _might_," the young woman conceded. "It might even alter matters
+altogether--but don't you think that even for a reunion we seem to have
+shaken hands almost long enough?"
+
+With reluctance he released the captive fingers and reminded her that he
+was still unanswered.
+
+"No," she told him, "I'm not married so far--of course I've tried hard,
+but the honest gander hasn't volunteered."
+
+"Thank God!" was his instant and fervent comment.
+
+Beyond her were the sands of the bar and the Atlantic Ocean stretching
+unbroken to the Madeiras and a flawless sky against which the gulls
+dipped and screamed.
+
+She was straight and vivid, and his pulses quickened, taking fire. Sun,
+air and water; sparkle, radiance and color--these things were about him
+filling his senses with delight and she seemed to epitomize them all in
+a personal incarnation.
+
+"Don't let me keep you standing," he begged her, belatedly remembering
+his manners. "You were taking your case when I came. Besides, Old
+Neptune in person will be along soon to claim this sandbar for himself.
+Meanwhile, 'The time has come,' the walrus said, 'to talk of many
+things.'"
+
+"As for instance?"
+
+"As for instance that there's less of the fortuitous in this meeting
+than appears upon the surface."
+
+"Then you knew I was on the sandbar?"
+
+Stuart Farquaharson shook his head. "I didn't even know that you were at
+Chatham. I just got here this morning driving through to Provincetown.
+But I did know that you were on Cape Cod, and that is why I'm on Cape
+Cod."
+
+She dropped lightly to the sand and sat nursing her knees between
+interlocked fingers. Stuart Farquaharson spread himself luxuriantly at
+length, propped on one elbow. He could not help noting that the bare
+knee was dimpled and that the curved flesh below it was satin-smooth and
+the hue of apple blossoms. The warm breeze kept stirring her hair
+caressingly and, against the glare, she lowered her long lashes, half
+veiling her eyes. But at his avowal of the cause of his coming her lips
+curved with humorous scepticism.
+
+"I'm afraid you acted very hastily," she murmured. "You've only known I
+was here for about six years."
+
+He nodded, entirely unruffled.
+
+"I have only recently been promoted to the high office of 'Master of my
+fate'--but before we get to that--where are you stopping?"
+
+"Our party will be here at Chatham for several days. We're stopping at
+The Arms."
+
+"You speak of a party, and that makes me realize the imperative need of
+improving this golden moment," Stuart Farquaharson announced urbanely,
+"because I have certain rude and elementary powers of deduction."
+
+"Which lead you to what conclusion?" She turned eyes riffled with
+amusement from the contemplation of a distant sail to his face, and he
+proceeded to enlighten her.
+
+"To two. First, that in Chatham, Massachusetts, as in the Valley of
+Virginia, there is probably a Jimmy Hancock buzzing about. Secondly,
+that since 'misfortunes come not single spies, but in battalions,' there
+are probably a flock of Jimmies. By the by, will you swim out here with
+me to-morrow morning?"
+
+"To-morrow morning," she demurred. "I believe I have an engagement for a
+horseback ride with Billy Stirling. We're going to look at a wind mill
+or something."
+
+The man shook his head in mock distress.
+
+"I knew it," he sighed, then his tone grew serious and he began to speak
+rapidly. "You say I've known where you were for six years and that's
+true. It's also true that until this summer, I haven't in any genuine
+sense been the master of my movements. Four years were spent in college,
+and two in law school. There were vacations, of course, but my mother
+claimed them at home. She is dead now, and her last few years were years
+of partial invalidism--so she wanted her family about her."
+
+"Oh," the girl's eyes deepened with sympathy. "I didn't know that. She
+was, I think, almost the loveliest woman I ever knew. She was everything
+that blue blood ought to be--and so rarely is."
+
+"Thank you. Yes, I think my mother was just that--but what I meant to
+claim was that this summer is the first I have been free to use in
+whatever way I wanted: the first time I've been able to say to myself,
+'Go and do whatever seems to you the most delightful thing possible in a
+delightful world.' What I did was to come to Cape Cod and why I did it
+I've already told you."
+
+Conscience studied his expression and back of the whimsical glint in his
+eyes she recognized an entire sincerity. Perhaps he had retained out of
+boyhood some of that militant attitude of believing in his dreams and
+making them realities. She found herself hoping something of the sort as
+she reminded him, "After I had outgrown pigtails, you know, they would
+have let me read a letter from you--if it had arrived."
+
+"Certainly. There were a good many times when I started to write; a good
+many times when I got as far as a half-finished letter. But I always
+tore it up. You see, it never appeared to me that that was the way. A
+letter from me, after a long absence would have been a shadowy sort of
+message. I couldn't guess how clearly you remembered me or even whether
+you remembered me at all. You were a child then, who was growing into a
+woman. Your life was an edifice which you were building for yourself.
+What niches it had for what saints and deities, I couldn't hope to know.
+I might have been scornfully thrust in among the cobwebs with other
+promiscuous rummage of outgrown days. I might have been hardly more
+important than the dolls that preceded me in your affections by only a
+couple of years. How could I tell?" He paused and questioned her with
+direct eyes. "No, I meant to come back into your life not as a ghost
+speaking from the past but as a man intent on announcing himself in
+person. It was no part of my scheme that you should say, 'Oh, yes, I
+remember him. A long, thin kid with a vile temper. I used to love to
+stir him up and hear him roar.' That's why I never wrote."
+
+Her smile was still a little doubtful and so he went on.
+
+"It would have been too easy for you to have simply dropped me cold. Now
+it happens that in life I am endowed with a certain india-rubber
+quality. I am practically indestructible. When you biff me into the
+corner I can come bouncing back for more. In short, I am not so easy to
+be rid of, when I'm on the ground."
+
+Conscience laughed. They were still young enough to respond thrillingly
+to the remembered fragrance of honeysuckle and the plaintive note of the
+whippoorwill, and perhaps to other memories, as well.
+
+She rose abruptly and went down to the water's edge where she stood with
+the breeze whipping the silk draperies of her blue bathing skirt against
+her knees and stirring her hair into a dark nimbus about her head. After
+retrieving from the sand the blue cap and the blue stocking, her
+companion followed her.
+
+"Now that I'm here," he asseverated, "I hold that we stand just where we
+stood when we parted."
+
+But at that she shook her head and laughed at him. "Quite the reverse,"
+she declared. "I hold that by years of penitence I've lived down my
+past. We're simply two young persons who once knew each other."
+
+"Very well," acceded he. "It will come to the same thing in the end. We
+will start as strangers, but I have a strong conviction that when we
+become acquainted, I'm going to dog your steps to the altar. I'm willing
+to cancel all the previous chapter, except that I sha'n't forget it....
+Can _you_ forget it?"
+
+She flushed, but shook her head frankly, and answered without evasion,
+"I haven't forgotten it yet."
+
+He was gazing into her face with such a hypnotism of undisguised
+admiration that she smilingly inquired, "Well, have I changed much?"
+
+"You have. You've changed much and radiantly. Since you insist on
+regarding me as a new acquaintance I must be conservative and
+restrained, so I'll only say that you have the most flawless beauty I've
+ever seen."
+
+"The tide is rising," she reminded him irrelevantly. "We'd better be
+starting back." She put her hands up to her wind-blown hair and began
+coiling it into abundant masses on her head, while he was kneeling on
+the sand and tying the ribbon of her bathing slipper.
+
+They crossed the bar and went into the water, swimming side by side with
+easy strokes, and when the return trip was half completed they saw the
+head of another swimmer coming out.
+
+"That's Billy Stirling," she told him. "He seems to have guessed where I
+was."
+
+"I was right," sighed the Virginian. "He out-Jimmies Jimmy Hancock. I
+don't like this Stirling person."
+
+"You don't know him yet, you know."
+
+"Quite true, but I don't have to know him to dislike him. It's a matter
+of general principle."
+
+But in spite of his announcement, Stuart did like Billy Stirling. He
+liked him from the moment that gentleman thrust a wet paw out of the
+water to shake hands and tossed the brine from a grinning face to
+acknowledge the girl's introduction. He liked him even better for the
+Puck-like irresponsibility of his good humor as, later on, he introduced
+Stuart to the others of the party.
+
+"Now that you've met this crew, you are to consider yourself a member,"
+declared Stirling, though he added accusingly, "I promoted this
+expedition and used great discrimination in its personnel. It struck me
+as quite complete before your intrusion marred its symmetry, but you're
+here and we've got to make the best of you."
+
+The women differed with Mr. Stirling and scathingly told him so, to his
+immense delight.
+
+"The difference between a party made up in handcuffed pairs, like this
+has been, and one equipped with an extra man or two is the exact
+difference between frugal necessity and luxury," protested Henrietta
+Raven, sententiously.
+
+"I suppose you get the fact that these guileless kids over here are our
+venerated chaperons?" said the host with a pointed finger. "They are so
+newly-wed that they still spoon publicly--which is disgraceful, of
+course, but reduces the obnoxiousness of chaperons."
+
+The week that followed in Chatham was a momentous time and a turning
+point for the young Virginian. In a way it was epochal in his life.
+Though he was assimilated into the party as if he had been one of them
+from childhood, he found little opportunity to be alone with Conscience.
+Indeed the idea came to him at first vaguely, then persistently, that
+she herself was seeking to avoid anything savoring of the quality of a
+tete-a-tete.
+
+The realization haunted and troubled him because even in this general
+association, her personality had flashed varyingly and amazingly from
+many facets. The dream which had meant so much to his boyhood was
+swiftly ripening also into the dream of his manhood, or, as he would
+have expressed it, a fulfillment. His heart had been fallow when he had
+first known her. It had not been subjected to subsequent conquest and
+now its predisposed allegiance was ready to grow with tropical swiftness
+into a purposeful and fiery ardor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Stuart Farquaharson had that habit of self-analysis which often
+compelled him to take his own life into the laboratory of reflection and
+study its reactions with an almost impersonal directness. That analysis
+told him that Conscience Williams, had she chosen to do so, might have
+imposed upon him the thrall of infatuation, even had there been no
+powerful appeal to his mentality. Every fiery element that had lain
+dormant in his nature was ready to leap into action, in response to a
+challenge of which she was herself unconscious--a challenge to the
+senses. And yet he recognized with an almost prayerful gratitude that it
+was something paramount to physical lure, which beckoned him along the
+path of love. Into the more genuine and intimate recesses of her life,
+where the soul keeps its aloofness, she had given him only keyhole
+glimpses, but they had been such glimpses as kindled his eagerness and
+awakened his hunger for exploration. There had been candid indications
+reenforced by a dozen subtler things that her liking for him was more
+than casual, and yet she denied him any chance to avow himself, and
+sometimes, when he came suddenly upon her, he discovered a troubled
+wistfulness in her face which clouded her eyes and brought a droop to
+the corners of her lips.
+
+On one such occasion as he was passing an old house with a yard in which
+the grass was tall and ragged and the fruit trees as unkempt and
+overgrown as a hermit's beard he saw her standing alone by one of the
+tilting veranda posts. The sunshine was gone from her dark eyes, so that
+they seemed darker than ever--and haunted with an almost tragic
+wistfulness. She had the manner of one facing a ghost which she had
+vainly sought to lay. He came so close before he spoke her name that she
+turned toward him with a start, as though he wakened her suddenly out of
+somnambulism, but even as she wheeled, her face brightened and a
+bantering merriment sounded in her voice, countering all his solicitous
+inquiries with gay retorts.
+
+When a week of charming but unsatisfying association had passed Stuart
+Farquaharson felt that the time had come when he must talk with her less
+superficially. It was as if they had only waded in the shallows of
+conversation--and he wanted to strike out and swim in deeper waters. The
+opportunity, when it came, was not of his own making. It was an evening
+when there was dancing in the large lounge of The Arms. Farquaharson and
+Conscience had gone, between dances, to the tiled veranda overlooking
+the sea. The moon was spilling showers of radiance from horizon to
+shore, and making of the beach a foreground of pale silver. The veranda
+itself was a place of blue shadows between the yellow splotches of the
+window lights. After a little she laid a hand lightly on Stuart's arm.
+
+"Don't you want to take me for a stroll on the beach?" she asked a shade
+wearily. "I'm tired of so many people."
+
+They followed the twisting line of the wet sands and at last halted by
+the prow of a beached row-boat, where the girl enthroned herself, gazing
+meditatively off to sea.
+
+"Conscience," he asked slowly, "you have used a diplomacy worthy of a
+better cause, in devising ways to keep me from talking with you
+alone--why?"
+
+"Have I done that?" she countered.
+
+"You know you have. Of course you've known I wanted to make love to you.
+Why wouldn't you let me?"
+
+"Because," she answered gravely, meeting his eyes with full candor, "I
+didn't want you to--make love to me. I'm not ready for that."
+
+"I haven't said I wasn't willing to wait, have I?" he suggested quietly.
+"You don't appear to throw barriers of silence between yourself and
+Billy."
+
+"No. That's different.... I'm not--" Suddenly she broke off and laughed
+at herself.
+
+Then a little startled, at her own frankness, she admitted in a low
+voice, "I'm not afraid of Billy's unsettling me."
+
+The man felt his temples throb with a sudden and intoxicating elation.
+He steadied himself against its agitation to demand,
+
+"And you are--afraid that I might?"
+
+She was sitting with the moonlight waking her dark hair into a somber
+luster and a gossamer shimmer on the white of her evening gown. Her
+hands lay unmoving in her lap and she slowly nodded her confession.
+
+"You see," she told him, after another long pause, "it's a
+thing--falling in love--that I should do rather riotously--if I did it
+at all. I shouldn't be able to think of much else."
+
+Stuart Farquaharson wanted to seize her in his arms and protest that she
+could never love him too riotously, but he instead schooled his voice to
+a level almost monotonous.
+
+"I fell in love with you--back there in the days of our childhood," he
+said slowly. "Maybe it was only a boy's dream--then--but now it's a
+man's dream--a life dream. You will have to be won out of battle, every
+wonderful reward does--but victory will come to me." His voice rose
+vibrantly. "Because winning it is the one inflexible purpose of my life,
+dominating every other purpose."
+
+She had not interrupted him and now she was a little afraid of him--and
+of herself. Perhaps it was only the moon--but the moon swings the tides.
+
+"Stuart--" Her voice held a tremor of pleading. "If you do love
+me--like that--you can wait. Just now I need you--but not as a lover. I
+need you as a friend whom I don't have to fight."
+
+The man straightened and bowed. "Very well," he said, "I can wait--if I
+must. Your need comes first."
+
+She gave him a grateful smile, then suddenly came to her feet and began
+speaking with such a passionate earnestness as he had not before heard
+from her lips.
+
+"I think it's the right of every human being to live fully--not just
+half live through a soul-cramping routine. I think it's the right of a
+man or a woman to face all the things that make life, to _think_--even
+if they make mistakes--to fight for what they believe, even if they're
+wrong. I'd rather be Joan of Arc than the most sainted nun that ever
+took the veil!"
+
+The young man's face lighted triumphantly, because that was also his
+creed. "I knew it!" he exclaimed. "I didn't have to hear your words to
+know that marking time in an age of marching would never satisfy you."
+
+"And yet every influence that means home and family seems bent on
+condemning me to the dreariness and mustiness of a life that kills
+thought. I've thought about it so much that I'm afraid I've grown
+morbid." Once more her voice rang with passionate insurgency. "I feel as
+if I were being sent to Siberia."
+
+Stuart answered with forced composure through which the thrill of a
+minute ago crept like an echo of departing trumpets. "Of course, I came
+out here to declare my love. I had waited for this chance ... the sea
+... the moon--well! It's rather like asking for a field-marshal's baton
+and a curveting charger--and getting instead a musket and place in the
+ranks. The man who doesn't serve where he's put isn't much good...." He
+paused and then went on calmly, "What is this thing that haunts you?"
+
+"When I finished at the preparatory school," she began, "father thought
+I'd gone far enough and I _knew_ I needed college. At last I won a
+compromise. I was to have one year by way of trial, and then he was to
+decide which idea was right--his or mine."
+
+"So now--"
+
+"So now the jury has the case--and I'm terribly afraid I know the
+verdict in advance. Father is a minister of the old school and the
+unyielding New England type. I don't remember my mother, but sometimes I
+think the inflammatory goodness at home killed her. In our house you
+mustn't question a hell where Satan reigns as a personal god of
+Damnation. To doubt his spiked tail and cloven hoofs, would almost be
+heresy. That's our sort of goodness."
+
+"And colleges fail to supply a course in the Chemistry of Brimstone," he
+suggested.
+
+"They don't even frown on such ungodly things as socialism and
+suffrage," she supplemented.
+
+He nodded. "They offer, in short, incubation for ideas questionably
+modern."
+
+Her voice took on a fiery quality of enthusiasm.
+
+"Life was never so gloriously fluid--so luminous--before. Breadth and
+humanity are being fought for. Men and women are facing things
+open-eyed, making splendid successes and splendid failures." After a
+moment's pause she added, wearily, "My father calls them fads."
+
+"And you want to have a part in all that. You don't want only the
+culture of reading the _Atlantic Monthly_ at a village fireside?"
+
+"I want to play my little part in the game of things. The idea of being
+shielded from every danger and barred off from every effort, sickens me.
+If I am to lead a life I can be proud of, it must be because I've come
+out of the fight unshamed, not just because no one ever let me go into a
+fight."
+
+She was standing in an attitude of tense, even rapt earnestness, her
+chin high and her hands clenched. Her voice held the vibrance of a
+dreamer and her eyes were looking toward the horizon as if they were
+seeing visions off across the moonlit water.
+
+"I might fail miserably, of course, but I should know that I'd had my
+chance. The idea at home seems to be that a woman's goodness depends on
+someone else keeping it for her: that she should stick her head into the
+sand like an ostrich and, since she sees nothing, be womanly. If I have
+a soul at all, and it can't sail beyond a harbor's breakwater, I have
+nothing to lose, but if it can go out and come back safe it has the
+right to do it. That's what college means to me: the preparation for a
+real life: the chance to equip myself. That's why the question seems a
+vital crisis--why _it_ is a vital crisis."
+
+"Conscience," he said thoughtfully, "you have described the exact sort
+of intolerant piety, which tempts one to admire brilliant wickedness.
+You can't accept another's belief unless it's your own. That is one of
+Life's categorical rules. It's not a problem."
+
+"It's so categorical," she retorted quickly, "that there is no answer to
+it except the facts. My father is old. He has burned out his life in his
+fierce service of his God and his conscience. To tell him how paltry is
+the sum of his life's effort, in my eyes, would be like laughing aloud
+at his sermon."
+
+"And yet you can't possibly take up the life of an outgrown age because
+he prefers the thought of yesterday."
+
+"I'm afraid I'll have to--and--"
+
+"And what?"
+
+"And I think--it's going to break my heart. I've got to live a lie to
+keep a man, who regards a lie as a mortal sin, happy in the belief that
+he has never tolerated a lie."
+
+"My God, Conscience," Stuart broke out, "this is the New England
+conscience seeking martyrdom. Life runs forward, not back. Rivers don't
+climb hills."
+
+"I have said that to myself a thousand times," she gravely replied, "but
+it doesn't answer the question. There's no compulsion in the world so
+universal as the tyranny of weakness over strength. Haven't you seen it
+everywhere? Wherever people have to live together you find it. You find
+the strong submitting to all sorts of petty persecutions, and petty
+persecutions are the kind that kill, because the weak are nervous or
+easily wrought up and must have allowances made for them. And the person
+so considered always thinks himself strong beyond others and never
+suspects the truth. Only the weak and foolish can strut independently
+through life."
+
+"And yet to draw the blinds and shut out the light of life because some
+one else chooses to sit in the dark is unspeakably morbid."
+
+Conscience shrugged her shoulders. "Sitting in the dark or living
+righteously--there's no difference but point of view. My father has been
+true to his convictions. The fact that his goodness is no broader than
+his hymn book doesn't alter that." There was a pause, then suddenly the
+girl laughed and stretched both arms out to sea. "Oh, well," she said,
+"I don't often indulge in these jeremiads. Now it's over, and I've at
+least got the summer ahead of me. I guess we'd better go back. I
+promised Billy a dance."
+
+She rose, but the Virginian stood resolutely in her path. "Just a moment
+more," he begged. "It won't be love-making. The day we drove down to
+Provincetown you were sitting on the sand dunes. For a background you
+had the sea and sky--and they were gorgeous. But while I looked at it I
+saw another picture, too. May I try to paint _that_ picture for you?"
+
+"Surely, if you will."
+
+"Well, I'm rather leaving the sunlight now," he admitted. "I'm painting
+gray. I'm converting it into terms of winter storm and equinox. Last
+year a ship was pounded to pieces in the bay while the people on
+Commercial street looked helplessly on. It was the same sea, but it
+wasn't smiling then. It wore the vindictive scowl of death. That's the
+mood which has made this strip of coast a grave-yard of dead ships.
+That's the mood, too, which has given color to the people's thought--or
+taken the color out of it, leaving it stout and faded like weatherbeaten
+timbers--making of it the untrustworthy thought of melancholia."
+
+"And am I the spirit of that picture, too?"
+
+"You are the exact antithesis of all that, but you are threatening to
+fade into its grayness--and to deaden all the glow that was on the
+palette with which God painted you."
+
+They walked slowly back to the verandah, but paused a space before going
+into the light and crowds where a waltz had just begun--and as they
+waited a hotel page came dodging between the smoking, chatting loungers
+calling her name--"Miss Conscience Williams--Miss Conscience Williams,"
+and waving a yellow telegraph envelope.
+
+The girl's face paled a little as she took the message from the urchin's
+hand and her eyes widened in an expression of fear. But she tore the
+covering and drew out the sheet deliberately, reading in the yellow
+light that flooded through a window. Then an almost inaudible groan came
+from her lips and she stood holding the paper so loosely that it slipped
+from her fingers and drifted to the floor. Stuart retrieved it and
+handed it to her, but she only commanded in a stunned voice, "Read it."
+
+The man stepped from the shadow to the light and read:
+
+"Your father had paralytic stroke. He wants to see you."
+
+It was signed by initials which Stuart inferred to be those of the
+elderly aunt of whom she spoken. He laid his hand very gently on her arm
+and turned her a step to the side so that she passed out of the broad
+band of window-light and stood in the shadow. The blaze from the
+interior gave too much the effect of a spotlight playing on her eyes and
+lips and brow, for him to be willing that the idling crowds of strollers
+should read what he read there. He knew that in a moment she would
+regain control sufficiently to face even the fuller publicity inside,
+but during that moment she had the right to the limited privacy afforded
+by the dark shadow of the tiled veranda.
+
+She stood leaning against the wall for a moment, then she straightened
+herself with an effort and pressed the tips of her fingers to her
+temples.
+
+"What can you get out of your car?" she asked. And the man answered
+quickly, "As much speed as the roads let me--I have done sixty."
+
+"Please take me home." The words came abruptly and with undisguised
+wretchedness, "and take me _fast_."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Twenty minutes later Stuart Farquaharson swung himself to the driver's
+seat of his low-hung roadster, and threw on the switch, while Billy
+Stirling and the others stood at the curb, waving farewells and finding
+nothing suitable to say.
+
+The car went purring through the quiet streets where gabled houses slept
+under the moon, but having passed the town limits, leaped into a racing
+pace along the road for Orleans.
+
+Stuart made no effort to talk and Conscience spoke only at long
+intervals. She was gazing ahead and her eyes were wide and wet with
+tears.
+
+Once she leaned over to say: "If any of the things I said seemed
+disloyal, please try to forget them. Of course, I'm only too glad he
+wants me, and that I can help."
+
+"I understand," he assured her. "I never doubted that."
+
+The moon had set and it wanted only two hours of dawn when Conscience
+roused herself from her revery to say, "It's the next gate--on the
+right."
+
+Wheeling the car into the driveway, he had a shadowy impression of an
+old and gabled place, inky except for the pallid light of a lamp turned
+low in an upper window.
+
+As the girl hesitated on the verandah, he caught the complaining creak
+of an old plank, and while she waited for her bag there came to his ears
+the whining scrape of a tree branch against the eaves. The little voices
+of the hermitage were giving their mouselike welcome.
+
+With her key fitted in the door, Conscience turned and held out both
+hands.
+
+"You've been wonderful, Stuart," she said, with tears in her voice.
+"You've understood everything and I want to thank you while we're here
+alone. You'll come in, of course? I'm afraid it will be dismal, but the
+hotel is worse."
+
+The man shook his head. "No," he answered, as he pressed her hands in
+his own, "I'll go back to the village and rouse up the hostelry, but I'm
+coming to-morrow--to inquire."
+
+Many dogs were aroused to a noisy chorus before his hammering on the
+door of the old house which passed for a hotel received official
+response, and the east was breaking into a pallid rosiness before his
+thoughts permitted him to leave his seat by the window and stretch
+himself wearily on his uninviting bed.
+
+But when the sun had waked him at eight o'clock the landscape framed by
+his window was a smiling one to which the youth in him responded and he
+dressed clear-eyed and ready for a new day. In the hope that Conscience
+had been able to sleep late, he meant to defer his visit of inquiry, and
+in the meantime he breakfasted at leisure and went out to search for a
+barber. The quest was not difficult, and while he awaited his turn he
+sat against the wall, mildly amused at the scraps of local gossip that
+came to his ears couched in homely vernacular.
+
+"I heard that Eben Tollman cal'lates to jam Lige Heman with a
+foreclosure on his mortgage. It's move out and trust in Providence for
+Lige and Lige's." This comment came in piping falsetto from a thin youth
+who had just been shaven raw, but still lingered in the shop, and it met
+prompt reply from a grizzled old fellow with a wooden leg.
+
+"Pshaw, Seth, that ain't no news. You can't scace'ly get folks excited
+by a yarn about a shark's bitin' a cripple--but if you was to give in a
+yarn about a cripple bitin' a shark--well, there'd be some point to
+that. If you told where somebody had got a dollar away from Eben, now,
+we'd call you a liar, I s'pose--and be right at that--but we'd listen."
+
+"If you got a nickel from Tollman," retorted the first speaker, "you
+couldn't put it in a slot machine. It would be squeezed till it was bent
+double. Well, you can't blame him, I s'pose. He ain't got more'n a
+million."
+
+Just at that moment the door was opened by a gentleman entering from the
+street, and Farquaharson was immensely diverted at the sudden hush in
+which that particular vein of conversation died. It was an easy guess
+that this was Eben Tollman himself.
+
+The newcomer bore himself with a cold reserve of conscious superiority.
+He might have been forty, though the humorless immobility of his face
+gave him a seeming of greater age. In stature he was above the average
+height and his eyes were shrewd and piercing. To the salutations of
+those present, he responded with a slight, stiff inclining of his
+head--and appeared to withdraw into the shell of self-sufficiency.
+
+When Stuart, later, presented himself at the old manse, he found it a
+venerable place, whose shingled roof was moss-green and whose gables
+were honorably gray with age and service. An elderly servant directed
+him to the garden, and elated at the prospect of a tete-a-tete among the
+hedge rows, he went with a light step along the mossy path, noting with
+what a golden light the sun filtered through the fine old trees and
+flecked the sod. But inside the garden he halted among the flower
+borders, for a glance told him that Conscience was not alone. She sat
+leaning toward a wheel-chair, reading aloud from a book which he
+divined, rather than recognized, to be a Bible. As he hurried forward
+the girl looked up and rose to meet him with a swift eagerness of
+welcome.
+
+Because Stuart had catalogued Conscience's father, who was old enough to
+be her grandfather, as a bigot and an obstructionist standing between
+her and the sun, he was prepared to dislike him. Yet when he came up he
+confessed to a sort of astonished admiration. He stood looking at a head
+which suggested the head of a lion, full maned and white as a snow-cap,
+shaggy and beetling of brow, and indomitable of eye. Such a man, had he
+lived in another day, would have gone uncomplaining to the agonies of
+the Inquisition--or as readily have participated in visiting
+Inquisitional tortures on another. Yet it was a face capable of
+kindliness, too, since its wrath was only for sin--or what it regarded
+as sin.
+
+He held out a hand in greeting.
+
+"Conscience has told me how you rushed her home to me. It was very kind
+of you. I was hungry to see her, but I hadn't dared to hope for her so
+soon."
+
+The old man spoke with a smile, but it was unconsciously pathetic.
+Stuart could see that he was stricken not only in his useless legs but
+also in his heart, though his eagle-like eyes were steady.
+
+Conscience had been crying, but now she smiled and the two chatted with
+a forced vivacity, pretending to ignore the thing of which each was
+thinking and, though vivacity was foreign to his nature, the sufferer
+joined in their conversation with a grim sort of self-effacement. Soon
+they saw another figure approaching by the flagged path. It was the
+figure of Eben Tollman and his manner was full of solicitude--but as he
+talked with the father, Farquaharson saw him more than once steal covert
+glances at the daughter. Obviously he bore, here, the relationship of
+family friend, and though Conscience seemed to regard him as a member
+of an older generation, he seemed to regard her as a contemporary.
+
+In the days that followed Stuart Farquaharson's car standing at the
+front of the old manse became a fixture in the landscape. The invalid
+minister, seeking to accustom himself stoically to a pitiful anticlimax
+of life, found in the buoyant vitality of this newcomer--of whom he
+thought rather as a boy than a man--a sort of activity by proxy. He,
+himself, moved only in a wheel chair, but Stuart could laughingly
+override his protests and lift him with an easy strength into the seat
+of the roadster to spin out across the countryside which he had told
+himself he should hardly see again.
+
+Even the spinster aunt, who had begun by regarding him with suspicion,
+decided first that he was harmless, then that he was useful and finally
+that he was charming.
+
+Yet the young Virginian was not altogether beguiled into the hope that
+this enviable status would be permanent. The talks and drives brought
+incidental glimpses into the thoughts that had habitation under the
+white mane and that came militantly out through the unyielding eyes even
+in silence. Stuart winced often under the sting and irritation of a
+bigotry which could, without question or doubt, undertake to rule
+offhand and with absolutism on every question of right or wrong.
+
+He was keeping and meant to keep a constant rein on his speech and
+conduct, but he foresaw that, with all his restraint, a day might come
+when the old puritan would divine the wide divergence of their thought
+and have out upon him for one of the ungodly. Once he voiced something
+of this to Conscience herself in the question, "How long do you think
+your father will continue to welcome me here?"
+
+Her eyes widened. "Welcome you? Why shouldn't he? He's leaning on you
+as if you were a son. He declared his liking for you from the first
+day."
+
+Stuart shook his head in doubt and his eyes darkened with gravity. "It
+never pays to blind one's eyes to the chances of the future," he said
+slowly. "He won't continue to like me, I'm afraid. Just now he thinks of
+us both as children. I am only your overgrown playmate--but realization
+will come--and then--"
+
+"You think that he will change?"
+
+"I know it."
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed, and fell silent, but after a pause she spoke again
+impulsively, with a note of fear in her voice. "You won't go away and
+leave me here alone, will you--even if nobody else likes you?"
+
+"No one but you can send me away--" he declared almost fiercely, "and
+before you can do it you must prove yourself stronger than I."
+
+She gave a little sigh of relief and fell to talking of other things. It
+was when he rose to go and she walked to his car with him that he asked
+with seeming irrelevance, "Has this Mr. Tollman ever--made love to you?"
+
+She burst, at that, into a gale of laughter more spontaneous than any he
+had heard since the telegram had sobered her. It was as though the
+absurdity of the idea had swept the sky clear of everything but comedy.
+
+"Made love to me!" she mockingly echoed. "Honestly, Stuart, there are
+times when you are the funniest mortal alive--and it's always when
+you're most serious. Picture the Sphinx growing garrulous. Picture
+Napoleon seeking retreat in a monastery--but don't try to visualize Mr.
+Tollman making love."
+
+"Perhaps I'm premature," announced Farquaharson with conviction. "But
+I'm not mistaken. If he hasn't made love to you, he will."
+
+"Wherefore this burst of prophecy?"
+
+"I don't have to be prophetic. I saw him look at you--and I didn't like
+the way he did it. That man thinks he loves you."
+
+"If so, he hasn't mentioned it to me."
+
+"He will--I say 'thinks' he loves you," Stuart persisted in a level and
+somewhat contemptuous voice, "because I don't believe he can really love
+anything but himself and his money. But in a grasping, avaricious way he
+wants you. His eyes betrayed him. He wants you in the fashion that a
+miser wants gold. He wants you in the way a glutton wants a peach which
+he has deliberately watched ripen until finally he says to himself,
+'It's about ready to pick now.'"
+
+A more intimate view of Eben Tollman failed to remove the initial
+dislike, and yet Farquaharson acknowledged that nothing concrete was
+added to the evidence of sheer prejudice. In his application to the
+business affairs of the minister, he was assiduous and untiring, and the
+invalid depended upon his advice as upon an infallible guidance. Stuart
+told himself that to attribute this service of friendship to a selfish
+motive was a meanness unworthy of entertainment, yet the suspicion
+lingered. When they met, Tollman was always courteous and if this
+courtesy never warmed into actual cordiality neither was it ever
+tinctured with any seeming of dislike.
+
+The summer had spent its heat and already there was a hint of autumn in
+the air, but Stuart had kept his promise. There had been no lovemaking.
+
+He and Conscience walked together one afternoon to a hill where they sat
+with a vista of green country spread before them, just beginning to
+kindle under the splendid torch of an incendiary autumn. Off beyond was
+the sea, gorgeously blue in its main scheme, yet varying into subtle
+transitions of mood from rich purple to a pale and tender green. The sky
+was cloudless but there was that smoky, misty, impalpable thing like a
+dust of dreams on the distance. The girl stood with one hand resting on
+the gnarled bole of a pine. She wore a blue sweater, and her carmine
+lips were more vivid because these months of anxiety had given to her
+checks a creamy pallor. The man, standing at her elbow, was devouring
+her with his eyes. She was gorgeous and wholly desirable and his heart
+was flaming with emotions that ran the whole gamut of love's
+completeness from clean passion to worship.
+
+Yet he held his truce of silence and it was she herself who spoke at
+last.
+
+"The girls are all meeting on the campus--under the big trees about
+now," she said, and her eyes held a far-away wistfulness. "They are
+chattering foolishly and delightfully about their summer adventures ...
+and the dormitories are being allotted. There'll be several new English
+readers, I guess."
+
+"Does it hurt as badly as that?" he asked, and her answer was a low,
+rather hysterical little laugh, coming nearer bitterness than anything
+he had ever heard from her lips before.
+
+"You've been here. You've seen it all. Haven't you stopped instinctively
+often when you broke into a sudden laugh with a moldy feeling around
+your heart as if you'd shouted out in church? Haven't you watched
+yourself and stultified yourself in every conversation, except when we
+were alone, to keep from treading on the toes of some inch-wide
+prejudice?"
+
+"I've felt those things, of course--all of them." His reply was grave.
+"But then, you see, you've been here, and that made the whole thing
+lyric. The rest was just a somber background. It only made you stand out
+the more triumphantly in contrast. It's like a Sorolla picture hung
+against gray."
+
+"We don't stand out against dull backgrounds--not for long," she
+declared. "We fade into them." But after a moment she wheeled with a
+sudden impulsiveness and gazed contritely into his face.
+
+"Forgive me," she pleaded. "It's shameful and petty and mean to wreak
+all my protests against you. You've been splendid. I couldn't have borne
+it without you."
+
+Stuart Farquaharson's cheeks paled under an emotion so powerful that
+instead of exciting him it carried a sense of being tremendously
+sobered--yet shaken and tried to the limit of endurance.
+
+"You've forbidden me to make love to you," he said desperately, "and I'm
+trying to obey, but God knows, dear, there are times when--" He broke
+off with an abrupt choke in his throat.
+
+Then Conscience said in a changed and very gentle voice, "You wouldn't
+have me until I could be utterly, unmistakably sure of myself, would
+you?"
+
+"No," he replied uncompromisingly, "the very intensity of my love would
+make it hell for both of us unless you loved me--that way, too--but I
+wish you were certain. I wish to God you were!"
+
+Again she turned her eyes seaward, and when she spoke her voice was
+impersonal, almost dead, so that he thought, with a deep misery, she was
+trying to make it merciful in tempering her verdict.
+
+"I am certain now," she told him, still looking away.
+
+He came a step nearer and braced himself. He could forecast her words,
+he thought--deep friendship but no more!
+
+"Your mind is--definitely--made up?"
+
+Very abruptly she wheeled, showing him a face transformed and
+self-revealing. Against her ivory white cheeks her parted lips were
+crimson and her eyes dilated and softly black. "I think I've known it
+from the first," she declared, and her voice thrilled joyously. "Only I
+didn't know that I knew."
+
+There was no need to ask what she knew. Her eyes were windows flung open
+and back of them was the message of her heart.
+
+"I don't know how you love me," she went on tensely, "but if you don't
+love me rather madly, it's all one sided."
+
+As his arms closed about her, he knew that he was violently shaken, but
+he knew that she was trembling, too, through all the magnificent
+softness and slenderness of her. He knew that the lips against which he
+crushed his kisses were responsive.
+
+Later he declared, with a ring of triumph, "I told you when you were a
+little girl that they might take you to the North Pole and surround you
+with regiments of soldiers--but that I'd come to claim you. I tell you
+that again. _He_ wrote our two names in one horoscope and it had to be."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+In the library at the old manse that afternoon there was less of
+sunlight and joy. Shadows hung between the walls and there were shadows,
+too, in the heart of one of the men who sat by a central, paper-littered
+table.
+
+It was at best a cheerless room; this study where the minister had for
+decades prepared the messages of his stewardship--and sternly drawn
+indictments against sin. In the drawers of the old-fashioned desk those
+sermons lay tightly rolled and dusty. Never had he spared himself--and
+never had he spared others. What he failed to see was that in all those
+sheaves upon sheaves of carefully penned teaching, was no single relief
+of bright optimism, no single touch of sweet and gracious tolerance, not
+one vibrating echo of Christ's great soul-song of tenderness.
+
+Now it was ended. He had dropped in the harness and younger men were
+taking up the relay race. They were men, he feared, who were not to be
+altogether trusted; men beguiled by dangerous novelties of trend. With
+worldliness of thought pressing always forward; with atheism increasing,
+they were compromising and, it seemed to him, giving way cravenly, step
+by step, to encroachment.
+
+But the conversation just now was not of religion, or even dogma which
+in this room had so often been confused with religion. Eben Tollman was
+sitting in a stiff-backed chair across from his host. His face wore the
+immobile expression of a man who never forgets the oppressive fact that
+he is endowed with dignity.
+
+"Eben," said the minister, "for years you have advised me on all money
+matters and carried the advice into effect. You have virtually annexed
+my business to your own and carried a double load."
+
+"You have devoted your life to matters of greater moment, Mr. Williams,"
+unctuously responded the younger man. "Your stewardship has been to
+God."
+
+"I could have wished," the minister's face clouded with anxiety, "that I
+might have seen Conscience settled down with a godly husband and a child
+or two about her before I go. Those are restless days and a girl should
+have an anchorage."
+
+There was a pause and at its end Tollman said hesitantly, almost
+tentatively, "There is young Mr. Farquaharson, of course."
+
+"Young Mr. Farquaharson!" The minister's lower jaw shot out pugnaciously
+and his eyes flashed. "Eben, don't be absurd. The two of them are
+children. This boy is playing away a vacation. To speak of him as a
+matrimonial possibility is to talk irresponsibly. You astonish me!"
+
+"Of course, in some respects it seems anomalous." Tollman spoke
+thoughtfully and with no resentment of his companion's temper. He was
+quite willing that any objections to Stuart which were projected into
+the conversation should appear to come from the other. "For example, his
+people are not our people and the two codes are almost antithetical. Yet
+his blood is blue blood and, after all, the war is over."
+
+"If I thought that there was even a remote danger of this friendship
+ever becoming more than a friendship, I'd have Conscience send him away.
+I'd guard her from it as from a contagion." The announcement came
+fiercely. "Young Farquaharson's blood is blood that runs to license. His
+ideas are the ideas of a hard-drinking, hard-gaming aristocracy. But
+nonsense, Eben, he's a harmless boy just out of college. I like him--but
+not for my own family. What put such an absurdity into your head?"
+
+"Possibly it is an absurdity." Tollman gave the appearance of a man
+who, having suggested a stormy topic, is ready to relinquish it. In
+reality he was making Williams say everything which he wished to have
+said and was doing it by the simple device of setting up antagonism to
+play the prompter. "What put it into my head was perhaps nothing more
+tangible than their constant companionship. They are both young. He has
+a vital and fascinating personality. There is a touch of Pan and a touch
+of Bacchus in him that--"
+
+"Those are somewhat pagan advantages," interrupted the minister with a
+crispness which carried the bite of scorn.
+
+"Pagan perhaps, but worth considering, since it is not upon ourselves
+that they operate." Tollman rose and went over to the window which gave
+off across the garden. He presented the seeming of a man whose thought
+was dispassionate, and because dispassionate impossible to ignore. "This
+young man has in his blood bold and romantic tendencies which will not
+be denied. To him much that we revere seems a type of narrowness. His
+ancestors have made a virtue of the indulgences of sideboard and card
+table--but the boy is not to blame for that."
+
+Eben Tollman was playing on the prejudices of his host as he might have
+played on the keys of a piano. He maintained, as he did it, all the
+semblance of a fair-minded man painting extenuations into his portrait
+of the absent Farquaharson.
+
+"And you call this predisposition to looseness and license a thing to be
+condoned, to be mixed with the blood of one's own posterity? Eben, I've
+never seen you make excuses for ungodliness before." The fierce old face
+suddenly cleared. "But there--there! This is all an imaginary danger.
+I'll watch them, but I'm sure that these two have no such reprehensible
+thought."
+
+Mr. Tollman took up his hat and gloves. "I will see you again
+to-morrow," he said, as he passed out of the library, leaving the old
+puritan behind him immersed in a fresh anxiety.
+
+It was not the intention of William Williams to act with unconscientious
+haste--but he would watch and weigh the evidence. He prided himself on
+his rigid adherence to justice, and escaped the knowledge that his sense
+of justice was a crippled thing warped to the shape of casuistry. If he
+had permitted the affliction, which God had visited upon him, to blind
+his eyes against duty to his daughter, he must rouse himself and remedy
+the matter. It was time to put such self-centered sin behind him and
+make amends. In this self-assumption of the plenary right to regulate
+the life of his daughter, or any one else, there was no element of
+self-reproach. He held God's commission and acted for God!
+
+The gradual, almost imperceptible change of manner was observable first
+to the apprehensive eyes of Stuart Farquaharson himself. The Virginian's
+standards as to his bearing in the face of hostility were definite and
+could be summed up in the length of an epigram: Never to fail of
+courtesy, but never to surrender more than half of any roadway to
+aggression. Yet here was a situation of intricate bearings and a man
+whom he could not fight. A brain must be dealt with, too old for
+plasticity, like sculptor's clay hardened beyond amendment of form. A
+man whose fighting blood is hot, but whose spirit of sportsmanship is
+true, can sometimes maintain a difficult peace where another type would
+fail, and that was the task Stuart set himself. That same spirit of
+sportsmanship would have meant to Williams only a want of seriousness, a
+making play out of life. But to Stuart it meant the nearest approach we
+have to a survival of chivalry's ideals: a readiness to accept
+punishment without complaint: a willingness to extend every fair
+advantage to an adversary: a courage to strive to the uttermost without
+regard to the material value of the prize--and paramount to all the
+rest, a scorn for any meanly gained advantage, however profitable. If
+there was any value in his heritage of gentle blood and a sportsman's
+training, it should stand him in good stead now, for the sake of the
+girl he loved.
+
+One evening in the garden Conscience asked him, "Do you think I
+over-painted the somberness of the picture? But it's a shame for you to
+have to endure it, too. I think the confinement is making Father more
+irritable than usual."
+
+The man shook his head and smiled whimsically.
+
+"It's not the confinement. It's me. He's discovered that you and I have
+grown up, and he's seeking to draw me into a quarrel so that he can
+tender me my passports."
+
+Conscience laid her hands on his arm and they trembled a little.
+
+"I'm sure it isn't that," she declared, though her words were more
+confident than her voice. "You've stood a great deal, but please keep it
+up. It won't"--her voice dropped down the key almost to a whisper--"it
+won't be for long."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The hills were flaming these days with autumnal splendor. Conscience and
+Stuart had just returned from a drive, laden with trophies of woodland
+richness and color. About the cheerless house she had distributed
+branches of the sugar maple's vermilion and the oak's darker redness,
+but the fieriest and the brightest clusters of leafage she had saved for
+the old library where the invalid sat among his cases of old sermons.
+
+"Stuart and I gathered these for you," she told him as she arranged them
+deftly in a vase.
+
+The old man's face did not brighten with enjoyment. Rather it hardened
+into a set expression, and after a moment's pause he echoed querulously,
+"You and Stuart."
+
+His daughter looked up, her attention arrested by his tone. "Why, yes,"
+she smiled. "We went for a drive and got out and foraged in the woods."
+
+"How long has Mr. Farquaharson been here now?"
+
+"Something over six weeks, I believe."
+
+"Isn't it nearer two months?"
+
+The girl turned very slowly from the window and in the dark room her
+figure and profile were seen, a silhouette against the pane with a
+nimbus about her hair.
+
+"Perhaps it is. Why?"
+
+For a while the father did not speak, then he said: "Perhaps it's time
+he was thinking of terminating his visit."
+
+The girl felt her shoulders stiffen, and all the fighting blood which
+was in her as truly, if less offensively than in himself, leaped in her
+pulses. Defiant words rushed to her lips, but remained unsaid, because
+something grotesque about his attempted movement in his chair
+accentuated his helplessness and made her remember.
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked in a level voice, which since she had
+suppressed the passion came a little faint and uncertain.
+
+"I had no objection," he replied quietly enough but with that inflexible
+intonation which automatically arouses antagonism, since it puts into
+its "I want's" and its "I don't want's" a tyrannical finality, "to this
+young gentleman visiting us. I extended him hospitality. I even liked
+him. But it has come rather too much, for my liking, to a thing that can
+be summed up in your words of a minute ago--'Stuart and I.' It's time to
+bring it to an end."
+
+"Why should it come to an end, Father?" she asked with a terrific effort
+to speak calmly.
+
+"Because it might run to silly sentiment--and to such an idea I could
+never give consent. This young man, though a gentleman by birth, is not
+our sort of a gentleman. His blood is not the kind of blood with which
+ours can be mixed: his ideas are the loose ideas that put pleasure above
+righteousness. In short, while I wish to say good-by to him as agreeably
+as I said welcome, the time has come to say good-by."
+
+She came over and sat by his chair and let one hand rest on his white
+hair. "Father," she said in a low voice, tremulously repressed, "you are
+undertaking to rule offhand on a question which is too vital to my life
+to be treated with snap judgment. I've tried to meet your wishes and I
+want to go on trying, but in this you must think well before you take a
+position so--so absolute that perhaps--"
+
+He shook her hand away and his eyes blazed.
+
+"I _have_ thought well," he vehemently declared. "I have not only
+thought, but I have prayed. I have waited silently and watched in an
+effort to be just. I have asked God's guidance."
+
+"God's guidance could hardly have told you that Stuart Farquaharson has
+loose ideas or that he's unrighteous or that his blood could corrupt our
+blood--because none of those things are true or akin to the truth."
+
+For an instant the old man gazed at her in an amazement which turned
+quickly to a wrath of almost crazily blazing eyes, and his utterance
+came with a violence of fury.
+
+"Do you mean that such an unspeakable idiocy has already come to
+pass--that you and this--this--young amateur jockey and card-player from
+the South--" He broke suddenly off with a contempt that made his words
+seem to curl and snap with flame.
+
+The girl rose from her place on the arm of his chair. She stood
+lancelike in her straightness and her eyes blazed, too, but her voice
+lost neither its control nor its dignity.
+
+"I mean," she said, "that this gentleman who needs no apologist and no
+defense, has honored me by telling me that he loves me--and that I love
+him."
+
+"And his high courage has prevented him from admitting this to me and
+facing my just wrath?"
+
+"His courage has been strong enough to concede to my wish that I might
+tell you myself, and in my own time."
+
+The library door stood open and the hall gave out onto the verandah
+where Stuart Farquaharson sat waiting for Conscience to return.
+
+The minister attempted to rise from his chair and fell back into it,
+with a groan, as he remembered his helplessness. That helplessness did
+not, however, abate his anger, and his voice rose as it was accustomed
+to rise when, pounding the pulpit pillow, he wished to drive home some
+impassioned utterance, beyond the chance of missing any sleepy ear.
+
+"If what you say is true, this man has abused my hospitality and used my
+roof as an ambuscade to attack me. He is not, as you say, a man of honor
+or of courage, but a coward and a sneak! I have more to say, but it had
+better be said to him direct. Please send him to me."
+
+The girl hesitated, then she wheeled with flaming face toward the chair.
+"I have been willing," she said, "to smother my life in an effort to
+meet your ideas, though I knew them to be little ideas. Now I see that
+in yielding everything one can no more please you than in yielding
+nothing. If he goes, I go, too. You may take your choice."
+
+But as her words ended Conscience felt a hand laid gently on her
+shoulder, and a voice whispered in her ear, "Don't, dear; this will
+always haunt you. Leave it to me." Stuart turned her gently toward the
+door, then faced the irate figure in the chair. In a voice entirely
+quiet and devoid of passion he addressed its occupant. "I thought I
+heard you call for me, sir. I am here."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+For a little while the study remained silent, except for the excited
+panting of the minister, whose face was a mask of fury. The passion in
+Conscience's eyes was gradually fading into an expression of deep
+misery. The issue of cruel dilemma had come in spite of every defensive
+effort and every possible care. It had come of her father's forcing and
+she knew that he would make no concession. When Williams spoke his voice
+came chokingly.
+
+"Conscience, leave us alone. What I have to say to this man is a matter
+between the two of us."
+
+But instead of obeying the girl took her place at Stuart's side and laid
+her hand on his arm.
+
+"What you have to say to him, Father, is very much my affair," she
+replied steadily. "My action for the rest of my life depends upon it."
+
+"Dear," suggested the Virginian in a lowered voice, "you can trust me.
+I'm not going to lose my temper if it's humanly possible to keep it.
+There's no reason why you should have to listen to things which it will
+be hard to forget."
+
+"No," she declared with a decisiveness that could not be shaken, "I stay
+here as long as you stay. When you go, I go, too."
+
+Farquaharson turned to the minister, "I believe you called for me, sir,"
+he repeated, in a tone of even politeness. "You have something to say to
+me?"
+
+The old man raised a hand that was palsied with rage and his voice
+shook.
+
+"I fancy you heard what I said of you. I said that you had abused my
+hospitality and that you are a coward and a sneak. You are worse than
+that; you are an infamous scoundrel."
+
+Conscience felt the muscles in the forearm upon which her fingers rested
+grow tense and hard as cables. She saw the face pale to lividness and
+the lips stiffen, but except for that, the man made no movement, and for
+some ten seconds he did not speak. They were ten seconds of struggle
+against an anger as fierce as it was just, but at the end of that time
+he inquired quietly, "Is that all you meant to say to me?"
+
+"No! There's much more, but for most men that would be enough. To let it
+go unanswered is a confession of its truth."
+
+"My invariable answer to such words," said Stuart Farquaharson slowly,
+"is made with a clenched fist. The triple immunity of your cloth, your
+age and your infirmity denies me even that reply."
+
+"And what immunity makes a denial unnecessary?"
+
+"A denial would dignify a charge which I can afford to ignore as I
+ignore vulgar talk that I hear in an alley."
+
+The old man bent forward, glaring like a gargoyle, and his first
+attempts to speak were choked into inarticulate rumblings by his rage.
+His face reddened with a fever of passion which threw the veins on his
+temples into purple traceries.
+
+"I repeat with a full responsibility--with the knowledge that the God
+whom I have tried to serve is listening, that you _are_ what I have
+called you, because you have come into my house and practiced a
+continuous and protracted deceit. You have abused the freedom granted
+you as a guest to try to win my daughter away from everything worth
+holding to and everything she has been taught. I was a blind fool. I was
+a watchman fallen asleep at the gate--a sentry unfaithful at his post."
+The voice of the minister settled into a clearer coherence as he went on
+in deep bitterness. "You say I have accused you sternly. I am also
+accusing myself sternly--but now the scales have fallen from my eyes and
+I recognize my remissness. God grant I am not too late."
+
+He paused for breath and his fingers clenched rigidly at the carvings of
+his chair arms. "You know that my daughter is young and
+inexperienced--an impressionable child not sufficiently seasoned in
+wisdom to repudiate the gauzy lure of dangerous modernisms."
+
+"Father," broke in Conscience during his accusing pause, "you are
+starting out with statements that are unjust and untrue. I am not a
+child and no one has corrupted my righteousness. We simply have
+different ideas of life."
+
+The minister did not take his eyes from the face of the young man and he
+ignored the interruption of his daughter.
+
+"I could not blame her: it was the natural spirit of unthinking youth.
+You, however, did know the consequences. Here in my house--which you
+must never reenter--you have incited my family against me to serve your
+own covetous and lustful interests." Again he halted while the young
+man, still standing as rigid as a bronze figure, his flushed face set
+and his eyes holding those of his accuser with unblinking steadiness,
+made no attempt to interrupt him.
+
+"What, indeed, to you were mere questions of right or wrong? You had a
+world of light and frivolous women to choose from, your own kind of
+women who could dance and fritter life away in following fads that make
+for license--but you must come into the household of a man who has tried
+to fight God's battles; standing against these encroachments of Satan
+which you advocate--and beguile my only daughter into telling me that I
+must choose between surrender or the wretchedness of ending my life in
+deserted loneliness."
+
+Farquaharson, despite the storm which raged in his heart, answered with
+every outward show of calmness, even with dignity.
+
+"You accuse me of having made love to your daughter. For that I have no
+denial. I have loved her since she was a child. I have told her so at
+every opportunity, but that love has been honorable and free of deceit
+and I know of no law which forbids a man of decent character to plead
+his cause. That I should win her love is a marvelous thing, but, thank
+God, I have it and hope to hold it till death."
+
+"You have filched it! You have it as a thief has another man's purse or
+another man's wife. You have gained favor by arousing discontent for a
+Godly home: a home where she is sheltered and where she belongs."
+
+There was a tense silence and Farquaharson's voice was almost gentle
+when he next spoke.
+
+"There is more than one way of looking at life--and more than one may be
+right. Conscience wanted the wider scope which college would have given
+her. She wanted it with all the splendid eagerness of a soul that wishes
+to grow and fulfill itself. That rightful privilege you denied her--and
+she has not complained. Why shouldn't she want life's fullness instead
+of life's meagerness and its breadth instead of its bigotries? Is there
+greater nobility in the dull existence of a barnacle that hangs to one
+spot than in the flight of a bird? I have sought no quarrel and I have
+cruelly set a curb upon my temper, but I have no apologies to make and
+no intention of giving her up. I should be glad of your consent, but
+with it or without it I shall continue to urge my love. It would be a
+pity for you to force a breach."
+
+"There is no question of my forcing a breach." The first words wore
+spoken sharply, but as they continued they began again to rush and mount
+into an access of passion. "You are as insolent as your words prove you
+to be reckless. You have tried to corrupt every idea of righteousness
+in my daughter's heart. It would almost appear that you have succeeded.
+But I believe God is stronger than Satan. I believe my prayers and the
+heritage of Godfearing forefathers will yet save her. As for you, you
+are to leave my house and henceforth never to cross my threshold."
+
+"Very well," answered Stuart quietly; then he added: "To what extent am
+I indebted to Mr. Eben Tollman for your sudden discovery that I am a
+sneak and a coward?"
+
+"That," shouted the invalid, "proves your meanness of spirit. Had Mr.
+Tollman held a brief for you he could not have defended you more
+stoutly. He, too, was deceived in you, it seems."
+
+"Stuart," suggested the girl, "it's no use. You can't change him now.
+Perhaps when he's less angry--"
+
+"Less angry!" screamed the old man. "For almost seventy years my wrath
+against the machinations of hell has burned hot. If God grants me
+strength to the end, it will never cool. You, too, have turned to my
+enemies in my last days. You would leave me for a young wastrel who has
+sung in your ears the song of a male siren. But before I will surrender
+my fight for the dictates of the conscience God has given me to be my
+mentor, I will see you go!"
+
+"Father!" cried the girl. "You don't know what you're saying."
+
+His face had become frenzied and purpled, his hands were shaking. His
+voice was a thunder, rumbling with its agitation. "I must have sinned
+deeply--but if the Almighty sees fit to take from me my health, my
+child, my last days of peace on earth--if He chooses to chastise me as
+He chastised Job--I shall still fight for His righteous will, and war on
+the iniquitous chil--"
+
+The last word broke with a choke in his throat. The white head rocked
+from side to side and the hands clawed the air. Then William Williams
+hunched forward and lurched from his chair to the floor.
+
+In an instant Farquaharson was at his side and bending over the
+unconscious form and a few minutes later, still insensible, the figure
+had been laid on a couch and the roadster was racing for a physician.
+
+When Conscience came out into the yard later, where her lover was
+awaiting her, her lips were pale and her eyes tortured. She went
+straight into his outstretched arms and with her head on his shoulder
+sobbed out a misery that shook her. At last the man asked softly, "What
+did the doctor say?" And she answered brokenly.
+
+"It seems that--besides the paralysis he has a weak--heart."
+
+The man held her close. "I wish to God it could have been averted. I
+tried."
+
+"You did all you could," she declared. "But, Stuart, when he came back
+to consciousness, his eyes were awful! I've never seen such terror in a
+human face. He couldn't speak at first and when he could ... he
+whispered in absolute agony, 'Has she gone?' He thought I'd left him
+lying there--and gone with you."
+
+"Great God!" It was more a groan than an exclamation.
+
+"And when he saw me he stretched out his hands like a child and began
+crying over me, but even then he said bitterly, 'That man's name must
+never be mentioned in this house.'... What are we to do?"
+
+"There is only one thing to do," he told her. "We are young enough to
+wait. You can't desert a dying father."
+
+While they talked the physician came out of the door.
+
+"The patient will pull through this attack," he said briskly. "It's a
+leaky valve. There is only one rule that I have to lay upon you. It is
+absolutely vital that he shall not be excited. A blow with an ax would
+be no more fatal than another such stroke."
+
+Conscience looked desperately about her, as Stuart with the doctor
+beside him started the car again down the drive. In a front window her
+eyes lighted on a flaming branch of maple leaves. Only two hours ago she
+and her lover had been watching the sunlight spill through the gorgeous
+filter of the painted foliage. They had carried in their hearts the
+spirit of carnival. Now the storm had broken and swept them.
+
+She walked unsteadily to the veranda of the house and dropped down on
+the steps. Her head was swimming and her life was in a vortex.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The days that followed were troubled days and they brought to
+Conscience's cheeks an accentuated pallor. Under her eyes were smudges
+that made them seem very large and wistful. The minister was once more
+in his arm chair, a little more broken, a little more fiercely
+uncompromising of aspect, but the one normal solution of such a spent
+and burdensome life: the solution of death, stood off from him. Upon his
+daughter, whose lips were sealed against any protest by the belief that
+even a small excitement might kill him, he vented long and bigoted
+sermons of anathema. In these sermons, possibly, he was guilty of the
+very heresy of which his daughter had said he was so intolerant. He
+seemed to doubt himself, these days, that Satan wore a spiked tail and a
+pair of cloven hoofs. Of late he rather leaned to the belief that the
+Arch-tempter had returned to walk the earth in the guise of a young
+Virginian and that he had assumed the incognito of Stuart Farquaharson.
+
+One refrain ran through every waking hour and troubled his sleep with
+fantastic dreams. God commanded him to strip this tempter of his
+habiliments of pretense and show the naked wickedness of his soul to the
+girl's deluded eye. To that fancied command he dedicated himself as
+whole-heartedly as a bloodhound gives itself to the man hunt.
+
+To Stuart one day, as they walked together in the woods, Conscience
+confessed her fear that this constant hammering of persecution would
+eventually batter down her capacity for sane judgment and she ended with
+a sweeping denunciation of every form of bigotry.
+
+"Dear," he answered with the gravity of deep apprehension, "you say
+that and you believe it and yet this same instinct of self-martyrdom is
+the undertow of your life flood. If your given name didn't happen to be
+Conscience your middle name would be just that."
+
+"I suppose I have a conscience of a sort--but a different, sort, I hope.
+Is that such a serious fault?" she asked, and because the strain of
+these days had tired and rubbed her nerves into the sensitiveness of
+exhaustion, she asked it in a hurt and wounded tone.
+
+"It's an indispensable virtue," he declared. "Your father's conscience
+was a virtue, too, until it ran amuck and became a savage menace. When
+you were a child," he went on, speaking so earnestly that his brow was
+drawn into an expression which she mistook for a frown of disapproval,
+"your most characteristic quality was an irrepressible sense of humor.
+It gave both sparkle and sanity to your outlook. It held you immune to
+all bitterness."
+
+"And now?" She put the query somewhat faintly.
+
+"Now, more than ever, because the life around you is grayer, it's vital
+that you cling to your golden talisman. To let it go means to be lost in
+the fog."
+
+They were strolling along a woodland path and she was a few steps in
+advance of him. He saw her shoulders stiffen, but it was not until he
+overtook her that he discovered her eyes to be sparkling with tears.
+
+"What is it, dearest?" he contritely demanded, and after a long pause
+she said:
+
+"Nothing, except that I feel as if you had slapped me in the face."
+
+"I! Slapped you in the face!" He could only reecho her words in
+bewilderment and distress. "I don't understand."
+
+Laying a hand on her arm, he halted her in a place where the setting sun
+was spilling streams of yellow light through the woodland aisles and
+then her lips trembled; her eyes filled and she pressed both hands over
+her face. After a moment she looked up and dashed the tears
+contemptuously away.
+
+"No, I know you don't understand, dear. It's my own fault. I'm a weak
+little fool," she said, "But it's all gotten horribly on my nerves. I
+can't help it."
+
+"For God's sake," he begged, "tell me what I did or said?" And her words
+came with a weary resignation.
+
+"I think you had better put me out of your life, Stuart. I've just
+realized how things really are--you've told me. I can't go because I'm
+chained to the galley. While Father lives my place is here."
+
+She broke off suddenly and his face took on a stunned amazement.
+
+"Out of my life!" exclaimed the man almost angrily. "Abandon you to all
+this abysmal bigotry and--to this pharisaical web of ugly dogmas!
+Conscience, you're falling into a melancholy morbidness."
+
+As she looked at him and saw the old smoldering fire in his eyes that
+reminded her of his boyhood, a pathetic smile twisted the corners of her
+lips.
+
+"Yes--I guess that's just it, Stuart," she said slowly, "You see, I may
+have to stay here until, as you put it, I'm all faded out in the fog. If
+I've changed so much already there's no telling what years of it will
+turn me into."
+
+Stuart Farquaharson caught her impulsively in his arms and his words
+came in tumultuous fervor.
+
+"What I said wasn't criticism," he declared. "God knows I couldn't
+criticize you. You ought to know that. This is the nearest we've ever
+come to a quarrel, dear, since the Barbara Freitchie days, and it's
+closer than I want to come. Besides, it's not just your laughter that I
+love. It's all of you: heart, mind, body: the whole lovely trinity of
+yourself. I mean to wage unabated war against all these forces that are
+trying to stifle your laughter into the pious smirk of the pharisee.
+There's more of what God wants the world to feel in one peal of your
+laughter than in all the psalms that this whole people ever whined
+through their noses. You're one of the rare few who can go through life
+being yourself--not just a copy and reflection of others. A hundred
+years ago your own people would probably have burned you as a witch for
+that. They've discontinued that form of worship now, but the cut of
+their moral and intellectual jib is, in some essentials, the same. Thank
+God, you have a different pattern of soul and I want you to keep it."
+
+She drew away from him and slowly her face cleared of its misery and the
+eyes flashed into their old mischief-loving twinkle. "That's the first
+real rise I've had out of you," she declared, "since Barbara waved the
+stars and stripes at you. Then you were only defending Virginia, but now
+you've assumed the offensive against all New England."
+
+But even in that mild disagreement they had, as he said, come nearer
+than either liked to a quarrel--and neither could quite forget it. Both
+felt that the thin edge of what might have been a disrupting wedge had
+threatened their complete harmony.
+
+Because he could mark the transition of this thing called conscience
+into an obsession, and because he, too, was worn in patience and
+stinging with resentment against the injustice of the father, he fought
+hotly, and his denunciations of various influences were burning and
+scornful. So slowly but dangerously there crept into their arguments the
+element of contention. Hitherto Stuart had made no tactical mistakes. He
+had endured greatly and in patience, but now he was unconsciously
+yielding to the temptation of assailing an abstract code in a fashion
+which her troubled judgment might translate into attacks upon her
+father. Out of that attitude was born for her a hard dilemma of
+conflicting loyalties. It was all a fabric woven of gossamer threads,
+but Gulliver was bound into helplessness by just such Lilliputian
+fetters.
+
+Late one night, when the moon was at two-thirds of fullness and the air
+touched with frost, Stuart abandoned the bed upon which he had been
+restlessly tossing for hours. He kindled a pipe and sat meditating, none
+too cheerfully, by the frail light of a bayberry candle. Through the
+narrow corridors and boxed-in stair wells of a ramshackle hotel, came no
+sounds except the minors of the night. Somewhere far off a dog barked
+and somewhere near at hand a traveling salesman snored. In the flare and
+sputter of the charring wick and melting wax shadows lengthened and
+shortened like flapping flags of darkness.
+
+Then the jangle of the telephone bell in the office ripped the stillness
+with a discordant suddenness which Farquaharson thought must arouse the
+household, but the snoring beyond the wall went on, unbroken, and there
+was no sound of a footfall on the creaking stair. At last Stuart,
+himself, irritated by the strident urgency of its repetitions, reached
+for his bath robe and went down. The clapper still trembled with the
+echo of its last vibrations as he put the receiver to his ear and
+answered.
+
+Then he started and his muscles grew taut, for the other voice was that
+of Conscience and it shook with terrified unevenness and a tremulous
+faintness like the leaping and weakening of a fevered pulse. He could
+tell that she was talking guardedly with her lips close to the
+transmitter.
+
+"I had to speak to you without waiting for morning," she told him,
+recognizing his voice, "and yet--yet I don't know what to say."
+
+Recognizing from the wild note that she was laboring under some
+unnatural strain, he answered soothingly, "I'm glad you called me,
+dear."
+
+"What time is it?" she demanded next and when he told her it was well
+after midnight she gave a low half-hysterical laugh. "I couldn't
+sleep.... Father spent the afternoon exhorting me ... he was trying to
+make me promise not to see you again ... and I was trying to keep him
+from exciting himself." Her voice was so tense now as to be hardly
+recognizable. "Every few minutes it looked as if he were about to fly
+into a passion.... You know what that would mean ... and of course
+I--I--couldn't promise."
+
+She paused for breath, but before he could speak, rushed on.
+
+"It's been an absolute reign of terror. Every nerve in my body is
+jumping and quivering.... I think I'm going mad."
+
+"Listen." The man spoke as one might to a child who has awakened,
+terrified, out of a nightmare and is afraid to be alone. "I'm coming out
+there. You need to talk to some one. I'll leave the car out of hearing
+in the road."
+
+"No, no!" she exclaimed in a wildly fluttering timbre of protest. "If he
+woke up it would be worse than this afternoon--it might kill him!"
+
+But Stuart answered her with a quiet note of finality. "Wrap up
+well--it's cool outside--and meet me on the verandah. We can talk more
+safely that way than by 'phone. I'm going to obey the doctor
+implicitly--unless you fail to meet me. If you do that--" he paused a
+moment before hanging up the receiver--"I'll knock on the door."
+
+The moon had not yet set as he started on foot up the driveway of the
+manse and the bare trees stood out stark and inky against the silver
+mists. Before he was more than half-way to the house he saw her coming
+to meet him, casting backward glances of anxiety over her shoulder.
+
+She was running with a ghostlike litheness through the moonlight, her
+eyes wide and frightened and her whole seeming one of unreasoning panic
+so that the man, who knew her dauntlessness of spirit, felt his heart
+sink.
+
+"You shouldn't have done it," she began in a reproachful whisper. "You
+shouldn't have come!" But he only caught her in his arms and held her so
+close to his own heart that the wild palpitation of her bosom was calmed
+against its steadiness. Her arms went gropingly round his neck and
+clutched him as if he were the one stable thing that stood against an
+allied ferocity of wind and wave.
+
+"You needed me," he said. "And when you need me I come--even if I have
+to come like a burglar."
+
+The eyes which she raised to his face were tearless--but hardly sane.
+She was fear-ridden by ghosts that struck at her normality and she
+whispered, "Suppose he died by my fault?"
+
+At all costs, the lover resolved, Conscience must leave this place for a
+time--until she could return with a stabler judgment. But just now he
+could not argue with her.
+
+"We'll be very quiet," he said reassuringly. "If you hear any sound in
+the house you can go back. You're overwrought, dearest, and I've only
+come to be near you. Nobody will see me except yourself, but if at any
+time before daylight you want me, come to your window and raise the
+blind. I'll be where I can see."
+
+For a while she clung to him silently, her breath coming fast. About
+them the moon shed a softness of pale silver and old ivory. The silence
+seemed to carry a wordless hymn of peace and though they stood in shadow
+there was light enough for lovers' eyes. The driven restlessness that
+had made Conscience doubt her sanity was slowly yielding to a sense of
+repose, as the tautened anguish of a mangled body relaxes to the balm of
+an anesthetic. Slowly the slenderly curved and graciously proportioned
+modeling of her lithe figure quieted from spasmodic unrest and the wild
+racing measure of her heart-beat calmed. Then she turned up her face.
+Her eyes cleared and her lips tilted their corners in a smile.
+
+"I'm a horrid little demon," she declared in a voice freighted with
+self-scorn, but no longer panic-stricken. "I've always hated a coward,
+and I'm probably the most amazingly craven one that ever lived. I do
+nothing but call on you to fight my battles for me when I can't hold my
+own."
+
+"You're an adorable little saint, with an absurd leaning toward
+martyrdom," he fervently contradicted. "Why shouldn't you call on me?
+Aren't you fighting about me?"
+
+Her dark eyes were for a moment serene because she was treasuring this
+moment of moonlight and the respite of love against the chances of
+to-morrow.
+
+"Anyhow you came--" she said, "and since you did there's at least one
+more fight left in me." Then her voice grew again apprehensive. "It was
+pretty bad before ... just hearing you preached against and being afraid
+to reply because ... of the warning. Now he wants my promise that I'll
+dismiss you forever ... and the worst of it is that he'll pound on it to
+the end. What am I to do?"
+
+"Is there any question?" he gravely asked her. "_Could_ you make that
+promise?"
+
+"No--no!" He felt the figure in his arms flinch at the words, "There's
+no question of _that_, but how am I to keep him from raging himself to
+death?"
+
+"Hasn't the doctor warned him that he mustn't excite himself?"
+
+The dark head nodded and the fingers of the hands about his neck
+tightened. "Of course," she said. "But there you have the tyranny of
+weakness again. I must make the fight to keep him alive. He would
+regard it as going righteously to death for his beliefs. That's just
+the goodness-gone-wrongness of it all."
+
+"Blessed are the self-righteous," mused Farquaharson half aloud, "for
+they shall supply their own absolution." To himself he was saying, "The
+wretched old hellion!"
+
+"And then you see, after all," she added with the martyr's sophistry,
+"in the fight for you, I'm only fighting for myself and in doing what I
+can for him I'm trying to be unselfish."
+
+"Listen," the man spoke carefully, "that, too, is the
+goodness-gone-wrongness as you call it; the sheer perversion of a duty
+sense. If it were just myself to be thought of, perhaps I couldn't fight
+you on a point of conscience. But it isn't just me--not if you love me."
+
+"Love you!" He felt the thrilled tremor that ran through her from head
+to foot, and that made her bosom heave stormily. The moon had sunk a
+little and the shadow in which they were standing had crawled onward so
+that on her head fell a gleam of pale light, kindling her eyes and
+touching her temples under the sooty shadows of her hair. Her lips were
+parted and her voice trembled with the solemnity of a vow, too sacred to
+be uttered without the fullest frankness. "In every way that I know how
+to love, I love you! Everything that a woman can be to a man I want to
+be to you and all that a woman can give to a man, I want to give to
+you."
+
+It was he who trembled then and became unsteady with the intoxication of
+triumph.
+
+"Then I'll fight for you, while I have breath, even if it means fighting
+with you."
+
+Suddenly she caught at his arm with a spasmodic alarm, and he turned his
+head as the screeching whine of a window sounded in the stillness. The
+effort to raise it cautiously was indicated not by any noiselessness
+but by the long duration of the sound. Then a woman's head with hair in
+tight pigtails stood out against the pallid light of a bedroom lamp,
+turned low, and the whispered challenge came out to them. "Who's out
+there?"
+
+"Ssh!" cautioned the girl, tensely. "It's I, Auntie. Don't wake Father."
+
+Grudgingly the window creaked down and for seconds which lengthened
+themselves interminably to the anxious ears of the pair in the shadows,
+they waited with bated breath. Then Stuart whispered, "You must go to
+sleep now."
+
+The rest of the far-spent night Stuart stood guard outside the house.
+Once, a half hour after Conscience had gone in, her blind rose and she
+stood silhouetted against the lamp-light. The man stepped out of his
+shadow and raised a hand, and she waved back at him. Then the lamp went
+out, and he surrendered himself to thought and resolves--and mistakes.
+This submission to the tyranny of weakness had gone too far. She must go
+away. He must take up the fight aggressively. He did not realize that he
+who was fighting for her sense of humor had lost his own. He did not
+foresee that he was preparing to throw the issue on dangerous ground,
+pitting his stubbornness against her stubbornness, and raising the old
+duel of temperaments to combat--the immemorial conflict between puritan
+and cavalier.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Stuart Farquaharson had tempered a dignified strength with a gracious
+fortitude. He had endured slanderous charges and stood with the
+steadiness of a reef-light when Conscience was steering a storm ridden
+course, but the constant pressure on the dykes of his self-command had
+strained them until they might break at any moment and let the flood of
+passion swirl through with destructive power. He was being oppressed and
+seeing Conscience oppressed by a spirit which he regarded as viciously
+illiberal--and he accused Conscience, in his own mind, of blind
+obedience to a distorted sense of duty. Unconsciously he was seeking to
+coerce her into repudiating it by a form of argument in which the
+graciousness of his nature gave way to a domineering insistence.
+Unconsciously, too, that form of attack aroused in her an unyielding
+quality of opposition.
+
+When he saw her next after the mid-night meeting she had seemed more
+normally composed and he had seized upon the occasion to open his
+campaign. They had driven over and stopped the car at a point from which
+they could look out to sea, and though the summer vividness had died out
+of wave and sky and the waters had taken on a touch of a leaden
+grimness, there was still beauty in the picture.
+
+For awhile they talked of unimportant things, but abruptly Stuart said:
+"Dearest, I told you that I meant to fight for you even if I had to
+fight with you. That's the hardest form in which the battle could come,
+but one can't always choose the conditions of war." He paused and,
+seeing that his eyes were troubled, Conscience smiled encouragingly.
+
+"At least," she laughed, "I believe you will wage war on me humanely."
+
+The man went on hurriedly. "I've been talking with the doctor. He says
+that your father's condition holds no immediate danger--danger of death,
+I mean. Unless he suffers another stroke, he may live for years."
+
+The girl nodded her head. "Yes, I know," she said wearily, "and for him
+life only means continuation of suffering." She did not add that it
+meant the same for her and Stuart, looking steadily into her face, said
+with decision, "For awhile you must go away."
+
+"I!" Her eyes widened with an incredulous expression as if she thought
+she had misunderstood, then she answered slowly and very gently, "You
+_know_ I can't do that, dear."
+
+"I know that you must," he countered, and because he had keyed himself
+for this combat of wills he spoke more categorically than he realized.
+"At first thought, of course, you would feel that you couldn't. But your
+ability to stand a long siege will depend on conserving your strength.
+You are human and not indestructible."
+
+She shook her head with a gentle stubbornness. "Stuart, dear, you're
+trying to make me do a thing you wouldn't do yourself. A sentry placed
+on duty can't go away until his watch is over--even if it's raw and
+gloomy where's he's stationed."
+
+"No, but soldiers under intolerable stress are relieved and given
+breathing space whenever it's possible."
+
+"Yes, whenever it's possible."
+
+"It's possible, now, dearest, and perhaps it won't be later. You could
+visit some friend for a few weeks and come back the better able to carry
+on the siege. Otherwise you'll be crushed by the weight of the ordeal."
+
+"Stuart," she began slowly, "who is there to take my place, even for a
+few weeks?"
+
+"And the whole intolerable situation arises," he broke out with a
+sudden inflection of wrath, "from inert, thick-skulled bigotry. Thought
+processes that are moral cramps and mental dyspepsia threaten to ruin
+your entire life."
+
+"Don't, dear--please!" She leaned toward him and spoke earnestly. "I
+know it's hard to endure without retort, but please don't make me listen
+to things like that about Father. It's bad enough without any more
+recriminations."
+
+Then logic retreated from Stuart Farquaharson. He, the gracious and
+controlled, gave way to his first moment of ungenerous temper and
+retorted bitterly.
+
+"Very well, but it seems you can listen to his abuse of me."
+
+Conscience flinched as if lash-stung and for an instant indignation and
+anger kindled in her eyes only to die as instantly out of them, as she
+bit her lip. When she spoke it was in an even gentler voice. "You know
+why I listened to him, Stuart. You know that I didn't listen ... before
+his stroke. I didn't listen when I told him that if you went, I went,
+too, did I?"
+
+The man's face paled and with a spasmodic gesture he covered it with his
+hands. "My God!" he exclaimed, "I don't think I've ever said such a
+damnably mean and caddish thing before--and to you!"
+
+But Conscience bent over and drew his hands away from his face. "It
+wasn't you. It was just the strain. You could make allowances for me
+when I called you out to calm me in the middle of the night. I can make
+them, too. Neither of us is quite sane."
+
+But having had that warning of Stuart's slipping control, Conscience
+kept locked in her own bosom certain fresh trials which discussion would
+have alleviated. She did not tell him how she spent sleepless nights
+devising plans to meet the grim insistence upon his banishment which
+she knew the morning would bring. But she felt that the comfort of a
+complete unburdening of her feelings had been curtailed and with a
+woman's genius for sacrifice she uncomplainingly assumed that added
+strain.
+
+One afternoon Eben Tollman came out of the house, as she was walking
+alone under the bare trees of the driveway, and stopped, hat in hand, at
+her side.
+
+"Conscience," he began thoughtfully, "Mr. Williams has just told me of
+his insistence that Mr. Farquaharson shall not only be denied the house,
+but sent away altogether. You must be carrying a pretty heavy load for
+young shoulders."
+
+The girl stood regarding her father's counselor gravely. He had never
+appealed to her as a person inviting confidence, and she had thought of
+his mind as cut to the same austere pattern as the minister's own. Yet
+now his face wore an expression of kindliness and sympathy to which his
+manner gave corroboration. Possibly she had misjudged the man and lost
+his underlying qualities in her careless view of externals. Tollman
+seemed to expect no answer and went on slowly, "I tried to point out to
+your father the unwisdom of an insistence which must stir a spirit like
+yours to natural opposition. I suggested that under the circumstances it
+was scarcely fair."
+
+"What did he say?" She put the inquiry with a level glance as if
+reserving her right to accept or reject his volunteered assistance.
+
+"He could only see his own side. He must do his duty, however hard he
+found it."
+
+Conscience remembered Stuart's warning that Tollman thought he loved
+her, and smiled to herself. This voluntary championing of another man's
+cause hardly seemed to comport with such a conception.
+
+"I don't know what to do," she admitted wearily. "Obviously I can't make
+the promise he asks and no more can I let him fly into a rage that may
+kill him. I'm between the upper and nether mill-stones."
+
+The man nodded with a grave and courteous comprehension.
+
+"I hesitate to volunteer advice--and yet--" He came to a questioning
+halt.
+
+"Yes," she prompted eagerly. "Please go on."
+
+"I had thought," he continued, with the diffident manner of a man
+unaccustomed to proffering counsel before it was asked, "that, if you
+cared to use me, I might be of some help--as an intermediary of sorts."
+
+"An intermediary?" she repeated. Then more impulsively, because she felt
+that her attitude had been wanting in graciousness, she added, "I know
+you're offering to do something very kind, but I'm afraid I don't quite
+understand."
+
+"I think I am entirely in your father's confidence," he explained, "and
+because, on many subjects, we hold common opinions, I can discuss--even
+argue--matters with him without fear of antagonism or excitement to him.
+Still I hope I am not too old to be in sympathy with your more youthful
+and more modern outlook on life. If at any time I can help, please call
+on me."
+
+They had been walking toward his buggy at the hitching post--it was not
+a new or particularly well-kept vehicle--and there they halted.
+
+"This is good of you," she said, extending her hand cordially, and as he
+took it he suggested, "Meanwhile an old man is not speedily weaned from
+an idea which has taken deep root, and that brings me to another
+suggestion." Once more he paused deferentially as if awaiting
+permission, "if I may make it."
+
+"I wish you would."
+
+"It is the idea of Mr. Farquaharson's constant proximity and influence
+which keeps your father's animosity stirred to combat. With a temporary
+absence it would relax. I think it might even come to an automatic
+end.... When Farquaharson returned Mr. Williams's mind might have lost
+its inflammation."
+
+He smiled and shook the reins over the back of the old horse and when he
+drove away he left Conscience standing with her lips parted and her gaze
+set.
+
+Send Stuart away for a time! She had told that she could not stand it
+without him, and now Tollman had expressed the unbiased view of one
+whose personal desires were not blinding his judgment. She moved over to
+the side of the road and leaned heavily against a tree. She felt as if
+she were standing unprotected under the chilling beat of a cold and
+driving rain, and her lips moved without sound, shaping again the three
+words "send him away!"
+
+She had been holding her lover at her side until she could see his
+nerves growing raw under the stress of his worry about herself and the
+temper which nature had made chivalric giving way to acerbity. Yes,
+Tollman was right--it required a sacrifice to save a wreck--and because
+he was right the sun grew dark and the future as black as the floor of
+the sea.
+
+But the next time she saw Stuart she did not broach the suggestion, nor
+yet the next time after that. The man gave her no opportunity, so
+indomitably was he waging his campaign to have her go. And as her
+equally inflexible refusal stood impregnable against his assaults, he
+grew desperate and reenforced his arguments with the accusation of
+indifference to his wishes. In each succeeding discussion, his
+infectious smile grew rarer and the drawn brow, that bore close kinship
+to a frown, more habitual. His own talisman of humor was going from him,
+and two unyielding determinations settled more and more directly at
+cross odds.
+
+When the breach came it was almost entirely the Virginian's fault, or
+the fault of the unsuspected Hyde who lurked behind his Jekyll.
+
+"Conscience," he pleaded desperately on the afternoon which neither of
+them could ever remember afterwards without a sickness of the soul,
+"you're simply building a funeral pyre for yourself. You're wrecking
+your life and my life because of an insane idea. You're letting the
+pettiest and unworthiest thing in you--a twisted instinct--consume all
+that's vital and fine. You're worshiping the morbid."
+
+"If I'm guilty of all that" she answered with a haunted misery in her
+eyes which she averted her face to hide, "I'm hardly worth fighting for.
+The only answer I have is that I'm doing what seems right to me."
+
+"Can't you admit that for the moment your sense of right may be clouded?
+All I ask is that you go for a while to the home of some friend, where
+they don't rebuff the sunlight when it comes in at the window."
+
+"Stuart," she told him gently but with conviction, "you have changed,
+too. Once I could have taken your advice as almost infallible, but I
+can't now."
+
+The Virginian's face paled, and his question came with an irritable
+quickness, "In what fashion have I changed?"
+
+"In a way, I think I've recovered my balance," she said with deep
+seriousness. "I couldn't have done it without you. You've taken my
+troubles on yourself, but at a heavy price, dear. They've preyed on you
+until now it's _you_ who can't trust his judgment. All you say
+influences me, but it's no longer because of its logic, it's because I
+love you and you're talking to my heart."
+
+Farquaharson paced the frosty path of the woods where they were talking.
+His face was dark and his movements nervous so Conscience would not let
+herself look at him. She had something difficult to say and of late she
+had not felt strong enough to spend vitality with wastefulness.
+
+"You say I'm wrecking both our lives...." she went on resolutely. "I
+don't want to wreck either ... but yours I couldn't bear to wreck. I
+love you enough to make any sacrifice for you ... even enough to give
+you up."
+
+Stuart wheeled and his attitude stiffened to rigidity. The woods raced
+about him in crazy circles, and before his eyes swam spots of yellow and
+orange.
+
+"Do you mean--" he paused to moisten his lips with his tongue and found
+his tongue, too, suddenly dry--"do you mean that you've let this tyranny
+of weakness conquer you? Have you promised to exile me?"
+
+She flinched as she had flinched on the one other occasion when he had
+accused her of a disloyalty which would have been impossible to her, but
+she was too unhappy to be angry.
+
+"No," she said slowly, "I haven't even considered such a promise. I said
+just now that you had changed. The other Stuart Farquaharson wouldn't
+have suspected me of that."
+
+"Then what in Heaven's name do you mean?"
+
+"I mean that you must go away--for awhile. It's only selfishness that
+has blinded me to that all along. I'm killing all the best in you by
+keeping you here."
+
+"You are strong enough to bear the direct strain, I suppose," he accused
+with a bitter smile. "But I'm too weak to endure even its reflection."
+
+"It's always easier to bear trouble oneself," she reminded him with a
+gracious patience, "than to see the person one loves subjected to it."
+
+"When did you think of this?"
+
+"I didn't think of it myself," she told him with candid directness. "I
+guess I was too selfish. Mr. Tollman suggested it."
+
+"Mr. Tollman!" The name burst from his lips like an anathema and a
+sudden gust of fury swept him from all moorings of control. "You love me
+enough to give me up--on the advice of my enemies! You are deaf to all
+my pleadings, but to the casual suggestion of this damned pharisee you
+yield instant obedience. And what he suggests is that I be sent away."
+
+Her twisted fingers clenched themselves more tautly and had passion not
+enveloped Stuart in a red wreath of fog he must have refrained from
+adding to the acuteness of her torture just then.
+
+"Why," she asked faintly, "should he be your enemy?"
+
+"Because he wants you himself, because, with me disposed of, he believes
+he can get what his unclean and avaricious heart covets as a snake
+charms a bird, because--"
+
+Conscience rose with an effort to her feet. Her knees were trembling
+under her and her heart seemed to close into a painful strangulation.
+
+"Stuart," she faltered, "if you think that my love can only be held
+against any outsider by your being at hand to watch it, you don't trust
+it as it _must_ be trusted--and it isn't worth offering you at all."
+
+"You've fallen under the spell of these Mad Mullah prophets," he
+retorted hotly, "until you can't trust yourself any longer. You've been
+inflamed into the Mohammedan's spirit of a holy war and you're ready to
+make a burnt offering of me and my love."
+
+"Now," she said with a faintness that was almost a whisper, "you _must_
+go, whether you agree or not. You distrust me and insult me ... and I
+don't think ... I can stand many ... interviews like this."
+
+But Farquaharson's curb had slipped. His anger was a frenzied runaway
+which he, like a madman, was riding in utter recklessness.
+
+"If I go now," he violently protested, "if I am sent into exile at the
+behest of Tollman, my enemy, I go for all time, knowing that the woman I
+leave behind is not the woman I thought I knew or the woman I have
+worshiped."
+
+Their eyes met and engaged in a challenge of wills in which neither
+would surrender; a challenge which had built an issue out of nothing.
+His burned with the moment's madness. Hers were clear and unflinching.
+
+"If you _can_ go like that," she said, and the tremor left her voice as
+she said it, "the man who goes isn't the man to whom I gave all my love
+and to whom I was ready to give my life."
+
+She straightened, sustained by a temporary strength, and stood clothed
+in a beauty above any which even he had before acknowledged; a beauty
+fired with the war spirit of a Valkyrie and of eyes regal in their
+affronted dignity. "If you can feel about me as your words indicate, we
+could never know happiness. The man whose love can make such accusations
+isn't the Stuart Farquaharson that made me willing to die for him.
+Perhaps after all I only _dreamed_ that man. It was a wonderful dream."
+
+She carried the fingers of one hand to her temple in a bewildered
+gesture, then shook back her head as one rousing oneself with an effort
+from sleep. "If it was a dream," she went on with a forced courage,
+"it's just as well to find it out in time."
+
+"Then--" he made several attempts before he could speak--"then you are
+sending me away. If that's true--as there's a God in Heaven, I'll never
+come back until you send for me."
+
+"As there's a God in Heaven," she answered steadily, almost
+contemptuously, "I'll never send for you. You'll never come back unless
+you come yourself--and come with a more absolute trust in your heart."
+
+They stood under the leafless branches in a long silence, both white of
+cheek and supremely shaken, until at last the man said huskily: "I
+suppose I may take you to your gate?"
+
+She shook her head. "No," she answered firmly, "I'm going across the
+field. It's only a step." She turned then and walked away and as he
+looked after her she did not glance backward. An erect and regal
+carriage covered the misery of her retreat--but when she reached her
+house she went up the stairs like some creature mortally wounded and as
+she closed the door of her room, there came from her throat a low and
+agonized groan. She stood leaning for a space against the panels with
+her hands stretched out gropingly against the woodwork. Her lips moved
+vacantly, then her knees gave way and she crumpled down and lay
+insensible on the floor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+After awhile her lashes trembled and rose flickeringly upon the vague
+perplexity of returning consciousness. Her head ached and her muscles
+were cramped, because she had crumpled down as she stood, so that she
+regained her feet falteringly and went with difficulty over to a chair
+before the mirror of her dressing-table. For awhile she sat gazing dully
+into her own reflected eyes. Under them were dark rings. Her cheeks were
+pale and her whole face was stricken with the bleak hopelessness of
+heartbreak. Her gaze fell on a framed photograph, just before her, and
+she flinched. It was an enlarged snapshot of Stuart Farquaharson. But
+other pictures more vitally near to her recent past were passing also
+before her. She felt again the muscles of his forearms snap into
+tautness as he stood silent under her father's insults. She felt the
+strength of his embrace calming the panic of her own heart; the touch of
+the kisses that had brought her both peace and ecstasy and wakened in
+her latent fires. Surely if, at last, the hot temper had broken through
+and blinded him with its glare of passion, it had not--could not--have
+burned to ashes all the chivalric record of these trying months. Surely
+it was a thing she could forgive. The man upon whom she had leaned so
+long and whom she had known so well must be more real than this alien
+revealed in an ungenerous half hour. The pale sunset died into the ashes
+of twilight. Her bureau clock ticked out a full hour--and a second hour
+while she sat almost immovable. She argued with herself that this
+conflict which had so impalpably gathered and so suddenly burst in
+storm was a nightmare coming out of the shadows and had no substance of
+reality.
+
+At last she lighted a lamp and moved wearily to her writing desk. Her
+pen developed a mutinous trick of balking, and her eyes of staring,
+unseeing, at the wall. But at last when she had torn up sheet after
+sheet, she finished her task.
+
+
+     "Dear Stuart," she had written. "You told me once that no one
+     should send you away--not even I--unless I proved myself stronger
+     than you. To-day you accused me of being the dupe of your
+     enemies--and you are going--not because I am strong enough to
+     banish you, but because you think me too weak to be trusted with
+     your love. Without absolute trust we could never hope for
+     happiness. So this isn't a plea, Stuart. It's not even an
+     apology--except that I freely acknowledge a large share of
+     fault--but I can't let you go without thanking you for all the
+     gallant sacrifices you have made and for all the ways in which you
+     have sought to stand between me and distress. Until to-day you
+     have, under fire, proven true to your code of knighthood, and
+     to-day I could forget--but could you? Of all the things I have ever
+     said to you, of love, I have no syllable to retract. Even now I
+     repeat it. I love you absolutely. When I suggested your leaving for
+     a time I did a desperately hard thing--and you misunderstood it.
+     Unless you can understand it, dear, it would do no good to come
+     back, it would only mean other humiliating memories. This is not an
+     easy letter to write and it's not well done. If your attitude of
+     this afternoon is anything more than the delusion of anger--in
+     other words, if your love is not one of complete trust, it's better
+     that we shouldn't see each other again. If you can come in the
+     spirit that I can receive you, to-day can be erased as if it had
+     never happened--but until I have your answer (given after you have
+     searched your heart) I shall be--but that is neither here nor
+     there."
+
+
+Tollman, who was taking supper at the manse that evening, noted the
+pallor of her face, but made no comment. He had, in fact, already
+divined a lover's quarrel and that was a thing into which even the most
+friendly interference might well bring rebuff. But he was not surprised,
+on leaving, to find Conscience waylaying him at the front door with an
+envelope in her hand, which she asked him to post without fail in the
+morning when after his invariable custom he drove to the village post
+office. Within the last few days the invalid's irritability had taken
+the form of intense dislike for the jingle of the telephone and in
+deference to his whim it had been disconnected. Consequently the family
+friend had of late both mailed and delivered notes between the lovers
+and knew the handwriting of each.
+
+That night Stuart slept not at all. For hours after he reached his room
+in the hotel he paced it frantically. First cumulative anger, long held
+in leash, swept him like a forest fire, charring his reason into
+unreason. He had fought for Conscience and lost her. She had thrown her
+lot with the narrow minds and cast him adrift. He had placed all his
+trust in her and she had failed to rise above her heritage. But as the
+night wore on a nauseating reaction of self-indictment followed. He saw
+that he had grossly affronted her and brutally accused her. The
+generosity and fairness he worshiped had had no part in his conduct. He,
+too, spent hours writing, destroying and rewriting letters.
+
+At last he let one stand.
+
+
+     "But, dearest," he said at its end, "if you _do_ let me come back,
+     you must still let me fight--not with temper and accusation, but
+     patiently--against the strangling of your life. After this
+     afternoon there can be no middle ground. I stand before you so
+     discredited that unless you love me enough to forgive me you must
+     hate me wholly and completely. If it's hate, I have earned it--and
+     more, but if it _can_ still be love, I have a life to spend in
+     contradiction of to-day. I shall remain here twenty-four hours
+     waiting for my answer, and each hour until it comes will be a
+     purgatory. I've forfeited my right to come to you without
+     permission. I must wait for your verdict. I don't even claim the
+     right to expect an answer--but I know you will give one. Not to do
+     so would be to brand me, for life, not only with bitter hatred but
+     bitter contempt as well."
+
+
+At dawn, without having been to bed, he posted the letter and sat down
+to wait with the anxiety of a defendant who has seen the jury locked
+into its chamber of fateful decision.
+
+When Eben Tollman came into the post office that morning, he called for
+his mail and that of the Williams household.
+
+Conscience's note to Stuart he did not mail. Stuart's letter to
+Conscience he did not deliver, but later in the day he deposited both in
+a strong-box in which he kept his private papers.
+
+Three days Stuart Farquaharson spent waiting for an answer and while he
+waited his face became drawn, and the ugly doubt of the first hours
+settled into a certainty. There would be no answer. He had told her that
+to ignore his plea would be the superlative form of scorn--and she had
+chosen it.
+
+Conscience, too, who had humbled herself, was waiting: waiting at first
+with a trust which refused to entertain doubt, and which withered as the
+days passed into such an agony that she felt she must go mad. If Stuart
+had deliberately done _that_--she must make herself forget him because
+to hold him in her heart would be to disgrace herself. The man, in the
+hour of ugly passion, had been the real one after all; the other only a
+pleasing masquerade!
+
+"Did you mail my letter?" she finally demanded of Tollman, and he
+smilingly responded. "I don't think I ever forgot to post a letter in my
+life."
+
+In a final investigation she walked to the village and inquired at the
+hotel desk, "Is Mr. Farquaharson here?"
+
+"No, Miss Conscience," the clerk smilingly responded, "he checked out
+last night. Said he'd send his address later."
+
+One afternoon several days later a stranger left the train at the
+village and looked about him with that bored and commiserating
+expression with which city men are apt to regard the shallow skyline of
+a small town. He was of medium height and carefully groomed from his
+well-tailored clothes to the carnation in his buttonhole and manicured
+polish of his nails. His face, clean-shaven save for a close-cropped and
+sandy mustache, held a touch of the florid and his figure inclined to
+stoutness. At the livery stable where he called for a buggy, after
+learning that no taxis were to be had, he gave the name of Michael Hagan
+and asked to be directed to the house of Mr. Eben Tollman.
+
+Mr. Tollman was obviously expecting his visitor, and received him upon
+arrival in his austere study. Yet the fact that there was no element of
+surprise in Mr. Hagan's coming failed to relieve Mr. Tollman of traces
+of nervousness as he inquired, "You are Mr. Hagan?"
+
+"Yes, Mr. Tollman, I came up in answer to your letter."
+
+The stranger had no roving eye. He seemed, indeed, steady of hearing to
+the verge of stolidity, yet in a few seconds he had noted and drawn
+rapid conclusions from the environment. The cheerlessness of the house
+had struck him and the somber room, decorated, if one calls it
+decoration, with faded steel engravings of Landseer hunting dogs
+guarding dead birds and rabbits, impressed him.
+
+Mr. Tollman bowed coldly.
+
+"The matter I wish to discuss with you is confidential," he began by way
+of introduction, and Hagan smiled as he replied, "Most matters which
+clients discuss with me, _are_ confidential."
+
+Even with this reassurance, Mr. Tollman appeared to labor under
+embarrassment and it was only after some thought that he suggested,
+"This business is so new to me that I hardly know how to approach it."
+
+"A man should be extremely frank with his physician or his lawyer,"
+volunteered the newcomer. "It's even truer in the case of a detective."
+
+"In this instance," Mr. Tollman proceeded with the wariness of one
+wading into water of unknown depth, "I am acting for friends whose
+business interests I represent, and who do not care to appear in the
+matter. Therefore your dealings will be exclusively with me."
+
+"Certainly, that's quite usual. Now, what's the nature of the case? Your
+letter didn't indicate."
+
+"Well, the fact is I wish to have a somewhat searching investigation
+made into the personal character and conduct of a young gentleman, who
+for reasons unnecessary to state, is of interest to my friends."
+
+"Let me understand you clearly," prompted Mr. Hagan, with a briskness
+that accentuated the other's air of secretiveness. "Is this man to be
+shown up? Is that what you mean?"
+
+Mr. Tollman stiffened. "I should suppose," he said with cool dignity,
+"that would be dependent to a certain extent on the facts."
+
+But Mr. Hagan had in his police-detective days made use of the third
+degree, and when he next spoke his voice was firm almost to sternness.
+"I thought," he reminded the other, "we were going to be frank."
+
+Thus encouraged, Tollman proceeded slowly, "I'm not seeking to whitewash
+the character of the gentleman, if that's what you mean."
+
+"Good! Now, we're going somewhere. There are very few people who have no
+skeletons in their closets."
+
+The hand of the employer came up with fastidious distaste. "Let this be
+understood from the beginning, Mr. Hagan, I have no wish to hear
+anything but reports of results obtained. In the details of your work I
+have not the slightest interest."
+
+Mr. Hagan nodded, and inquired, "Is it with a view to criminal
+prosecution, now, that this case is to be worked or--?" He paused
+interrogatively.
+
+"It is not. It is only necessary to convince a young lady, whose family
+disapproves of the man, that their suspicions are based on fact. She is
+so prejudiced in his favor, however, that the facts must be
+substantial--and of a character calculated to weigh with a woman."
+
+Hagan drew a cigar-case from his pocket, and proffered it, but his offer
+being declined with a cold shake of the head, he settled himself as
+comfortably as possible in his uncomfortable chair and engaged in
+reflection. After digesting the preliminaries, he began to speak
+musingly, as though to himself.
+
+"Of course if the lady knew that detectives were working on the case,
+the force of any disclosure would be discounted."
+
+His eyes were on his employer as he spoke and he saw Tollman start.
+Tollman's words, too, came with an impulsiveness which had been absent
+heretofore.
+
+"Neither of them must know, of course, that this investigation is being
+made. Unless you can assure me on that point you mustn't undertake the
+business."
+
+With some difficulty the detective repressed a smile. "That goes
+without saying, Mr. Tollman. Now if it could be shown that this man was
+mixed up in some sort of a scandal--with a married woman, or a shady
+one, for instance--that ought to fit the case, oughtn't it?"
+
+"Precisely." Again Tollman's voice was tinged with an unaccustomed
+quickness of interest, but at once, as though he had made a mistake, he
+amended with a heavy gravity, "However, we can hardly forecast what you
+will learn. I understand that he has directed his mail forwarded to an
+apartment hotel near Washington Square in New York."
+
+The two talked for perhaps forty minutes--though it must be admitted
+that a portion of that time was devoted to a discussion of the terms of
+employment. Mr. Tollman had never undertaken having a man shadowed
+before and he regarded the fees as needlessly large.
+
+Back once more in his office in a building on Forty-second Street, Mr.
+Hagan cut the end from a cigar and gazed out across the public library
+and the park at its back. The frosted glass of his hall door bore the
+legend, "The Searchlight Investigation Bureau. Private."
+
+"Well, what did you find out about this job?" inquired a member of the
+office force who had entered from a communicating room, and the chief
+wrinkled his brow a little as he studied his _perfecto_.
+
+"It's a dirty business, Schenk," he replied crisply. "It's the kind of
+thing that gives knockers a license to put detectives in the same class
+as blackmailers--and the old Whey-face himself is a tight-wad. He
+wrangled over the price--but I made him come through."
+
+"What does he want done?"
+
+"He wants a guy framed. You remember what the bulls did for Big
+Finnerty, when Finnerty was threatening to squeal to the District
+Attorney's office about police graft?"
+
+Schenk nodded. "They pulled the old stuff on him. Sent him to the
+Island a year for gun-toting."
+
+"Sure, and he didn't have a gat at that--that is, not until the bulls
+planted it in his kick on the way to the station house." The dignity of
+Mr. Hagan's consultation manner had dropped from him, and he had
+relapsed into the gang argot with which police days had given him an
+intimate familiarity.
+
+"Sure he didn't. That's the way they frame a man. It's the way they
+framed--"
+
+"Can the reminiscence stuff," interrupted the head of the Searchlight
+Investigation Bureau. "The point is that it's just about the deal we're
+being hired to put over on this Farquaharson person. He wants to marry a
+girl and we've got to frame him up with a dirty past--or present. Our
+respected employer is a deacon and a pious hypocrite. He wants results
+and he wants us to go the limit to get 'em. But he must never know
+anything that soils the hem of his garment. He has no interest in the
+petty doings of detectives. His smug face must be saved. He didn't tell
+me this, but I wised myself to it right away. He's got his eye on that
+girl, himself."
+
+The winter came close on the heels of a short autumn that year and it
+came with the bluster and roar of squalls at sea and the lashing of the
+woods inland. For some weeks Conscience followed the colorless monotony
+of her life with a stunned and bruised deadness about her heart. She had
+shed no tears and the feeling was always with her that soon she must
+awaken to a poignant agony and that then her mind would collapse.
+Mechanically she read to her father and supervised the duties of the
+attendant who had been brought on from Boston, but often when he spoke
+to her he had to repeat his question, and then she would come back to
+the present with a start.
+
+The invalid had learned from Tollman that Farquaharson had gone away
+after a quarrel, and he piously told himself that his prayers were
+answered and his daughter had been snatched as a brand from the burning.
+But for once an instinct of mercy tinged his dealings with the
+frailities of humanity. He refrained from talking of Stuart and from the
+pointing of morals. That would come later.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Thinking through days when a cold and tortured moisture would burst out
+on her temples and through nights when she lay wide-eyed and sleepless,
+only one answer seemed to come to Conscience. All Stuart's love must
+have curled in that swift transition into indifference and contempt.
+
+Admitting that conclusion, she knew that her pride should make her hate
+him, too, but her pride was dead. Everything in her was dead but the
+love she could not kill and that remained only to torture her.
+
+The most paradoxical thing of all was that in these troubled days she
+thought of only one person as a dependable friend. Eben Tollman had
+evinced a spirit for which she had not given him credit. It seemed that
+she had been all wrong in her estimates of human character. Stuart, with
+his almost brilliant vitality of charm, had after a quarrel turned his
+back on her. Eben Tollman, who masked a diffident nature behind a
+semblance of cold reserve, was unendingly considerate and no more asked
+reward than a faithful mastiff might have asked it. It contented him to
+anticipate all her wishes and to invent small ways of easing her misery.
+He did not even seek to force his society and satisfied himself with
+such crumbs of conversation as she chose to drop his way in passing. If
+ever she should come out of this period of torpid wretchedness, she
+would owe Tollman a heavy debt of gratitude.
+
+Three months after the day when Mr. Hagan returned from Cape Cod, that
+gentleman called into his private office a member of his staff, who
+responded to the name of Henry Rathbone, and put him through a brief
+catechism.
+
+"What have you got on this Farquaharson party?" he inquired. "Tollman
+complains that you're running up a pretty steep expense account and he
+can't quite see what he's getting for his money."
+
+Rathbone seated himself and nodded. "Mr. Tollman knows every move this
+feller's made. You gotta give him time. A guy that think's he's got a
+broken heart don't start right in on the gay life."
+
+"Why don't he?" inquired Mr. Hagan with a more cynical philosophy. "I've
+always heard that when a man thinks the world's gone to the bow-wows
+he's just about ripe to cut loose. Don't this feller ever take a drink
+or play around with any female companions?"
+
+"You ain't got the angle straight on Farquaharson," observed the sleuth
+who had for some time been Farquaharson's shadow. "He ain't that kind.
+I'm living in the same apartment hotel with him and my room's next door
+to his. I don't fall for the slush-stuff, Chief, but that feller gets my
+goat. He's hurt and hurt bad. It ain't women he wants--it's _one_ woman.
+As for female companions--he don't even seem to have any male ones."
+
+"What does he do with his time?"
+
+"Well, he went down to the farm for a few weeks and closed up the place.
+He studied law, but he's passed it up and decided to write fiction
+stories. Every morning he rides horseback in the park, and, take it from
+me, those equestrian dames turn all the way round to rubber at him."
+
+"What else does he do?"
+
+"He walks miles, too. I fell in with him casual like one day and tagged
+along. Well, he hiked me till my tongue hung out. We started at the Arch
+and ended up at Dolrandi's cafe at the north end of the speedway--it
+ain't but only about a dozen miles.... During that whole chummy little
+experience he spoke just about a couple of times, except to answer my
+questions. Sometimes when he thought I wasn't looking his eyes would get
+like a fellow's I seen once in death-row up the river, but if he caught
+me peepin' he'd laugh and straighten up sudden."
+
+"Well, I don't suppose you can get anything on him till he gives you a
+chance," said Mr. Hagan grudgingly, "but what this man Tollman wants is
+results. He ain't paying out good money that he's hoarded for years,
+just to get merit reports. He didn't wring it out of the local widows
+and orphans just for that."
+
+"I get you, and I'll keep watching. Since Farquaharson got this bug
+about writing stories he's taken to rambling around town at night. I
+said he didn't seem to want companions, but when he goes out on these
+prowls he'll talk for hours with any dirty old bum that stops him and he
+always falls for pan-handling. Beggars, street-walkers, any sort of old
+down-and-outer interests him, if it's hard luck they're talking."
+
+But the face which reminded Mr. Rathbone of the man who was awaiting the
+electric chair was the public face of Stuart Farquaharson. He did not
+see the same features during the hours when the door of his room was
+closed. The hotel he had selected, near Washington Square, was a modest
+place and his window looked out over roofs and chimney-pots and small
+back yards.
+
+There, sitting before his typewriter, his sleeves rolled above his
+elbows, he sought to devote himself to his newly chosen profession: the
+profession which he had substituted for law. Through a near-by window he
+had occasional glimpses of a girl who was evidently trying to be an
+illustrator. Stuart imagined that she was poor and ambitious, and he
+envied her the zest of her struggle for success. He himself had no such
+incentives. Poverty was not likely to touch him unless he became a
+reckless waster, and he fancied that his interests were too far burned
+to ashes for ambition. It was with another purpose that he forced
+himself to his task. He was trying to forget dark hair and eyes and the
+memory of a voice which had said, "Love you! In every way that I know
+how to love, I love you. Everything that a woman can be to a man, I want
+to be to you, and everything that a woman can give a man, I want to give
+you."
+
+And because he sought so hard to forget her, his fingering of the
+typewriter keys would fall idle, and his eyes, looking out across the
+chimney-pots, would soar with the circling pigeons, and he would see her
+again in every guise that he remembered--and he remembered them all.
+
+She had been cruel to the point of doing the one thing which he had told
+her would brand him with the deepest possible misery--and which pledged
+him in honor not to approach her again by word or letter without
+permission. But that was only because the thing which he conceived to be
+her heritage of narrowness had conquered her.
+
+On the floor below was a young man of about his own age, who was also a
+candidate for the laurels in literature. Stuart had met him by chance
+and they had talked a little. This man's enthusiasms had gushed forth
+with a vigor at which the Virginian marveled. For him ambition blazed
+like an oriflamme and he had dared to gamble everything on his belief in
+himself. With scant savings out of a reporter's salary in the West he
+had come to wrest success from the town where all is possible, but now a
+shadow of disappointment was stealing into his eyes. A fear was lurking
+there that, after all, he might have mistaken the message of the Bow
+Bells which had rung to him the Dick Whittington message that the city
+was his to conquer.
+
+Perhaps because Louis Wayne desperately needed to succeed, while Stuart
+Farquaharson wrote only as an anodyne to his thoughts, Wayne vainly
+peddled his manuscripts and almost from the first Stuart sold his at
+excellent rates.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Reinold Heath was rarely in a sunny mood at the hour when her
+coffee and rolls came to her, as she sat propped against the pillows of
+the elaborately hung bed in her French gray and old-rose room. The same
+hour which brought the breakfast tray brought Mrs. Heath's social
+secretary and those duties which lie incumbent upon a leader of
+society's most exploited and inner circles.
+
+Mrs. Heath, kimono-clad in the flooding morning light, looked all of her
+fifty years as she nodded curtly to her secretary. It was early winter
+and a year had passed since Stuart had left Cape Cod.
+
+"Let's get this beastly business done with, Miss Andrews," began the
+great lady sharply. "What animals have you captured this time? By the
+way, who invented week-ends, do you suppose? Whoever it was, he's a
+public enemy."
+
+The secretary arranged her notes and ran efficiently through their
+contents. These people had accepted, those had declined; the
+possibilities yet untried contained such-and-such names.
+
+"Why couldn't Harry Merton come?" The question was snapped out
+resentfully. "Not that I blame him--I don't see why any one comes--or
+why I ask them for that matter."
+
+"He said over the 'phone that he was off for a duck-shooting trip,"
+responded Miss Andrews.
+
+"Well, I suppose we can't take out a subpoena for him. He's escaped
+and we need another man." Mrs. Heath drew her brow in perplexed thought,
+then suddenly demanded: "What was the name of that young man Billy
+Waterburn brought to my box at the horse show? I mean the one who rode
+over the jumps like a devil and blarneyed me afterward like an angel."
+
+The secretary arched her brows. "Do you mean the Virginian? His name was
+Stuart Farquaharson."
+
+"Do you know where he lives--or anything else about him?"
+
+"Why, no--that is, nothing in the social sense." Miss Andrews smiled
+quietly as she added, "I've read some of his stories in the magazines."
+
+"All right. Find out where he lives and invite him in Merton's place.
+Don't let _him_ slip--he interested me and that species is almost
+extinct."
+
+As Miss Andrew jotted down the name, Mrs. Heath read the surprised
+expression on her face, and it amused her to offer explanation of her
+whim.
+
+"You're wondering why I'm going outside the lines and filling the ranks
+with a nobody? Well, I'll tell you. I'm sick of these people who are all
+sick of each other. The Farquaharsons were landed gentry in Virginia
+when these aristocrats were still grinding snuff. Aren't we incessantly
+cudgeling our brains for novelty of entertainment? Well, I've discovered
+the way. I'm going to introduce brains and manners to society. I daresay
+he has evening clothes and if he hasn't he can hire them."
+
+Decidedly puzzled, Stuart Farquaharson listened to the message over the
+telephone later in the day, but his very surprise momentarily paralyzed
+his power of inventing a politely plausible excuse, so that he hung up
+the receiver with the realization that he had accepted an invitation
+which held for him no promise of pleasure.
+
+It happened that Louis Wayne, who had by sheer persistency seized the
+outer fringes of success, had come up with a new manuscript to read and
+was now sitting, with a pipe between his teeth, in Stuart's morris
+chair.
+
+"Sure, go to it," he exclaimed with a grin, as Stuart bewailed his lack
+of a ready excuse. "It'll be a bore, but it will make you appreciate
+your return to the companionship of genius."
+
+"The Crags" was that palatial establishment up the Hudson where the
+Reinold Heaths hold court during the solstices between the months at
+Newport and the brief frenzy of the New York season, and the house party
+which introduced Stuart Farquaharson to Society with a capital S was
+typical. One person in the household still had, like himself, the
+external point of view, and her ditties threw her into immediate contact
+with each new guest.
+
+"Miss Andrews," he laughed, when the social secretary met him shortly
+after his arrival, "I'm the poor boy at this frolic, and I'm just as
+much at my ease as a Hottentot at college. When I found that I was the
+only man here without a valet, I felt--positively naked."
+
+The young woman's eyes gleamed humorously. "I know the feeling," she
+said, "and I'll tell you a secret. I took a course of education in
+higher etiquette from the butler. You can't do that, of course, but when
+in doubt ask me--and I'll ask the butler."
+
+But it was Mrs. Heath's prerogative to knight her proteges with the
+Order of the Chosen, and Stuart Farquaharson would have graced any
+picture where distinction of manner and unself-conscious charm passed
+current.
+
+"Who is the girl with the red-brown hair and the wonderful complexion
+and the dissatisfied eyes?" he asked Miss Andrews later, and that lady
+answered with the frankness of a fellow-countryman in foreign parts:
+
+"Mrs. Larry Holbury. That's her husband over there--it's whispered that
+they're not inordinately happy."
+
+Farquaharson followed the brief glance of his companion and saw a man
+inclining to overweight whose fingers caressed the stem of a cocktail
+glass, and whose face was heavy with surliness.
+
+It subsequently developed, in a tete-a-tete with the wife, that she had
+read all of Mr. Farquaharson's stories and adored them. It leaked out
+with an air of resignation that her husband was a bit of a brute--and
+yet Mrs. Holbury was neither a fool nor a bore. She was simply a
+composite of flirtatious instinct and an amazing candor.
+
+In the life of Stuart Farquaharson the acceptance of that invitation
+would have passed as a disconnected incident had it been altogether a
+matter of his choosing, but he had let himself be caught. Mrs. Reinold
+Heath had chosen to present him as her personal candidate for lionizing
+and whom she captured she held in bondage.
+
+"Honestly, now, Miss Andrews," he pleaded over the telephone when that
+lady called him to the colors a second time, "entirely between
+ourselves, I came before because I couldn't think of an excuse in time.
+Let me off and I'll propose a substitute arrangement. Suppose we have
+dinner together somewhere where the _hors d'oeuvres_ aren't all gold
+fish."
+
+Her laugh tinkled in the telephone. "I wish we could," she said. "I knew
+you let yourself in for it the first time--but now you're hooked and you
+_have_ to come." So he went.
+
+On later occasions it was more flattering than satisfying to him that
+the beautiful Mrs. Holbury should drop so promptly into a sort of easy
+intimacy and treat him almost from the start with a proprietary manner.
+It soon became an embarrassment of riches. Stuart was thinking of
+himself as a woman-hater, these days, and he held a normal dislike for
+wagging tongues. Holbury, too, who was reputed to be of jealous
+tendency, seemed to regard him unfavorably and took no great pains to
+affect cordiality.
+
+One day Wayne dropped, coatless, into Farquaharson's room and grinned
+as he tossed a magazine down on the table. "_Sic fama est_" was his
+comment, and Stuart picked up the sheet which his visitor indicated with
+a jerk of the thumb. The magazine was a weekly devoted ostensibly to the
+doings of smart society, but its real distinction lay in its innuendo
+and its genius for sailing so close to the wind of libel that those who
+moved in the rarified air of exclusiveness read it with a delicious and
+shuddering mingling of anticipation and dread. Its method was to use no
+names in the more daring paragraphs, but for the key to the spicy, one
+had only to refer back. The preceding item always contained names which
+applied to both.
+
+Stuart found his name and that of Mrs. Holbury listed in an account of
+some entertainment--and below that:
+
+
+     "A young Southerner, recently arrived and somewhat lionized, is
+     whispered to be complicating the already uneven balance of
+     domesticity in the home of a couple whose status in society
+     antedates his own. This gallant has all the attractiveness of one
+     untouched with ennui. He rides like a centaur, talks like a
+     diplomat and flatters as only a Virginian or an Irishman can
+     flatter. The same whisper has it that the husband suffers in the
+     parallel."
+
+
+Farquaharson's face darkened and he reached for his discarded coat.
+
+"Hold on; you have company," suggested Wayne placatingly. "Where do you
+think you're going in such hot haste?"
+
+Stuart was standing with his feet well apart and his mouth set in a
+stern line.
+
+"Wayne," he said with a crisp and ominous decisiveness, "I've never
+slandered any man intentionally--and I require the same decency of
+treatment from others."
+
+"Go easy there. Ride wide! Ride wide!" cautioned the visitor. "That
+little slander is mild compared with many others in the same pages. Are
+the rest of them rushing to the office to cane the editors? They are
+not, my son. Believe me, they are not."
+
+"They should be. Submission only encourages a scoundrel."
+
+"In the first place they would find no one there but a rather fragile
+and extremely polite young lady. The editor himself doesn't sit around
+waiting to be horsewhipped. In the second, society tacitly sanctions and
+supports that sheet. Your fashionable friends would call you a barbarian
+and what is worse--a boob."
+
+Farquaharson stood in a statuesque ire, and Wayne went philosophically
+on. "Take the advice of a singularly wise bystander. At least treat it
+with the contempt of silence until you've consulted the lady. Caning
+people in New York is attended with some degree of notoriety and she
+would have to share it. When you're in Rome, be as Romanesque as
+possible."
+
+"For my part," declared Stuart, "I like another version better. When
+you're a Roman, be a Roman wherever you are."
+
+Yet after some debate he took off his coat again and announced
+cryptically, "After all, the one unpardonable idiocy is sectionalism of
+code--damn it!"
+
+He knew that Marian Holbury and her husband were near a break and that
+the husband's jealousy looked his way. But, conscious of entire
+rectitude, he gave no thought to appearances and treated the matter
+lightly. But the Searchlight Investigation Bureau, whose employment had
+been discontinued as not paying for itself, was now re-employed and
+instructed to send a marked copy of the weekly to Miss Conscience
+Williams. That copy was anonymously mailed, bearing a New York
+postmark, and its sending was a puzzle which its recipient never solved.
+
+Spring came, and Stuart, who had begun the writing of a novel, took a
+small house in Westchester County, where he could work apart from the
+city's excitement. Had he been cautious he would not have selected one
+within two miles of the Holbury country house, yet the fact was that
+Marian Holbury had discovered it and he had taken it because of its
+quaintness. He had been there several weeks alone except for a man
+servant when, one night, he sat under the lamp of his small living-room
+with sheets of manuscript scattered about him. It was warm, with clouds
+gathering for a storm, and the scent of blossoms came in through the
+open doors and windows. There was no honeysuckle in the neighborhood,
+but to his memory there drifted, clear and strong and sweet, the
+fragrance of its heavy clusters.
+
+He sat up straight, arrested by the poignancy of that echo from the
+past. The typewriter keys fell silent and his eyes stared through the
+open window, wide and full of suffering. He heard himself declaring with
+boyhood's assurance, "They may take you to the North Pole and surround
+you with regiments of soldiers--but in the end it will be the same."
+
+Then without warning a wild sob sounded from the doorway and he looked
+up, coming to his feet so abruptly that his overturned chair fell
+backward with a crash.
+
+"Marian!" he exclaimed, his voice ringing with shocked incredulity.
+"What are you doing here--and alone?"
+
+Mrs. Holbury stood leaning limply against the door-frame. She was in
+evening dress, and a wrap, glistening with the shimmer of silver,
+drooped loosely about her gleaming shoulders.
+
+"It's over," she declared in a passionate and unprefaced outburst. "I
+can't stand it! I'm done with him! I've left him!"
+
+Stuart spread his hands in dumfounded amazement. "But why, in God's
+name, did you come here? This is madness--this is inconceivable!"
+
+She went unsteadily to the nearest chair and dropped into it. "I came to
+stay--if you don't turn me out," she answered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Except for the low yet hysterical moaning of the woman in the chair and
+the distant whistle of a Hudson River boat, there was complete silence
+in the small room, while the man stood dumfounded and speechless.
+
+Marian's evening gown was torn and one silk stocking sagged at the
+ankle. Stuart Farquaharson noted these things vaguely and at last he
+inquired, "How did you get here?"
+
+Her answer came between sobs, "I walked."
+
+"You have done an unspeakably mad thing, Marian," he said quietly. "You
+can't stay here. There is no one in this house but myself; even my
+servant is away to-night. Why didn't you go to 'The Crags'?"
+
+She lifted a tear-stained face and shot her answer at him scornfully.
+"'The Crags'! I had to talk to some one who was _human_. They would have
+bundled me back with cynical advice--besides, they're off somewhere."
+
+"You're in distress and God knows I sympathize with you. I shall
+certainly offer no cynical advice, but I mean to call your husband on
+the telephone and tell him that you're here."
+
+He turned toward the side table and lifted the desk instrument, but with
+the impetuous swiftness of a leopardess she came to her feet and sprang
+upon him. For an instant he was borne back by the unexpected impact of
+her body against his own and in that moment she seized the telephone
+from his hand and tore loose its wires from the wall. Then she hurled it
+with a crashing violence to the stone flagging of the hearth where it
+lay wrecked, and stood before him a palpitating and disordered spirit of
+fright and anger.
+
+He had sought in that brief collision to restrain her, but she had
+wrenched herself free so violently that she had torn the strap which
+held her gown over one shoulder. Then as she reeled back, with a wildly
+ungoverned gesture she ran her fingers through her hair until it fell in
+tangled waves about her shoulders. It was perhaps a full minute before
+she could speak and while she stood recovering her breath, Stuart
+Farquaharson looked helplessly down at the instrument which she had
+succeeded in rendering useless.
+
+With blazing eyes and quivering nostrils, the woman rushed headlong into
+explanation, accusation and pleading.
+
+"If you telephoned that I was here he'd try to kill me. I tell you I'm
+done with him! I hate him--hate him; don't you understand? He's been
+drinking again and he's a beast. That's why I came ... that's why I had
+to come.... I came to you because I thought you'd understand ... because
+I thought ... you ... cared for me."
+
+"I care enough for you to try to prevent your ruining your life by a
+single piece of lunacy," he told her as he sought to steady her with the
+directness of his gaze. "You don't have to go on with Holbury if you
+choose to leave him, but this is the one place of all others for you to
+avoid." He cast a hasty glance about him and then, hurrying to the front
+of the room, closed the door and drew the blinds. For a half hour he
+argued with forced calmness, but the ears to which he spoke were deaf to
+everything save the wild instinct of escape.
+
+"Here you are in a house that sits in full view from the road: doors and
+windows open: you with your hair streaming and your gown disordered;
+hairpins strewn about: the telephone dead. Now, I've got to walk to
+your house and tell him."
+
+Under the level insistence of his eyes she had fallen back a pace and
+stood holding the unsupported gown over her bosom, but when he finished
+with that final announcement, which seemed to her a threat, she sprang
+forward again and threw her arms about him, not in an embrace but with
+the instinct of a single idea: to prevent his carrying out his announced
+intention.
+
+Stuart attempted gently to disengage himself, but the soft arms clung
+and the figure was convulsed with its agitation. "No, no!" she kept
+repeating. "You sha'n't go. You sha'n't leave me here alone.... I
+couldn't stand it."
+
+"You walked two miles to get here and that took you about forty-five
+minutes," he reminded her. "You've been here a half hour. Do you fancy
+your husband's jealousy won't tell him where you went?" But the idea
+terrified her into such renewed hysteria that he broke off and stood
+silent.
+
+The gathering clouds had broken now into a wild spring storm and the
+rain was drumming like canister on the roof of Stuart's cottage, so they
+did not hear the purr of a motor which stopped outside. They were
+without warning when the door suddenly burst open, and across the bare
+shoulder of the woman, who still hung sobbing to him, Stuart saw the
+bloated and apoplectic face of Larry Holbury and at his back the
+frightened countenance of two servants.
+
+The husband came unsteadily several steps into the room, and lifted a
+hand which shook as he pointed to the tableau. He addressed his
+retainers in a voice which trembled with drink and rage, but even in its
+thickness it was icy by virtue of a fury that had passed through all
+period of bluster.
+
+"I want you to look well at that," he said. "Mark every detail in your
+memories, both of you. There they are--in each other's arms. Notice her
+condition well, because, by God--"
+
+Marian's scream interrupted his sentence, and the scream itself died
+away in a quaver, as she faded into insensibility, and Farquaharson
+lifted her clear of the floor and carried her to the lounge.
+
+After that he turned to face Holbury and addressed him with a quietness
+which the glitter in his eye contradicted. "This is a pity, Holbury. It
+seems that you frightened her with some brutality. She lost her head and
+came here. I was trying to persuade her to go back."
+
+"Yes," Holbury's laugh rang with the uncontrolled quality of a maniac's.
+"Yes, I know. You tore the clothes off of her trying to persuade her to
+come back to me! Well, you needn't trouble about sending her back
+now--the door's locked. She's yours. Do what you like with her. Of
+course I ought to kill you, but I won't. I brought these men to
+establish beyond doubt the identity of the co-respondent. It's a gentle
+riddance--a crooked wife and a crooked paramour."
+
+One of the men advanced into the room and ostentatiously gathered in a
+couple of hairpins and a bit of torn lace, while Farquaharson crossed
+and stood face to face with the irate husband.
+
+"Do you mean that you believe that?" The question came with a deadly
+softness.
+
+"I don't have to believe. I have seen."
+
+"Then," Stuart's words ripped themselves out like the tearing of cloth,
+"send your damned jackals outside, unless you want them to see their
+master treated as such a cur deserves."
+
+A moment later the two servants were assisting Holbury to his motor, one
+of them nursing a closed and blackened eye on his own account as a badge
+of over-impetuous loyalty; and most of that night, while Marian Holbury
+lay groaning on the couch, Stuart Farquaharson sat before his empty
+hearth with eyes which did not close.
+
+The Holbury divorce suit, after filling advance columns of spicy print,
+was awarded with a sealed record and Farquaharson was given no
+opportunity to tell his story to the public. He saw nothing more of
+Marian and was widely accused of having compromised and then abandoned
+her. So Stuart closed the house on the Hudson, as he had closed the
+house in Virginia, and with a very bitter spirit went to Europe.
+
+It was some time before this, perhaps several months, that Eben Tollman,
+the indispensable friend--serving hitherto without reward or the seeking
+of reward--ventured to aspire openly to more personal recognition. He
+had been building slowly, and if perseverance is a merit, he deserved
+success. Perhaps Conscience had changed. There had been many things to
+change her. She had lived long without a break in an atmosphere which
+she had dreaded and her father had not grown sunnier. A life of dogma
+had acidulated into so impossible a fanaticism that in contrast Tollman
+seemed to assume something like breadth of gauge.
+
+The heart attacks which had been painted as such sure death had been a
+greater threat to the girl than to the man whose heart was physically
+involved. There had been two of them and both had been survived. William
+Williams was a man who was always dying, but who never died. Yet these
+seizures served their purpose since they kept the daughter freshly
+reminded that a sword of Damocles hung over her--and that her father
+must not be crossed. It became a thought with which she lived, with
+which she slept, until it carried her to more and more absurd lengths of
+self-effacement and ate out the heart of her independence. Of Eben
+Tollman she no longer thought as a man old enough to be her father and
+as impersonal as the Sphinx.
+
+If he lacked the fire and buoyancy which had made association with
+Stuart Farquaharson a thing of light and color and sparkle, so did her
+whole life lack that fire in these gray days. So did she herself lack
+it, she told herself wistfully. At all events he came nearer being
+_fides Achates_ than any one else. Stuart was a memory and she was
+trying very hard to make him even less than that--only the gnawing ache
+in her heart wouldn't let her.
+
+Yet when Tollman shifted her abstract acceptance of what he meant to her
+to a question of a concrete application, she felt the sudden sinking of
+despair.
+
+All afternoon her father had been petulant and reminiscent. He had
+seemed perversely bent on committing a righteous suicide by forcing her
+to make him angry. He had cast into damnation all the "fads" and "isms"
+of an ungodly present and, since he judged the time had come to point a
+moral, he had buried Stuart Farquaharson at the bottom of the heap.
+
+Even now Conscience winced under these tirades. The truth was that she
+was heart-broken; that the image of Stuart, despite his feet of clay,
+was still shrined in her life. But she was fighting that and she did not
+know that the fight was hopeless.
+
+So to-night, as she sat with a sewing basket in her lap and Tollman sat
+across from her in the chair he had so often occupied of late, the
+surprise came.
+
+"Conscience," he said, and something in the tone of his voice caused her
+to look suddenly up, "I've tried to be your friend because I've known
+that it was only that way I could be anything."
+
+Suddenly his voice leaped with a fierceness of which she had never
+thought it capable. To her he had always been sort of extinct volcano,
+and now he broke into eruption. "Must it always be only that? Is there
+no hope for me?"
+
+The piece of sewing in her hand dropped suddenly to her lap with the
+needle thrust half through. She sat as if in tableau--a picture of
+arrested motion.
+
+She should have foreseen that the comfortable and platonic relation
+could not last--but she had not foreseen it. It came with a shock and in
+the wake of the shock came crowding pictures of all the rest of life,
+painted in these dun tints of New England lethargy from which she had
+prayed to be delivered. Then slowly and welling with disquiet, her eyes
+rose to his and she found them full of suspense.
+
+"I suppose," she answered in a bewildered tone, "I ought to have known.
+But it's been so satisfying just as it was--that I didn't pause--to
+analyze."
+
+"Couldn't it still be satisfying, dear?" He took an eager step forward.
+"Am I too much of a fossil?" He paused and then added with a note of
+hurt. "I have felt young, since I've been in love with you."
+
+The middle-aged lover stood bending forward, his face impatiently eager
+and his attitude as stiffly alert as that of a bird dog when the quail
+scent strikes into its nostrils.
+
+"I've accepted all you had to give," she said with the manner of one in
+the confessional, "and I never stopped to think that you might want
+something more than I was giving." Still he waited and she hurriedly
+talked on. "I must be honest with you. I owe you many debts, but that
+comes first of all. I've tried to forget--tried with every particle of
+resolution in me--but I can't. I still love him. I think I'll always
+love him."
+
+Tollman bowed. He made no impassioned protest and offered no reminder
+that the man who still held her affection had proven himself an
+apostate, but he said quietly. "I had hoped the scar was healed,
+Conscience, for your own sake as well as mine. So long as I knew it hurt
+you, I didn't speak."
+
+For the first time in months tears started to her eyes and she felt
+that she was wounding one who had practiced great self-sacrifice. He
+spoke no more of his hopes until some time after the news came of
+Stuart's participation in scandal.
+
+At first Conscience instinctively refused that news credence, but in
+many subtle and convincing ways corroboration drifted in and her father,
+with his prosecutor's spirit, pieced the fragments together into an
+unbroken pattern. Until this moment there had lurked in Conscience's
+heart a faint ghost of hope that somehow the breach would be healed,
+that Stuart would return. Now even the ghost was dead. She was sick,
+unspeakably sick: with the heart-nausea of broken hope and broken faith.
+
+Much of what she heard might be untrue, but it seemed established beyond
+doubt that from her and from his early ideals--like the oath of Arthur's
+knights--he had gone to careless living. He had played lightly with a
+woman's honor and his own, and had not come out of the matter unsoiled.
+Now nothing mattered much and if Tollman claimed the reward of his
+faithfulness and her father would died happier for it why should she
+refuse to consider them?
+
+In these days the old man's urgency of Tollman's suit was rarely
+silenced, but one afternoon he pitched it to a new key, and the girl's
+habitual expression of weariness gave way to one of startled amazement.
+
+"Of one phase of the matter," he said, "I have never spoken. I refrained
+because Eben was unwilling that you should know, but justice is
+justice--you should honor your benefactor."
+
+"Honor my benefactor? I don't understand."
+
+The old man shook his lion-like head and, out of the parchment of his
+bony face, his eyes burned grimly.
+
+"This house--this farm--all of it--we have only by the sufferance of
+Eben's generosity, and yet I've heard men call him close."
+
+Conscience thought that she had lost the possibility of being stunned,
+but now she sat speechless as her father continued.
+
+"I never was a competent business man and I put affairs in Eben's hands
+too late. He concealed from me how dire my straits were--and our income
+continued--but it was coming out of his resources--not mine. If Tollman
+had chosen to demand payment, we would have been wiped out."
+
+"How long have you known this?"
+
+"Since shortly after my affliction came upon me."
+
+Conscience moved over and stood by the window. She pressed her temples
+with her finger tips and spoke in a dead quiet. "You have known--all
+that time--and you never told me. You have urged his suit and you never
+let me guess that my suitor had already--bought me and paid for me."
+
+With a low and bitter laugh--or the fragment of a laugh, she turned and
+left the room.
+
+After weeks of patient silence, Tollman asked once more, "Conscience, is
+there still no hope for me?" To his surprise she met his questioning
+gaze very directly and answered,
+
+"That depends on your terms."
+
+"I make no terms," he hastened to declare. "I only petition."
+
+"If you ask a wife who can be a real wife to you--who can give you all
+her love and life--then the answer must still be no," she went on
+steadily with something like a doggedness of resignation. "I can't lie
+to you. I have only a broken heart. Beyond friendship and gratitude, I
+have nothing to offer you. I can't even promise that I will ever stop
+loving--him. But--" her words came with the flatness of unending
+soul-fag--"I suppose I can give you the lesser things; fidelity,
+respect; all the petty allegiance that can go on without fire or
+spirit."
+
+"I will take what you can give me," he declared, and at the sudden ring
+of autumnal ardor in his voice and the avid light in his eyes, she found
+herself shivering with fastidious distaste. She did not read the eyes
+with full understanding, yet instinctively she shrank, for they held the
+animal craving of a long-suppressed desire--the physical love of a man
+past his youth which can satisfy itself with mere possession. "I will
+take what you can give me, and I shall win your love in the end. I have
+no fear; no doubts. I lack the lighter charms of a youthful cavalier,
+but I believe I have still the strength and virility of a man." He
+swelled a little with the strutting spirit of the mating male. "You will
+learn that my heart is still the heart of a boy where you are conceded
+and that our life won't be a shadowed thing."
+
+"I must have time to think," she said faintly. "I don't--don't know
+yet."
+
+Driven by wanderlust and an unappeasable discontent, Stuart Farquaharson
+had been in many remote places. Around those towns which were Meccas for
+tourists he made wide detours. His family had jealously kept its honor
+untarnished heretofore and though he bore himself with a stiffer outward
+pride than ever, he inwardly felt that fingers of scandal were pointing
+him out, through no misdeed of his own. Now he was back in Cairo from
+the Sudan and the upper Nile, almost as brown and hard of tissue as the
+Bedouins with whose caravans he had traveled and for the first time in
+many weeks he could regain touch with his mail. That was a matter of
+minor importance, but his novel had come from the press on the day he
+sailed out of New York harbor and perhaps there awaited him at
+Shepheard's some report from his publisher. That gentleman had predicted
+success with an abundant optimism. Stuart himself had been sceptical.
+Now he would know.
+
+He sent his luggage ahead and drifted on foot with the tide. What a
+place this would be, he reflected, to idle time away with the
+companionship of love. His eyes narrowed painfully with a memory of how
+Conscience and he had once talked of spending a honeymoon in Egypt. That
+seemed as long ago as the age of Egypt itself and yet not long enough to
+have lost its sting. Grunting and lurching along the asphalt, with bells
+tinkling from their trappings, went a row of camels and camel-riders.
+They threaded their unhurried way on cushioned hoofs through a traffic
+of purring roadsters and limousines. Drawn by undersized stallions, an
+official carriage clattered by. Its fez-crowned occupant gazed
+superciliously out as the gaudily uniformed members of his _kavasse_ ran
+alongside yelling to the crowds to make way for the Pasha! Fakirs led
+their baboons, magicians carried cobras in wicker trays, and peddlers
+hawked their scarabs and souvenirs. Against the speckless overhead blue,
+rose the graceful domes and minarets of mosques and the fringed tops of
+palms.
+
+Farquaharson lightly crossed the terrace at Shepheard's Hotel and
+traversed the length of the hall to the office at its back where mail is
+distributed. For him there was a great budget and he carried it out to
+one of the tables on the awninged terrace which overlooks the street.
+
+Yes, here was the publisher's note. He tore the envelope. "You have
+become famous," began his enthusiastic sponsor. "The thing has been a
+knockout--the presses are groaning."
+
+He read that letter and turned to others. A dramatist wished to convert
+his book into a play ... several magazines wanted to know when his next
+story would be complete ... two or three clipping bureaus wished to
+supply him with the comments of the press ... many of the missives bore
+the marks of much forwarding. Some had followed him half way around the
+world. Then at the bottom of the pile he found a small but thickly
+filled envelope. As it peeped out at him from under others his heart
+leaped wildly and he seized it. It was addressed in the hand of
+Conscience Williams. She had written to him! Why should she write except
+to tell him he might come back? Cairo was a wonderful place! The entire
+world was a wonderful place! A street fakir thrust a tray of scarabs up
+from the sidewalk and grinned. Farquaharson grinned back and tossed him
+_backsheesh_. Then he opened his missive. A young British army officer
+looked on idly from the next table, amused at the boyish enthusiasm of
+the American. As the American read the officer saw the delight die out
+of his eyes and the face turn by stages to the seeming of a mummy.
+
+Conscience had written a letter in which she suggested that, now at
+least, they might say farewell in all friendliness. She was going to
+marry Tollman, to whose great kindness she paid a generous tribute. The
+date was not set but it would be some time that winter.
+
+"I've had a great deal of time to think and little else to do, Stuart,"
+she wrote, and at this point the penmanship had suffered somewhat in its
+steadiness. "We have both had some troublesome times, but isn't there a
+great deal we can remember of each other with pleasure? Can't it be a
+memory which we need not avoid? I was bitterly rebellious and
+heart-broken when you ignored the note in which I asked you, as humbly
+as I could, to come back, but that is over now--"
+
+_A note which asked him to come back!_ The letter fell from
+Farquaharson's fingers. His hands themselves fell limp to the table. He
+sat stupefied--staring and licking his lips.
+
+The English officer rose and came over, dropping a kindly hand on his
+shoulder.
+
+"I beg pardon, sir," he said, "but are you ill? Can't I get a nip of
+brandy?"
+
+Stuart turned his head stupidly and looked up. Then slowly he pulled
+himself together, with a shamed realization that the eyes of a hundred
+pleasure-seekers had witnessed his collapse. He straightened and set his
+jaw. "No, thank you. I'm all right," he declared. "I've been in the
+desert, you see, and--" But the Englishman had nodded and gone back to
+his table.
+
+Ten minutes later, scornful of over-sea tolls, Farquaharson was filing a
+cablegram. The letter had said she would be married "some time in the
+winter." It was now past mid-winter. Would there be time? His hand
+trembled with his haste as if the saving of a few seconds could avail.
+
+
+     "Received no note from you. Wrote to you that night begging a
+     chance," he scribbled, as his head swam with the effort and frenzy
+     of his suspense. "Horrible mistake has occurred. Matter of life and
+     death and thousand times more than that that you take no step till
+     I see you. Am sailing by first boat. Wait."
+
+
+That afternoon he dashed across the gangplank of a P. and O. steamer at
+Alexandria just as the last whistle blew. While the propellers churned
+the Mediterranean waters into a restless wake at the stern, Stuart
+walked the decks like a man demented. Would there be time? His fingers
+itched for his watch, because his obsession was the flight of hours. But
+on the second day out a wireless message came, relaying from Cairo. The
+man did not dare open it on deck. He took it to his cabin and there with
+the slowness of deep fear, he unfolded the paper.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+Against the stupor of Stuart Farquaharson's brain, as he sat in the
+small stateroom of the P. and O. steamer, beat the fear of what he might
+read.
+
+Subconsciously his senses recorded small and actual things as the vessel
+lurched through a heavy sea: the monotonous rat-tat of the brass
+door-hook against the woodwork, and the alternating scraps of sky and
+water as the circle of his port hole rose and fell across the line of
+the horizon.
+
+He was thinking of the letter that had come to Cairo--and lain there so
+long unopened, but he was spared a knowledge of the suspense with which
+Conscience had awaited an answer.
+
+She had written it early in the fall and had mailed it endorsed "please
+forward" in the care of his New York publishers, so that it had played
+tag with him, never catching him, over the length of Europe and, after
+that, had zig-zagged along the cities of the Levant and the fringes of
+Africa.
+
+Meanwhile, the man to whom it was addressed was wandering from the upper
+Nile to Victoria Nyanza and beyond--where mail routes run out and end.
+Acknowledging in her thoughts, from the first frost on Cape Cod to the
+middle of winter, that temporizing only spelled weakness, Conscience had
+none the less temporized. She said to herself: "Nothing he wrote _now_
+would alter matters." Still with a somewhat leaky logic she added: "But
+I'll give him a month to answer before I fix the date." When the month
+had passed without result she granted herself other continuances, facing
+alike, with a gentle obduracy, the pleas of her elderly lover and the
+importunities of a father who threatened to murder himself with the
+self-inflicted tortures of impatience.
+
+At length she capitulated to the combined forces of entreaty, cajolery
+and insistence. The fight was lost.
+
+Through the preparations for that wedding she went without even the
+simulation of joy or glamour. At least she would be honest of attitude,
+but days which filled the house with wedding guests brought to her
+manner a transformation. Her decision was made and if she was to do the
+thing at all she meant to do it gallantly and with at least the outward
+seeming of full confidence. She meant to betray to these visitors no
+lurking misery of spirit; no note of struggle; no vestige of doubt. The
+eyes which burned apprehensive and terror-stricken, throughout the
+darkness of interminable nights, were none the less serene and regally
+assured by day. The groom, too, seemed rejuvenated by such a spirit as
+sometimes brings to autumn a summer quality more ardent than summer's
+own. At the end of his _fiancee's_ doubtings, he fatuously told himself,
+had come conviction. She knew at last how much stauncher a thing was his
+own dependable strength and ripened manhood than the frothy charm of a
+half-fledged gallant who had crumpled under the test.
+
+Among the guests who for several days filled both the manse and
+Tollman's house, were two who were not entirely beguiled by Conscience's
+gracious and buoyant demeanor. One pair of these observant eyes was
+violet blue and full of starry freshness. Intimate letters from
+Conscience, in the old days, had invested Stuart Farquaharson with a
+romantic guise for their possessor and Eben Tollman scarcely measured up
+to that standard.
+
+The other pair of eyes was neither young nor feminine, but elderly and
+penetrating. Though Doctor Ebbett's temples were whitely frosted, he and
+Eben Tollman had been classmates at Harvard. Now he was to be best man
+at his friend's belated marriage. The work in which he had made his name
+distinguished had to do with the human brain--its vagaries as well as
+its normalities--and his thought was enough in advance of the general to
+be frequently misunderstood and sometimes a target for lay ridicule.
+
+On the evening after his arrival he sat in Eben Tollman's study with two
+other men who were also classmates. Tollman himself was still at the
+manse, and his guests were beguiling themselves with cigars which he had
+furnished, and whiskey which he had not--and upon which he would have
+frowned.
+
+Over his glass Carton, the corporation lawyer, irrelevantly suggested:
+
+"Eben seems a boy again. It makes us chaps whose children are almost
+grown, feel relegated to an elder generation."
+
+"Miss Williams," observed Henry Standing, "has a pretty wit and a
+prettier face. I wanted to say to her: 'Now, my dear child, if I were
+twenty years younger--' and then I caught myself up short. I chanced to
+remember that Eben _isn't_ twenty years younger himself."
+
+Carton nodded thoughtfully. "I can't help feeling that a thing like that
+is always a bit chancy. Eben was a sober-sided kid in his cradle and the
+girl is all fire and bloom. Fortunately it doesn't seem to have occurred
+to her that there's any disparity." He paused, then demanded: "Ebbett,
+you're a psychologist. What do you think?"
+
+Dr. Ebbett took his cigar from his lips and studied it with
+deliberation. When he spoke his words were laconic.
+
+"I think it's as dangerous as hell."
+
+"But a young wife will rejuvenate him and keep him young, won't she?"
+
+"It's rarely been done before," retorted the doctor drily. "Moreover,
+it's not a question of making him young again. A man of our friend's
+type is born old."
+
+"Oh, come now," protested Carton. "What's the matter with his type?"
+
+Dr. Ebbett paused, listening to the blizzard's shrieking outside, then
+he replied evenly:
+
+"He's too intensely a New Englander. The somber and narrow man represses
+one-half of his being and straightway sets up a Mr. Hyde in ambush to
+make war on his Dr. Jekyl. Our lunatic asylums are full of patients
+whose repressions have driven them mad. The whole Puritan code is a
+religion of repression--and it's viciously dangerous."
+
+Dr. Ebbett paused and sent a cloud of cigar smoke outward. His voice
+abandoned the lecture-room professionalism into which it had fallen.
+
+"But, as you say, that is all academic. Perhaps the bride has youth and
+humor enough to leaven the whole lump."
+
+Much less abstruse were the thoughts of Eleanor Kent: she of the violet
+eyes, as she listened to Mary Barrascale's eulogy of Eben Tollman on the
+day before the wedding. Eleanor could not forget moments which had
+seemingly escaped Mary's observation: moments when Conscience, believing
+herself unnoticed, allowed a look of fright to come to her eyes and a
+line to circle her lips.
+
+"When you told me in your letter that he was so much older than you,"
+declared Mary, her enthusiasm bubbling as the three engaged themselves
+over the last details of packing, "I simply couldn't bear it,--but he
+isn't old at all. He's simply charming, and he has _such_ a rare
+distinction of manner. I feel as if I were talking to a Prime Minister
+whenever we have a chat."
+
+"Thank you, dear," said Conscience, quietly, and the happy serenity of
+her eyes seemed genuine--except to Eleanor.
+
+"Of course, at one time," Mary rushed on, "we all thought that you had
+decided to marry Mr. Farquaharson--and he sounded well worth while from
+what you told us. It only shows what an easy thing it is to make
+mistakes. How did you find out yourself, dear?"
+
+Eleanor Kent thought she saw Conscience wince and close her eyes for an
+instant as though in a paroxysm of pain, but her question came gravely:
+"How did I find out what?"
+
+"Why, that he was the sort of man that--well, that his mixing up in that
+Holbury scandal indicated."
+
+The girl who was to be married rose from the trunk over which she had
+been bending and averted her face, but her voice was evenly calm as she
+answered:
+
+"I fancy the reports we had of that were exaggerated."
+
+A sudden fire snapped in the violet eyes of Eleanor Kent and her cheeks
+burned under a rosy gust of anger.
+
+"Mary," she announced with spirit, "Mr. Farquaharson was a friend of
+Conscience's and I have no doubt he still is. I don't think either of us
+knows anything about him that gives us the right to criticize him. Have
+you read his book?"
+
+"Why, no. Of course, I didn't mean to say anything--"
+
+"Well, I advise you to read that book." Stuart's champion tossed her
+head with the positiveness of conviction. "It's not the kind of novel
+that a rake could write. It's straight and clean minded, and if what a
+man chooses to write, indicates what he thinks, he's that sort himself."
+
+At this defense from an unexpected quarter, a light of gratitude kindled
+in the face of the bride-to-be.
+
+When the day set for the wedding had worn to dusk, Conscience escaped
+from the guests and made her way slowly to her unlighted room. Her knees
+were weak and she told herself that this was the natural stage-fright of
+the altar--but she knew that it was more than that.
+
+As she reached for matches the sound of voices beyond the door arrested
+her, and the challenge of her own name held her attention.
+
+"She's _perfectly_ lovely," declared Mary Barrascale, whose speech ran
+to superlatives, "and she's _radiantly_ happy, too. To think that she's
+being married and we're still in college."
+
+Conscience straightened where she stood near the window. She raised her
+palms to her temples and stepped back unsteadily until she could lean
+against the wall. Before her eyes rose a vision of the college
+campus--another of the care-free dormitory, then the picture dissolved
+into another and she found herself trembling. Memory was playing tricks
+and very softly a voice seemed to whisper in her ear, as it had actually
+whispered long ago in response to these same regrets, "Does it hurt as
+much as that, dearest?"
+
+She became vaguely conscious of Eleanor's voice again, low pitched and
+tense.
+
+"I should think, Mary, you would see the truth. You chatter about how
+happy she is--and she's almost going mad before your eyes. It's
+ghastly--positively ghastly."
+
+"What in heaven's name do you mean?" Mary's question broke from her in
+amazement.
+
+"I mean that anyone who wasn't deliberately trying to be deceived ought
+to see what all this radiant happiness is worth. She's sick with doubt
+and misgiving. If you ask me I believe it's because she still loves
+Stuart Farquaharson--and besides I don't believe he was ever given a
+fair chance." The girl halted and then broke into silent tears. "She's
+letting them make a sacrifice of her--and I'm utterly ill with the
+thought of it."
+
+Conscience leaning weakly against the wall, let both hands drop
+nervelessly at her sides. "I don't believe ... he was ever given a fair
+chance." Her lips shaped the words she had just heard in a soundless
+echo.
+
+Was that true? she asked herself, accusingly, and her brain was too
+confused for a just answer. An avalanche of new doubts rushed down upon
+her, crushing her reason. She saw in this ceremony a horrible travesty
+from which she must escape at all costs.... But how? She had no longer
+the strength to repudiate boldly her settled decision. Her courage was
+at ebb and she was caught in the grip of unreasoning panic. She would
+abandon everything and everybody ... she would slip away ... she would
+be true to herself first and then try afresh to be true to others. In
+short she was for the time distracted.
+
+She slipped over noiselessly and closed her door. She selected a small
+traveling bag from the other pieces of luggage packed for her wedding
+trip.
+
+Then, overcome by sheer emotional exhaustion, she threw herself on her
+bed where she sobbed quietly in the flickering of the candles. It was so
+that the bridesmaids found her when they came in their capacity of tire
+maidens to remind her that she must soon begin dressing for the
+ceremony.
+
+At once Eleanor had her arms about her friend, while Mary stood by
+gasping and ineffectual.
+
+Slowly Conscience raised her face and looked miserably from one to the
+other. Her voice was dead and colorless.
+
+"I heard what you said, Eleanor," she declared. "It's all true.... I
+can't go through with it."
+
+"But it's too late now, dear!" began Mary Barrascale's horrified voice
+which Miss Kent silenced with a glance of contempt.
+
+"Thank God, it's _not_ too late--yet," she said calmly. "It's never too
+late while it's still _now_. But the bag, dear--what was that?"
+
+Conscience rose and stood unsteadily with a trace of panic lingering in
+her eyes. She spoke faintly.
+
+"I guess I was quite mad.... I had the impulse to--to run away."
+
+"You can't do that, you know." Eleanor Kent was one of those diminutive
+and very feminine persons, who in moments of crisis can none the less
+assume command with the quiet assurance of an admiral on his bridge.
+
+"You have still a perfectly good right to change your mind, but it
+mustn't be just on impulse. We're going to leave you now for thirty
+minutes. When the time is up I'll be back and if you want to begin
+dressing--all right." She paused a moment and then with a defiant
+stiffening of her slender figure she announced crisply. "And if you
+_don't_ want to, I'll go downstairs and tell them that you've decided
+not to be married."
+
+"What will they think of you?" Mary Barrascale had reached a condition
+from which her contributions to the talk emerged in appalled gasps.
+
+Eleanor wheeled on her. "They can think what they jolly well like," she
+announced with a fine abandon of recklessness.
+
+Feeling like watchers beside a jury-room door, the two bridesmaids kept
+vigil, harboring contrary hopes.
+
+Left alone in her room, the girl stood for a while gazing about her as
+if her wild eyes were seeking for some secret panel that might open in
+the walls and give her escape. She must think! There was little enough
+time at best to bring order out of this panic-ridden confusion of her
+thoughts. But her mind was like a stream in freshet. It could only race
+and swirl along one channel, and that was the spillway of memories.
+
+Stuart Farquaharson the boy; Stuart the man, coming to her at Chatham;
+Stuart standing self-governed as her father scourged him with abuse;
+Stuart the lover; all those semblances passed before her until her
+world seemed peopled with them, and her old love grew clamorous in
+resurrection--and insurrection.
+
+In a little while she would be--unless she halted here--holding up her
+hand for Eben's ring, and at the thought a sickness swept over her. It
+was impossible. Instead of victory it was, after all, an abject and
+hideous surrender. She could not face it and all that must come after
+it.
+
+Then she heard a feeble rap on her door. At the threshold stood the
+wheelchair to which her father was confined like a slave chained to his
+seat in the galley. She caught a brief impression of a pair of eyes
+beyond him: the eyes of Eleanor Kent, full of the message of strength;
+eyes that seemed to be saying, "Stand firm. Be sure!" But nearer at hand
+was the face with skin drawn like parchment over its bony angles, deeply
+lined with suffering, and crowned with a great shock of snowy hair.
+
+The features, though, were only details of setting for the spirit of the
+keen eyes that had always burned with an eagle fierceness and an
+unyielding aggressiveness. Now they were different, and as the guests
+who had brought the chair and its occupant up the stairs and into the
+room withdrew in silent respect, the daughter's gaze was held by them
+with a mesmeric force.
+
+It was a face transfigured; a face in which the hardness of fight had
+died into the serenity of peace.
+
+Angles and wrinkles had become only lines of emphasis for this new
+tranquillity of the eyes; eyes that might have seen a vision of divine
+accolade and were at peace.
+
+"My daughter," he said, as soon as they were alone together, and his
+voice held the music of a benediction, "you are standing at the
+threshold of your life--and I am near the end of mine, but for the first
+time in many years, I am content and all my sorrows are paid for."
+
+"Father!" she exclaimed brokenly, but he went on.
+
+"I can now go, knowing that your life is secure on the rock of a stable
+marriage: all your dangers over. You are making of my poor life a
+success after all--and its end is a thing of peace. Eben is not as young
+as you, but his heart is great and his character sincere. In the shadow
+of his strength you will 'be secure and at peace beside still waters'
+and I can leave you without fear. In his blood is the steadfastness of
+Plymouth Rock--ay, and the Rock of Ages and the honor of our
+forefathers."
+
+The old man broke off, and raised his thin hand to his lean face with a
+gesture of appealing physical weakness. His enthusiasm had tired him and
+now a smile came to his lips of unaccustomed sweetness and tenderness.
+When he spoke again it was in a different tone.
+
+"But you know all that. My life has been one of stress, and you've not
+known a mother. What I came to tell you, my dear, is that I realize you
+may have missed that tenderness, and that whatever I may have seemed, I
+have always felt it."
+
+She was kneeling by his chair now with her hands gently stroking his
+white mane.
+
+"I know, Dad," she declared, and he reached up and took her fingers
+between his two palms.
+
+"You are making me happy, my daughter, unspeakably happy," he said. "And
+I, who have long been old, feel young again. The Bible tells us that
+marriage means leaving father and mother and cleaving only to the
+one--but thank God, Eben insists that I shall spend my remaining days
+with you both, and I am very happy."
+
+At last he was rolled out again, leaving behind him a memory of that
+exalted peace of countenance, and with a stifled groan the bride-to-be
+turned back to her room--her period of reflection almost consumed.
+
+"It would kill him!" she moaned. "It would be murder. And that look!
+That happiness! I guess that will have to be my compensation."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+When the bridesmaids entered it was a pale but firm face that greeted
+them. "It was panic," said Conscience slowly. "If I hadn't decided
+freely and fully and finally, I wouldn't have come this far. No one has
+forced me.... He, Eben, is worth a dozen of me.... Please believe me,
+never speak of this to anyone. It was sheer nerves and panic."
+
+Of the wedding itself, Conscience had always a memory as confused and
+unreal as that of a dream in which logical events go mad. Through many
+faces, which at the moment seemed to be floating against black and
+leering at her, she had the sense of moving without the action of her
+muscles.... She saw the lion-like mane of her father's head and the
+ecstasy of his eyes and a voice in her but not of her whispered: "Well,
+I hope you're satisfied."... She was conscious of the heavy scent of
+flowers which reminded her of a funeral.... One face stood out distinct
+and seemed to be boring into her, reading secrets which, she felt
+through a great dizziness, she ought not to let him fathom. It was the
+face of Dr. Ebbett.... Then she heard a voice which sounded to her
+unduly loud saying: "I do," and realized that it was her own. Later she
+was reliably informed that she had appeared splendidly collected and
+regally happy. This blurred focus of realization left her only when she
+found herself in her own room and heard Mary Barrascale's voice
+speaking.
+
+"I've never seen a bride who was lovelier, or a groom who was happier,"
+announced Mary exuberantly as she began lifting the white veil from the
+dark hair. Then she added in afterthought:
+
+"Oh, by the way, I guess this is a message of congratulation or
+something. One of the servants handed it to me a few minutes ago." She
+drew from the bosom of her gown an envelope bearing the imprint of a
+cable office.
+
+As Conscience took the missive a sudden intuition hinted the contents
+and the waxy white of her cheeks became a dead pallor. Very slowly she
+tore the envelope and read Stuart's message frantically penned in Cairo
+on the way to the Alexandria train.
+
+
+     "Received no note from you. Wrote to you that night begging a
+     chance. Horrible mistake has occurred. Matter of life and death and
+     thousand times more than that, that you take no step till I see
+     you. Am sailing by first boat.  Wait.  Stuart."
+
+
+The bride's heart stopped dead, then pounded madly. Stuart had received
+no note from her! Then he had not abandoned her. He still loved her and
+from that instant, whenever she told herself she did not love him, she
+must lie. Now she was Tollman's wife. It had almost come in time.
+Perhaps it _had_ come in time.
+
+Conscience turned to the bridesmaid with a queer and unnatural ring in
+her voice.
+
+"Mary," she asked, "just exactly when did this message arrive?"
+
+"It must have been immediately before the ceremony," the girl answered
+with a puckered brow, striving for exactness. "One of the servants
+handed it to me just as we started down the steps--of course, I couldn't
+give it to you then."
+
+"No," Conscience spoke as if her words came from a long distance and
+again she caught her lower lip between her teeth. She had to do that to
+keep from screaming or breaking into a bitter laugh. "No, of course, you
+couldn't give it to me then, and yet--" She broke off and Eleanor
+Kent's arms encircled her.
+
+"Conscience, dear," she demanded, "was it anything you should have
+known?"
+
+Conscience straightened slowly and shook her head. She even forced a
+stiff smile. "No," she lied with an effort of fulfilment for her first
+wifely duty. "It was just what Mary thought. A message about my
+marriage. I must write an answer."
+
+Farquaharson, sitting in his stateroom, unfolded his cablegram with the
+feeling of a defendant who sees the door of the jury-room swing open.
+
+With a stunned sense of despair he read:
+
+
+     "Don't hurry home to explain. It's too late for that. We will be
+     glad to see you when your trip ends.
+                          "CONSCIENCE TOLLMAN."
+
+
+Conscience Tollman! There was no longer a Conscience Williams then. He
+could only realize that some hideous mistake had made absolute a
+life-wrecking edict which--had he only known before--might, perhaps have
+been set aside. Now it was irrevocable and his own blindness and a
+stubbornness masquerading as pride were to blame.
+
+Now she was the wife of Eben Tollman, the bigot whose narrowness would
+cramp her life into a dreary torture. His imagination eddied in
+bewildered wretchedness about that whirlpool of thought, bringing
+transient impulses of madness and self-destruction.
+
+The thought of her as the wife of any man except himself must have meant
+to him a withering agony--but the idea of marital intimacy between
+Conscience and Eben Tollman, seemed an unthinkable desecration at which
+his flesh crawled. He vainly argued with himself that this was no sudden
+loss which had struck his life barren, but one to which he had already
+shaped his resignation. All that self-schooling had been swept away as
+fiercely as fragments of drift in the freshet of news that came with
+her letter. She had not exiled him but had asked him to return. She had
+spoken of a bitterness born of disappointment, which she had conquered:
+a bitterness for which he was responsible. Stark pictures shaped
+themselves across his brooding: pictures of the gray life to which his
+desertion had condemned her ... the gradually crushing tyranny of
+weakness ... the final surrender. It had been a surrender after years of
+siege, not because her courage had failed, but because she had waited in
+vain for the reinforcement of his loyalty. This was what he had done
+with his life and hers. For him there was an empty future: for her
+marriage with a coldly selfish sensualist who called his greed piety.
+Stuart Farquaharson sat in a chilled inertia of despair while the ship's
+bells recorded the passing of hours. From the decks above drifted little
+fragments of human talk and human laughter, but to him they were
+meaningless. Late in the evening he rose with an effort and went on deck
+where he sought out an unoccupied place. Phosphorescent gleams broke
+luminously in the wake. Clusters of great stars and the bright dust of
+star-spray sprinkled the sky, but whether he looked up or down Stuart
+Farquaharson could see only the light of victorious surrender in the
+eyes of the woman he loved, declaring her love for him. Now she was in
+the arms of another man--a man who had cunningly and patiently
+subordinated every lesser thing to his determination of possessing her.
+
+The voice of impulse pleaded with him fiercely to go back and tax that
+man, panoplied though he was in the sanction of society and the church,
+with having won foully. Tollman would never kindle the fire that burned
+deep and blue-flamed in his wife's nature. Her life with him would be
+thirst and hunger. But Stuart's fever turned to chill again as he
+remembered. He had forfeited his rights and stood foresworn. His vows
+had been brave and his performance craven. He acknowledged with
+self-scorn that his eagerness to break through Tollman's force of
+possession went back to a motive more selfish than exalted. He was
+driven by a personal craving to hold another man's wife in his arms. He
+was tempted by the sense of insurmountable power which he knew he held
+upon her thoughts, her love and her imagination.
+
+This must be the persuasiveness of some devil's advocate which whispered
+to him: "Go now! Despite all her stern allegiance to duty you can make
+her come into your arms. This marriage is all a hideous mistake. The
+bigots have trapped her with a bait of false martyrdom. Go while she is
+still sickened with the first bitterness of this profanation of youth in
+the custody of age." Then into this hot-blooded counsel crept the old,
+cold voice of logic, like a calm speaker quieting the incendiary passion
+of a mob.
+
+It was her right to make the test unhampered, since--through his own
+delinquency--it was too late to avoid the test.
+
+Two courses lay open to him now that the past was sealed. He might
+return to his own country, excusing himself on the shallow pretense that
+he meant only to "stand by" in case she needed rescue from the
+unendurable, or he might turn his face east and put between himself and
+temptation as much of space as lies between Cape Cod and the Ganges.
+
+The two alternatives were, roughly, those of passion and reason, yet
+each was led by so many tributary problems that it was not easy to
+disentangle the threads of their elements.
+
+Stuart Farquaharson's inheritance of fighting blood brought a red
+blindness which at times made the voice of reason seem contemptible and
+pallid with cowardice.
+
+Could Eben Tollman, whom he had always distrusted, have engineered the
+thing?
+
+Stuart, pacing the deck, halted at the thought and his fevered temples
+turned abruptly cold. His face set itself into malignant lines of
+vengeance. If such a thing could be proven--as there was a God in
+Heaven--Tollman was his to kill and he should die! He stood for a while,
+his chest heaving with the agitation of his resolve--and then he smiled
+grimly to himself. The calmer voice denounced him for a fool running
+amuck with passion. These were thoughts suited to a homicidal half-wit.
+
+How could Eben have achieved such an end? It was absurd to seek such a
+reason for the fatality of his own senseless course. He had himself to
+blame.
+
+Buffeted between the two influences, fighting a desperate duel with
+himself, Farquaharson paced the deck all night.
+
+At times his face burned and his eyes smoldered with a fever only half
+sane. At times cold sweat stood on his temples and he trembled, with
+every muscle lax and inert. As dawn began to lighten the eastern
+sky-line no man could say--and least of all himself--which counsel would
+in the end prevail.
+
+When the purser appeared on deck he gazed perplexedly at the haggard and
+distracted face which confronted him and the nervous pitch of the voice
+that put rapid questions. It was obvious that this solitary passenger
+had not been in his berth.
+
+"What is our first port of call, and when do we reach it?" demanded
+Farquaharson.
+
+"Brindisi. To-morrow."
+
+"From Brindisi what are the most immediate connections respectively--for
+the States and--for India."
+
+The officer replied with a directness that rose superior to personal
+curiosity.
+
+"For the States the quickest course is to leave this vessel at
+Gibraltar. I can't tell you precisely what connection you could make
+there--but I dare say the delay would be only the matter of a day or
+two."
+
+"And for the east?"
+
+"You mean back-tracking over the route we've come?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"We should anchor at Brindisi at two o'clock to-morrow afternoon. At
+two-thirty the _Mogul_ weighs anchor for Port Said ... and the Indian
+Ocean."
+
+Upon the forehead of the passenger who stood in the freshness of the
+morning air were beads of sweat. His face was pale and drawn with the
+stress of one called upon for swift decision and terrifically shaken by
+irresolution. Knowing only that this seemed a stricken man, the purser
+pitied him.
+
+Farquaharson let his eyes roam west and a momentary light of eagerness
+leaped in them. Then he wheeled eastward and the light paled into the
+deadness of despair. After a moment he straightened himself and braced
+his shoulders. At the end he spoke with a quiet decisiveness.
+
+"Be good enough to send a wireless to Brindisi for me. Please do what
+you can to have the _Mogul_ held in the event of our being delayed. It's
+a matter of the utmost importance."
+
+The purser nodded. "Very good, sir," was his ready reply. "It may be a
+near thing, but I fancy you'll make it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Stuart Farquaharson's acknowledgment of the cablegram was brief. For the
+same reason which had made him so urgent in entreating Conscience to
+take no step until he arrived, it seemed better now that he should
+remain absent. He added assurances that he had never received any letter
+from her and mentioned the one he had written at the time of their
+parting. He wished her every conceivable happiness. As for himself, he
+would be indefinitely in the Orient where life was colorful enough to be
+diverting.
+
+Of course, Conscience did not receive that letter until her return from
+the wedding trip, made brief because of her father's condition. The trip
+itself had seemed in many ways as unreal and distorted an experience as
+the ceremony had been. She had constantly reminded herself of how much
+she owed to the generous devotion of her husband, but no self-reproach
+could stir into life the more fiery sentiments of her heart. For his
+virtues she had the admiration of a daughter, a friend or a sister--but
+not the bright enthusiasm of a bride.
+
+Tollman himself, the observer would have said, had left nothing to ask.
+Seemingly his one wish was to treat his life as a slate upon which every
+unacceptable word and line should be sponged out and rewritten.
+
+The wife sat in the study of her husband's house a day or two after
+their return, when Tollman entered with a face full of apprehension. He
+had just suffered a fright which had made his heart miss a beat or two
+and had set his brain swirling with a fevered vision of all future
+happiness wrecked on a shoal of damnable folly. When he had presented
+his wife with the keys of his house he had not laid upon her any
+Bluebeard injunction that one door she must never open. Bluebeard lived
+in a more rudimentary age, and his needs included a secret chamber. The
+things which Eben Tollman earnestly desired to conceal from his wife's
+view could be adequately stored in the small safe of his study, since
+they were less cumbersome than the mortal remains of prior wives done to
+death. They were in fact only documents--but for him pregnant with
+peril--and what had stamped his face suddenly with terror was the
+realization that now for the only time in all his meticulously careful
+life--he had left them open to other eyes than his own.
+
+The old minister had been moved bag, baggage and creed over to
+Tollman's larger house, and in these days of reaccommodated regime, the
+road between the two places was one busy with errand-running. On one of
+these missions Eben had been driving with the slow sedateness which was
+his wont, when upon pleasant reflections, like shrapnel disturbing a
+picnic, burst the sense of danger, and the realization of his folly. It
+struck the self-congratulation from his face as abruptly as a broken
+circuit quenches a lighting system.
+
+He saw the table in his study as he had left it: the strongbox open--the
+safe, too, from which he had taken it, agape: papers lying in
+unprotected confusion. Among them were the two purloined letters which
+had made his marriage possible, and which if discovered would end it in
+the volcanic flames of his wife's wrath. There were also certain
+memoranda concerning the affairs of William Williams which might have
+raised an ugly implication of an estate wrecked at the hands of a
+trusted friend. His fear-inflamed imagination went a step further until
+it saw also his wife's figure halting in her task of tidying up the
+study and her eyes first widening in bewilderment, then blazing into an
+unspeakable fury--and scorn. How could he have done such a thing--he the
+martinet of business caution? It seemed to himself inconceivable and not
+to be accounted for merely by the explanation of a new husband's
+abstraction.
+
+He remembered now. These particular papers had formerly been kept in a
+separate box--safe from confusion with others. In sorting things out
+prior to his wedding trip he had made several changes of
+arrangement--and had until this moment forgotten that change.
+
+A sudden sweat broke out on his forehead and, snatching the whip from
+its stalk on the dashboard, he belabored his aged and infirm mare into
+a rickety effort at speed.
+
+Ira Forman, standing by the green doors of his barn, watched the rich
+man go by with this unaccustomed excitement. Ira's small resources had,
+on occasion, felt the weight of Eben's hand and as he gazed, his
+observation was made without friendliness. "In a manner of speakin' Eben
+'pears to be busier than the devil in a gale of wind. I wonder who he
+cal'lates to rob at the present time."
+
+Eben had occasion to be busy. He had often told himself that it was the
+part of prudence to burn those documents, yet some jackdaw quality of
+setting store by weird trinkets had always saved them from destruction.
+In a fashion they were trophies of triumph. With indefinable certainty
+he felt that some time--somehow--their possession would be of
+incalculable value. They constituted his birth certificate in this new
+life.
+
+While a frenzy of haste drove him, the realization of what he might find
+when he arrived made him wish that he dared postpone the issue, and the
+hand which fitted a key to his own front door trembled with trepidation.
+Once he had seen his wife's face he would know. Her anger would not burn
+slowly, in such a case, but in the conflagration of tinder laid to
+powder. Yet when he stole quietly to the study door and looked in,
+anxiety made his breath uneven. She was sitting there, within arm's
+length of the table--which, thank God, seemed to the casual glance, just
+as he had left it,--but in her fingers she held what appeared to be a
+letter, and as he watched, unobserved, she crumpled it and tossed it
+into the flames that cast bright flecks of color on her cheeks. Her face
+looked somewhat miserable and distraught--but that hardly comported with
+what should be expected had she learned the truth--unless possibly it
+was the exhaustion of wretchedness following the violence of a swiftly
+sweeping and cyclonic storm. On the whole, her attitude was reassuring,
+he thought, and in any event a bold course was best. So he entered the
+room, smiling.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+"You are looking very serious, dearest," he declared in a tone of
+assumed lightness, marred by a cumbersome quality which made it
+grotesque. As his voice broke on her reverie, his wife started, then sat
+gazing at him with a sphinx-like expression in her eyes, which he found
+it hard to endure. But he went boldly on: "Very serious indeed for a
+bride of a month's standing."
+
+Still she did not answer and under the steadiness of her silent gaze,
+his momentary reassurance wilted. He had foreseen the possibility of
+encountering a woman turned Valkyrie, but was unaccoutred to face this
+enigmatical calm.
+
+Standing here now with those cool eyes upon him, a new and cumulative
+apprehension tortured him. What if, with a swift determination, his wife
+had decided upon yet another course: that of simulating until her own
+chosen moment ignorance of what she knew: of drawing him more deeply
+into the snare before she confronted him with her discovery?
+
+But as he was weighing these possibilities, Conscience broke the
+silence. She even smiled in a mirthless fashion--and the man began to
+hope again.
+
+"I _was_ serious," she said. "I was reproaching myself."
+
+"Reproaching yourself--" the husband arched his brows--"for what?"
+
+She responded slowly as if weighing her words.
+
+"For many things. You have devoted years of your life to my father and
+myself--and asked nothing. After a long while I consented to marry
+you--though I couldn't give myself freely or without reserve."
+
+He bent over a little and spoke with a grave dignity.
+
+"You have given me everything," he said quietly, "except the admission
+that you love me. I told you before we were married that I had no fear
+and no misgiving on that point. I shall win your love, and meanwhile I
+can be patient."
+
+She let the implied boast of word and manner pass without debate and
+went on self-accusingly:
+
+"You've treated yourself very much like an old house being torn to
+pieces and done over to satisfy the whims and eccentricities of a new
+tenant."
+
+Tollman affected a manner meant to be debonair, but his thought was
+divided and uncontrollable impulse drew his glance shiftily to the
+table.
+
+"Well, suppose that I have tried to change myself, why shouldn't I? I
+love you. I'm eager to demonstrate that I'm not too old a dog to learn
+new tricks."
+
+She only shook her head, and, finding words more tolerable than silence,
+he proceeded:
+
+"I've discovered the fountain which Ponce de Leon missed. Henceforth I
+mean to go on growing younger."
+
+"And yet, Eben--" She was still looking at him with that directness
+which hinted at some thought foreign to her words--something as yet
+unmentioned which had left her unstrung. "It's not really a congenial
+role to you--this one of reshaping your life. At heart you hate it....
+This house proves that. So does this room--and its contents."
+
+The pause which separated the final words brought a sinking sensation at
+the pit of his stomach, and the discomfort of a fencer, dueling in the
+dark--a swordsman who recognizes that his cleverness is outmatched. His
+question came with a staccato abruptness.
+
+"How is that?"
+
+Conscience rose from her chair and for a moment stood letting her eyes
+travel about the walls, the furniture, the pictures. As they wandered,
+the husband's gaze followed them, and when they rested for an instant on
+the open strong box and the untidy papers, his alarm gained a brief
+mastery so that he stepped hurriedly forward, placing himself between
+her and the danger.
+
+"What were you saying?" he questioned nervously.
+
+"I was calling your attention to this room. Look at it. If you didn't,
+at heart, hate all change--all innovation, you couldn't have lived here
+this long without having altered it."
+
+"Altered it--why?"
+
+Conscience laughed. "Well, because it's all unspeakably depressing, for
+one thing. Outside of prisons, I doubt if there is anything drearier in
+the world than Landseer engravings in black frames and fantastically
+grained pine trying to be oak--unless it's hair-cloth sofas and
+portraits that have turned black."
+
+The lord of the manor spoke in a crestfallen manner, touched with
+perplexity. To what was all this a preamble?
+
+"That portrait is of an ancestor of mine," he said and his wife once
+more laughed, though this time his anxiety fancied there was irony in
+it. "All right," she said, "but wouldn't it have been quite as
+respectful and much more cheerful to send him on a visit to some painter
+who takes in dingy ancestors and does them over?"
+
+"I hadn't thought of it," he acknowledged, but the idea did not seem to
+delight him.
+
+"No." They were still standing, she facing the table and he facing her,
+making of his shoulders as wide a screen as possible.
+
+Now she moved and stood with the fingers of one hand resting lightly on
+the spot where lay a profusion of scattered sheets and envelopes. These
+were papers which, should she see and recognize them--granting that she
+had not already done so--would spell divorce or separation. Tollman drew
+a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. At the price of
+any concession he must get her out of that room for five minutes!
+
+"No," she went on. "It hadn't occurred to you, because you really
+dislike all change. You are a reactionary ... and I'm afraid I'm what
+you'd call a radical."
+
+"But, dear--" he spoke eagerly, ready to sacrifice without combat even
+his cherished reverence for the unchanging order of his fathers: even
+his aversion to the wasting of money--"I haven't told you before because
+I wanted to surprise you. I've let all that wait until you should be
+here to direct it. I wanted the renovated house, like the renovated man,
+to bear the stamp of your designing."
+
+The wife's eyes flashed with surprise and apparent pleasure. "Do you
+really mean it?" she exclaimed. "Do you really mean that I may do what I
+like with the place?"
+
+"Yes, yes--" he hastened to assure her. "You are in supreme command
+here. You have _carte blanche_."
+
+For a while she did not speak, but when she did her voice was very soft.
+"Eben," she said almost falteringly, "you give me everything--and I give
+you so little."
+
+A few minutes later, with vast relief, he watched her go through the
+door, then collapsed, a limp creature, into the chair by the table, his
+arms going out and sweeping the papers into a pile close to his body.
+His face, relaxed from the strain of dissembling, looked old and his jaw
+sagged.
+
+But before he had sufficiently recovered to investigate the documents he
+heard a rustle and looked around. Conscience was standing in the
+door--and he feared that even the slouch of his shoulders, seen from
+behind, might have been dangerously revealing. His wife's level tone as
+she spoke, no less than her words, intensified his conviction of defeat.
+
+"The note that I asked you to mail to Stuart Farquaharson--that night
+when he left--never reached him."
+
+So she had, after all, been playing with him as a cat plays with a
+mouse! She had left the room, only to return and confront him when he
+was unmanned. Something of cornered desperation came into his eyes, but
+with a final instinct of precaution he managed to assume a remnant of
+poise.
+
+"Never reached him? That seems hardly possible."
+
+She nodded. "Yes; doesn't it? I asked you at the time if you were
+certain you had mailed it. Do you remember?"
+
+"Perfectly. I said I had never forgotten to mail a letter."
+
+"Still, he never received it--and he wrote one to me--at the same time
+which I didn't get, either."
+
+Eben Tollman licked his lips. It seemed useless to carry the fight
+further. He stood with one foot over the brink and momentum at his back.
+Then when another moment would have ended his campaign of dissimulation
+his wife spoke again, and the man's brain reeled--but this time with an
+incredulous reversal of emotion. Some miracle had saved him!
+
+"I've just had a note from him. He's in India."
+
+Eben Tollman straightened up, and shook from his shoulders the weight of
+a decade or two.
+
+He had been dying the multiple deaths of the coward because he had let
+his imagination bolt and run away. The menace had passed, and
+straightway came a transformation. Once more he was full-panoplied in
+his assurance of self-righteousness. His voice was unctuously
+calculated, persuasively considerate.
+
+"That is a very extraordinary story, but you aren't letting things that
+happened so long ago trouble you, are you, my dear?"
+
+"A thing--which has caused bitterness between friends--even long ago,
+must trouble one."
+
+"Yes, I quite concur in that sentiment." He nodded understandingly. It
+was the same gentleness of manner to which he had owed so much in the
+past. "And yet--I don't like to speak critically of a man who was once a
+rival--yet unhappily there are other things to be remembered. His
+experiences in New York seemed to prove him wanting of much that your
+friendship must demand."
+
+Conscience did not answer, but she felt the justice of the criticism.
+
+When his wife had again left him alone he lost no time in bending over
+memoranda and running through papers with fingers that trembled.
+
+Then he straightened up again. All was as he had left it. The two
+intercepted letters were tied safely together and the dust which had
+gathered upon their wrapper was undisturbed.
+
+For some minutes he abandoned himself to the satisfaction of a man whose
+escape has been narrow--but complete. Eventually, however, his brows
+drew together with an annoyance which had strayed into his thoughts and
+poisoned them. He had handled the situation ineptly and expensively.
+
+He had given his young wife _carte blanche_ to do what she chose with
+his old house. She would waste money more lavishly even than he had
+wasted it when he had employed the services of the Searchlight
+Investigation Bureau. What, after all, were these cushion-footed sleuths
+but blackmailers of a legalized sort? He dismissed lightly the
+circumstance that such enterprises fatten upon the support of gentlemen
+who have work to do which more open methods fail to favor. This process
+of thought permitted his armor of self-righteousness to be worn in
+accord with thrift and the accomplishment of his wishes and to remain
+the while undented by self-accusation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first days of her wedding trip had been marked, for Conscience, by a
+numbed vagueness, which brought a kindly blunting of all her emotions.
+In that coma-like condition she could be outwardly normal while inwardly
+she was living a life of unrealities. She had fought that dangerous
+comfort as a surrender to phantasy until in a measure she had conquered
+it.
+
+She had fought steadfastly against all the insurgent influences in her
+heart aroused by the belated telegram, as one fights the influence of a
+drug. It was not Eben Tollman's fault--ran her logic--that this message
+from Egypt had drawn Stuart Farquaharson dangerously close to his wife's
+inmost thoughts at a time when, she had told herself, he must henceforth
+be kept in the far background.
+
+But there was no escaping the reality that the cablegram and the letter
+had brought definite results. They had lifted Stuart out of his place in
+the past and drawn him into the present. He had not been guilty of
+desertion, but was, like herself, the victim of a hideous and
+inexplicable mistake.
+
+It had hurt when Tollman referred to Farquaharson's unfavorable record,
+even with the consideration of tone he had employed. But Conscience told
+herself that her duty lay less in defense of the man whom she had once
+loved and who had fallen from his pedestal than in the square facing of
+present facts.
+
+Her husband had alluded to Stuart with neither rancor nor resentment but
+in kindliness and fair judgment. Now, at all events, she argued wildly,
+seeking to coerce her heart, it was to Eben and not to Stuart that she
+owed loyalty. So, while her husband sat in his study regretting that he
+had conceded too much to his fears of unmasking, she wrestled in her
+room with rebellious heart fires, kindled by the letter from the exile.
+
+She shivered, though the room was warm. Assuredly, she told herself, she
+must keep burning before her mental vision the memory that, however much
+Stuart had been the victim of a mistake at the time of their parting, he
+had since forfeited all claims upon her love.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Stuart Farquaharson, the writer of best sellers, reflected that Life
+does not divide its chapters by the measure of the calendar, nor does it
+observe that rule of literary craftsmanship which seeks to distribute
+the drama of a narrative into a structural unity of form with the
+ascending stages of climax.
+
+At this bruised cynicism an older man would have smiled, but to Stuart
+it was poignantly real.
+
+He had lost the prize which to him seemed the only guerdon worth
+striving for, while every other recognition had come easily--almost
+without effort.
+
+The success of his novel had been so extraordinary that Farquaharson
+fell to reviewing his literary experience with a somewhat impersonal
+amusement. He had not poured his soul into his work with a bitter sweat
+of midnight endeavor as the genius is said to do. He had wooed the muse
+about as reverently as a battered tramp might fondle an equally battered
+dog, seeking, without illusion, a substitute for better companionship.
+
+One afternoon he sat alone in a Yokohama tea-house, reading the latest
+collection of newspaper reviews which had come to his hand.
+
+"We have here a book," observed one commentator, "which irritates with a
+sense of undeveloped power while it delights with a too-facile charm. It
+would seem to come from a pen more gifted than sincere."
+
+As Stuart slipped the collection of clippings into his pocket a hand
+fell on his shoulder and he rose to encounter a ruddy-faced young man in
+the undress uniform of the United States Navy.
+
+"Why so solitary?" demanded the newcomer. "Surely a famous novelist
+needn't sit alone in the shadow of Fuji Yama. The place teems with
+charming Americans."
+
+Farquaharson's face lighted with genuine pleasure as he grasped the
+outstretched hand in a grip of cramping heartiness.
+
+"Jimmy Hancock!" he exclaimed. "Why, man, I haven't seen you since--" He
+paused, and Jimmy, seating himself, grinned back as he took up the
+unfinished sentence: "'Since the memory of man runneth not to the
+contrary--' I'll have Scotch and soda, thank you."
+
+Farquaharson laughed. This was the same breezy Jimmy and the two had met
+rarely since the first academy days. That was a time which carried them
+both back almost to Conscience's visit in the Valley of Virginia.
+
+A torrent of questions, many of them intrinsically inconsequential yet
+important to the exile, had to be put by the officer and answered by the
+author. Finally came one which Stuart had apprehended.
+
+"When did you see Conscience Williams last? An unspeakably ancient
+letter from home mentioned your spending a summer up there on Cape Cod?
+There were even rosy prophecies." Farquaharson winced a little.
+
+"She is married," he said evenly, though with an effort. "She quite
+recently married a gentleman by the name of Eben Tollman."
+
+"Oh, then I was misinformed. Give me her address if you know it and I'll
+send my overdue congratulations."
+
+Farquaharson complied with that obedience to social necessity which made
+him conceal the fact that, for him, this reunion with an old friend had
+been robbed of its savor and turned into a series of unhappy memories.
+
+"This evening you are coming aboard to dine with me," announced Hancock
+when he had finished his drink and risen, "and after dinner a handful of
+people will arrive for an informal dance on deck."
+
+But Farquaharson gave an excuse. He felt weary and shrank from those
+inevitable confidences which must ensue. This evening he was leaving for
+Tokyo and would reach Yokohama on his return only in time to make his
+steamer for Honolulu. Jimmy Hancock was full of regret. His own cruiser,
+he said, would sail to-morrow for Nagasaki.
+
+Stuart's return from Tokyo and Nikko put him in Yokohama just before his
+steamer's sailing time. So it happened that he went over the gang plank
+of the _Nippon Maru_ as the whistle was warning visitors ashore.
+
+Having no acquaintances among the figures that lined the deck rail
+behind a flutter of handkerchiefs, he went to the smoking-lounge where
+for two hours he busied himself with his author's routine of note books.
+
+It was mid-afternoon when he emerged among those fellow passengers who
+had long ago claimed their steamer chairs and dedicated themselves to
+the idleness of the voyage.
+
+Stuart began pacing the boat deck with the adequate companionship of his
+pipe. He was not lonely for the society of men and women. In his own
+mind he put a stress of emphasis on women. Two of them had touched his
+life closely enough to alter its currents. One, he had lost through his
+own folly and her inability to free herself from the sectionalism of an
+inherited code. The other had been foolish in the extreme and had drawn
+him into the whirlpool of her heedlessness.
+
+In ways as far apart as east and west, each had been fascinating and
+each had been beautiful.
+
+The orbit of his rounds carried him several times past a woman, who was
+standing unaccompanied at the rail astern. Her face and glance were
+turned outward where the propellers were churning up a lather of white
+spume and where little eddies of jade and lapis-lazuli raced among the
+bubbles.
+
+He felt, at first, no curiosity for the averted face, but finally the
+length of time she had been standing there without change of posture,
+the unusual slenderness and grace of the figure, and the fact that he
+had _not_ seen her features awakened a tepid interest.
+
+But when, for the seventh time, he rounded the white walls of the after
+cabin and she turned with a smile of seeming welcome on her lips,
+Farquaharson stopped dead. For just a surprised instant he forgot the
+requirements of courtesy and glanced about as if instinctively seeking
+escape. His jaw stiffened, then with a sense of chagrin for this
+gracelessness he stepped forward with a belated cordiality.
+
+But in the brief interval he saw the exquisitely fair coloring of the
+woman's cheeks flush pinker, and the lower lip catch between her teeth.
+
+Her eyes, which in the afternoon sun were golden amber, clouded with a
+swift shadow of pain which as swiftly vanished.
+
+"I was wondering, Stuart," said Marian Holbury slowly, "whether you
+meant to speak to me at all."
+
+"I didn't know you were on this side of the world," he responded with
+recovered equanimity.
+
+She leaned against the rail and, while the breeze whipped the sash of
+her sweater and her white skirt about her, studied him gravely until he
+said: "Meeting you here was such a coincidence that it astonished me ...
+don't you find it surprising, too?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No," she said, "I don't. You see I _did_ know that you were on this
+side of the globe. I even knew that you would be on board. Lieutenant
+Hancock told me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+Stuart Farquaharson's first impulse upon finding his surprise for the
+meeting unshared, was an astonishment at Marian herself. Unless some
+great urgency existed for an immediate return to the States he supposed
+that she would have avoided sailing with him.
+
+"The circumstance that the one man I knew in Yokohama should also be an
+acquaintance of yours only heightens the effect of the coincidence," he
+hazarded, and his companion smiled as though amused at some unimpaired
+element of humor as she naively responded: "Yes--except that in a
+foreign town we would be apt to meet the same people."
+
+However it had happened, thought Stuart, it was a deplorable accident:
+their being thrown together for ten days in the narrowed companionship
+of a sea-voyage. For her, even more than himself, it must bring back the
+painful notoriety of their last companionship.
+
+It had all been so bootless and uncalled for! Marian Holbury might have
+divorced her husband had she wished, and remained unstigmatized. Yet she
+had, by yielding to an ungoverned impulse, reversed their positions of
+justification. Now the news of their names on the same sailing lists
+would come to ears at home and set tongues wagging afresh. There had
+been enough of that.
+
+As she stood there regarding him quietly, with the thorough
+self-possession of her sex and her class, he reminded himself that there
+was no profit in a sulkiness of attitude.
+
+"What are your sentiments," he inquired, "regarding a cup of tea?" And
+she laughed frankly and easily as she responded:
+
+"They are of the friendliest." Together they turned and went toward the
+nearest white-jacketed deck steward.
+
+As he made a pretense of sipping his tea Farquaharson admitted to
+himself that the lady whom he was meeting after a long interval had lost
+nothing of her charm.
+
+The ten days of enforced companionship would at all events be relieved
+of tedium, but he was in a quandary as to what should be his attitude.
+Later in the seclusion of the smoking-room he shaped a tentative policy
+of such deferential courtesy as he would have tendered a new
+acquaintance. He fancied that she would appreciate a manner which
+neither bordered on intimacy nor presumed upon the past.
+
+But as the days went on a variance developed between the excellence of
+his plan in theory and in practical application. For one thing, Marian
+herself seemed less grateful in her acceptance of it than he had
+anticipated. He sometimes felt, from a subtle hint of her manner, that
+her confidence in her own adroitness and _savoir faire_ needed no such
+assistance from him.
+
+There were moments, too, between their casual conversations when a
+wistful sort of weariness brought a droop to her lips, as though she
+would have welcomed a less constrained companionship.
+
+Sometimes when off guard, he found himself slipping into the manner
+which seemed more natural, and then he wondered if his policy of
+aloofness might not savor of the priggish.
+
+Not until they were nearing Honolulu did they refer to the past and then
+it was Marian and not Stuart who broached the subject.
+
+"We were fortunate in being in Japan in cherry-blossom time," suggested
+Stuart in a matter of fact fashion, as they strolled on deck at sunset.
+"We saw it all at its best."
+
+"Cherry-blossom time in Japan--" she echoed musingly. Then suddenly she
+broke out with an almost impassioned bitterness, "Yes, I suppose we
+were--fortunate! We are both still in our twenties. I am rich and you
+are better than that--you are along the way of being famous. And yet it
+occurs to me that neither of us is precisely happy. We are both outcasts
+from contentment--just Bedouins in the world's desert, after all."
+
+His question came vaguely and uncomfortably, "What do you mean, Marian?"
+
+She laughed, banishing the gravity from her face.
+
+"Nothing--nothing at all, Stuart," she assured him. "It was just a
+woman's mood." But after a moment she went on in a voice of greater
+seriousness: "It seems as good a time as any to tell you that I've come
+to realize with a wretched guiltiness--how I pulled you into the mess I
+made of my own affairs. If there were any way of undoing it--"
+
+He interrupted her quickly, "Please don't brood over that, Marian. It's
+all ended now. You were too confused just then by your own foreground
+wretchedness to be able to gauge the perspectives."
+
+"One has a right," she declared with self-scorn, "to expect from an
+adult human being, a reasonable degree of intelligence. I didn't display
+it to any conspicuous extent."
+
+"You gave way to a moment of panic."
+
+"Yes--and you suffered for it. I didn't quite understand then that
+sealing the evidence in the divorce, while it was supposed to protect
+me, really left you no chance to clear yourself."
+
+"Naturally not," he smilingly rejoined. "You weren't a lawyer, you know.
+But it must pain you to discuss these things and I'm not asking any
+explanation. Why shouldn't we let them rest in peace?"
+
+Her face flushed a little and she seemed on the point of argument, but
+she only said: "Yes, I suppose that is better."
+
+The evening before the _Nippon Maru_ was due in the Hawaiian port there
+was no moon, but all the softly blazing stars of the tropics were
+kindled in the sky and the phosphor waters of the Pacific played in an
+exquisite echo of light. Marian Holbury, in her simplicity of white
+skirt and white blouse looked as young as a school girl and, Stuart
+thought, more beautiful than he had ever seen her. They sat together on
+the after-deck which, as it chanced, they held in monopoly and the woman
+said musingly:
+
+"To-morrow we part company, don't we?"
+
+"I'm afraid so," he answered. "My ticket reads to Honolulu."
+
+"I suppose I should thank you," she continued in the same pensiveness of
+manner. "I guess your unbroken reserve was meant for considerateness."
+
+"Under the circumstances," he replied, a shade piqued by her tone,
+"anything else might have been embarrassing--for you."
+
+With eyes traveling seaward she spoke again and there was a ghost of
+quiet irony in her voice.
+
+"That seems to be a thing a man's chivalry never leaves to a woman's own
+judgment; the determination of what she may find embarrassing."
+
+"At least a man doesn't want to force the dilemma on her." Possibly he
+did not succeed in saying it entirely without stiffness.
+
+"If I'd been afraid of your doing that," she reminded him, "I might have
+changed my sailing date."
+
+"I was just a little surprised that you didn't," he admitted.
+
+A strolling couple passed and Marian watched them turn out of sight
+before she spoke again.
+
+"As a matter of fact, I did change it. I left the friends with whom I'd
+been traveling and took this earlier steamer home." She caught the
+expression of surprise in his face, but before he could put it into
+words she heightened it to amazement with the calm announcement: "I did
+that because Lieutenant Hancock told me that you were sailing by it."
+
+"But I--I don't understand!"
+
+"No. You wouldn't."
+
+"I'm dense, I suppose," he acknowledged, "but I should have fancied the
+only result of that would be unpleasant gossip."
+
+"Yes, Stuart, you _are_ dense," she interrupted, and into her eyes
+leaped an insurgent flame of scorn. "Why should I care what gossips
+thought? Their verdict was rendered long since. I had a reason more
+important to myself than their opinions."
+
+"Will you tell me what it was? If my attitude was silly, Marian, at
+least it was sincere."
+
+"I was wondering whether I would tell you or not, Stuart. Most women
+would not; but I'm reported to be startlingly--perhaps shockingly
+candid--so perhaps I will."
+
+Formerly he had thought her clever with a play of wit which made for
+fascination, but he had believed her processes of thought transparent to
+his own scrutiny. Of late he had discovered in her something baffling
+and subtle. This was not the same Marian but a Marian of whom his old
+acquaintance had been merely the matrix as iron is the beginning of
+tempered steel. The woman whose eyes dwelt on him now with a sort of
+inscrutable indulgence was one who reversed their positions. It was as
+if she read him easily in these days, while in herself she retained
+depths which he had no means of fathoming. But two things he _could_
+read in her eyes: courage and utter honesty--and these were qualities
+which he esteemed.
+
+After a little she asked him with a direct reading of his thoughts which
+made him start uncomfortably, "You find me changed?"
+
+Stuart drew a long breath. It broke suddenly upon him that if this woman
+had begun life under other auspices she might have developed into
+something rather magnificent.
+
+"Not changed--" he answered promptly. "Transformed!"
+
+"Thank you," she said, holding her voice steady. "It was the realization
+of the change that made me try the experiment."
+
+"What experiment?" His bewilderment was growing.
+
+"If I'm going to tell you--and one can talk frankly of things that
+belong unmistakably to the past--I must lay the foundation."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Of course, you realize that everyone said I fled to you--because we had
+had an affair. Later when I was divorced and you saw nothing more of me,
+they laughed at me--they thought I had grabbed at the reflection and
+dropped my bone in the stream."
+
+"But, Marian! You understood--"
+
+She raised a hand. "Please let me finish in my own way. It's not too
+easy at best."
+
+"Forgive me."
+
+"To their eyes, my one chance of rehabilitating my life lay in marrying
+you. I mention this to forestall misunderstanding; because in what I've
+got to say next it might logically occur to you as a thing I'd
+contemplated myself."
+
+"Surely," he exclaimed, "you don't think me so mean of mind as that."
+
+With a somewhat rueful smile, she continued:
+
+"When things became unendurable at home and I fled to your cottage,
+what did you think of me?"
+
+His response was immediate: "That you were in a panic. It seemed to you
+a case of any port in a storm. I was geographically near and--"
+
+"You really thought that?" A queer note came into her voice and she
+added almost in a whisper as if echoing it to herself: "Just because you
+were geographically near!"
+
+"Why else?" he demanded. "Of course, in your indignation against that
+brute Holbury, you momentarily thought of me with contrasting emotion. I
+understood that, but I never exaggerated it into anything more
+important--or permanent."
+
+"No. You just thought me a frivolous little idiot, and the estimate was
+annoyingly correct. I knew that--and yet I hadn't quite realized how
+meanly you _did_ think of me--until now."
+
+"But, Marian--!"
+
+"If you thought," she went on, and in the starlight, he could not see
+how the color had left even her lips, "if you thought that--even in
+those circumstances--even driven by terror of my life--I would have fled
+to any other man in the world--" Abruptly she broke off.
+
+Stuart Farquaharson's forgotten pipe had died to ashes. Now it fell with
+a tiny crash to the deck. The man leaned forward toward her and his eyes
+mirrored an astonishment genuine and absolute.
+
+"Do you mean ... that you really fancied ... that you loved me?"
+
+She turned her face away until he could see only the roundness of her
+check's contour and the curling softness of the hair on her neck. Her
+voice carried a burden of lethargic weariness. "No, I didn't fancy it
+... I knew it ... I've known it ever since."
+
+As Stuart Farquaharson remained silent in the amazement of these
+declarations, Marian turned her face again upon him. This time she spoke
+with a fiery impetuosity:
+
+"I suppose I should be burning with shame at confessing that ... only
+somehow I've never been able to realize why people should blush so at
+the truth ... and, as I said a moment ago, since it's over, there's no
+reason why I shouldn't tell you, is there?"
+
+"So now--it is over?" He spoke very softly yet with a sense of relief.
+
+Marian's eyes held his own with their remarkably candid gaze, making no
+effort to mask their misery. Her finely shaped head carried itself high
+as if in disdain for all dissimulation, and once more she went on in a
+forced evenness:
+
+"Yes, now it's over, but I'm not through talking. Please don't interrupt
+me. I've said too much to let it rest there and I've got to say the rest
+in my own fashion." She paused, then went resolutely forward. "You had
+spoken to me of Miss Williams, but--you know you were always reticent
+about the things you felt deeply--I didn't know enough to thoroughly
+understand. In the last year I've done a lot of thinking.... The point
+from which I always started was obvious. If you had cared at all about
+me, you would have looked me up--when the divorce was ended.... But
+later I heard of her marriage--Miss Williams'.... Perhaps, I told
+myself, things were different with you now. I heard of you from time to
+time ... and never as of one who was very happy."
+
+She paused and Stuart laid a hand gently on hers, but she withdrew her
+own and began afresh:
+
+"I don't care for the word 'chastened,' but I knew that I'd learned some
+things. I knew that I wasn't that same woman any more. The irresponsible
+lightness had been pretty well cured ... and I wasn't very happy,
+either.
+
+"Marian," he declared feelingly, "you don't have to defend yourself to
+me. The man who won your love could feel nothing but pride."
+
+"Thank you," she said briefly. "I'm not through yet.... I thought that
+if you met the _new_ me ... you might revise your _old_ opinion.... I
+thought at least that I could study you and that afterward there would
+be no uncertainty.... You spoke of the coincidence of our meeting. There
+was no coincidence about it. I was traveling more or less at random, but
+I knew you must come through Yokohama and I waylaid you. When Jimmy
+Hancock told me at the chance that you were taking this boat, I took it,
+too.... It meant ten days in which to study you--but I needed only ten
+seconds. I saw your face when we met on deck ... and that told me all
+there was to tell."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+She came to a stop and sat looking out at the phosphorescent sea and the
+star-filled skies. Farquaharson leaned forward, his words coming
+brokenly and in a heavy misery of embarrassment.
+
+"Marian, I _have_ recognized the new you: I've seen the splendid
+development and fulfilment of you. It's only that ... that--" He broke
+off and began over impetuously. "I happened to fall in love
+with--Conscience before I met you. Of course, that's quite hopeless now
+... but it seems permanent." He was struggling with a diffidence which,
+in such circumstances, a man must have been very callous to have
+escaped. On the lips of his characters, in fiction, words flowed with an
+ease of dialogue and broke often into epigram. Now they eluded him,
+leaving him in confusion. The situation was one for which he found
+himself unprepared. "I doubt if I shall ever feel otherwise--about her,"
+he went on somewhat flounderingly. "You and she are women of almost
+opposite types in a way and yet--yet I've been realizing while you
+talked, that in many respects you are alike."
+
+Marian's lips twisted themselves into a smile, stiff with tension of
+spirit, but a whimsical irony tinged her voice.
+
+
+     "The Colonel's lady and Rose O'Grady
+     Are sisters under their skins,
+
+
+I suppose we have that kinship, Stuart."
+
+The man's hands closed into a tight grip on the arms of his steamer
+chair. In his eyes were regret and sincerity, but his words came with
+the firmness of resolve:
+
+"I have, as you say, been dense," he declared, speaking now in even
+sentences that had ceased to break disjointedly. "I haven't even done
+you the justice of recognizing your more genuine self. You spoke of
+drawing me into the web of your troubles--but you didn't say the thing
+which you might have mentioned. I was also an adult of supposedly human
+intelligence. I should have foreseen the dangers of even so innocent an
+affair as was ours. I should have protected you."
+
+"Against myself?" she inquired.
+
+"Against ourselves," he responded quickly. "I should, for instance, have
+told you that I was so much in love with one woman, that to me all
+others must remain--just others. Now you have done me the honor to say
+you love me."
+
+"Please, Stuart!" Marian's face was momentarily drawn in a paroxysm of
+pain. "Please don't make me pretty speeches. It isn't necessary--and it
+doesn't help."
+
+"I'm not making pretty speeches," he declared. "My love is a hopeless
+one, but I can't deny its force without lying. I've helped you spoil
+your life and if I can help you mend it--" He broke off there and then
+abruptly he said: "Marian, will you marry me?"
+
+She carried her hands to her face and covered her eyes. For a moment she
+sat in a stunned attitude and her words came faintly:
+
+"I understand your motive, dear. It's gallant--but it wouldn't do."
+
+"Why?" he demanded and again her head came up with the bearing of pride.
+
+"I've already told you that it's not rehabilitation in the eyes of the
+world I seek. For you it would be sacrifice--and for me a failure. If
+you asked me because you loved me, and I believed I could make you happy
+I think you know what my answer would be. But to marry you without your
+loving me--well, that would be--" She paused and then finished: "It
+would be sheer Hell."
+
+Stuart leaned over and picked up the pipe. His face was rigid and
+self-accusing, and the woman laid her hand on his arm.
+
+"You have ridden with me in the hunting field, Stuart," she irrelevantly
+reminded him. "I hope you'll testify that I can take my croppers when
+they come. Please don't think I'm whimpering."
+
+"One could hardly think that," he declared.
+
+A sudden thought brought a fresh anxiety to her eyes, as she vehemently
+demanded: "Was she--was Miss Williams, influenced by what people said
+about you and me?"
+
+"I suppose," he said, "the only version she had was the public one, and
+I fancy there were those about her who made use of it, but I don't
+believe it affected her decision."
+
+Marian's voice was very low, almost tender now. "It would mean a good
+deal to you, wouldn't it, to have her know the truth?"
+
+His hand gripped her own feelingly for a moment and he nodded his head
+but, in words, he said only: "Yes--it would."
+
+"I wish I knew her. I wish I could set you straight with her," she told
+him and after that she rose. "At all events it was worth the
+experiment," she commented. "Well, '_la comedia e finita_.' I think now
+I'll go to bed."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Conscience dealt relentlessly with herself in those storms of argument
+which arose in her mind and had to be fought out; storms involving the
+readjustment of her life to the partnership of marriage.
+
+Yet she must not, if she placed value upon success, fall into the class
+of parasite wives who suffer their own independence of thought to
+languish.
+
+One day she came into the study while Eben was engaged in those matters
+of business which brought the most unaffected pleasure to his eyes and
+his attitude was that of such absorption that she did not at once
+announce her presence. When he turned at length and saw her, he came
+instantly to his feet, but despite the smile of his welcome, Conscience
+caught the repressed reluctance with which he shoved back his papers and
+pencil.
+
+"Eben," she hazarded, "why can't I make myself useful? Can't you
+delegate some part of your work to me?"
+
+Instead of gratification his expression took on the cast of
+apprehension, though he laughed.
+
+"What! Do you want to turn business woman, my dear?" he inquired. "Are
+you ambitious to come into the firm and have your name on the door?"
+
+"I want to have a hand on the oar because I think you have a sort of
+financial genius and I'd like to share a thing which must come that
+close to your inner life," she explained, and under the pleasurable
+spell of her appreciation Tollman found himself expanding with
+responsive pride. To certain forms of flattery he was as susceptible as
+a schoolgirl.
+
+"If I have ability," he made modest disavowal, "it's of a slight
+caliber."
+
+"I don't know anything about your financial rating," went on his wife.
+"I've never asked any questions about that and I don't care so far as
+the mere figures go. But I believe you have a gift of business
+generalship which, in fields of wider opportunity, might have made you a
+millionaire."
+
+Tollman broke unexpectedly into a peal of laughter. He complacently
+accepted the tribute to his powers, but would have preferred it laid on
+with greater lavishness. Quite casually he remarked:
+
+"When I said slight caliber, I spoke comparatively. If the occasion
+arose, I fancy I could sign a check now--not only for a million but for
+several."
+
+Conscience's dark eyes must have mirrored their amazement: an amazement
+which was entirely natural, and which concerned not only the revelation
+of wealth in itself, but more complex things as well.
+
+The disturbing thought intruded itself that in a land of such sparse
+opportunities these returns could be wrung out only by a policy so
+tight-fisted as to be merciless. It must mean draining resources to
+their dregs. That was an unpleasant suspicion which she instantly
+expelled with the reminder that her husband had inherited wealth and
+that in supplementing it he had not been limited to a local field of
+operation.
+
+The next unwelcome thought suggested that if Eben were so rich as that
+his generosity to her father and herself was discounted. Out of
+abundance he had given a moiety and because of it she had put her life
+into a yoke. But that idea, too, she met with the answer that his
+conduct must not be measured by a given cost but by its spirit and
+willingness.
+
+"You are surprised?" His smiling inquiry called her back from her
+disturbing reverie with a sense of guilty criticism.
+
+"Only at the degree of your success, Eben," she told him gravely; "I had
+not supposed it so large."
+
+But as time went on, an intelligence less keenly edged than hers would
+have recognized that it was only to the anterooms of his financial
+interests that he admitted her.
+
+This was inevitable, and obviously he could not explain what she felt to
+be a rebuff. To make full disclosure of certain transactions would have
+stripped Eben Tollman of disguise and brought results as parlous as
+those he had feared on the afternoon when he left his strong box
+unlocked. Structures of self-delusion might have fallen into shapeless
+debris under the batteries of her frank questioning. Eben Tollman could
+dismiss from thought the woman who has lost her way or the man who has
+succumbed to a destructive thirst. That required only the remembrance
+that the "wages of sin is death." But if real estate which he owned in
+poor, even disreputable sections of distant cities brought him in
+surprisingly large rentals, he did not conceive that his duty required
+an investigation of the characters of his tenants.
+
+Of course should his agents tell him that his property was being
+prostituted to evil ends for gain he would have to sever relations with
+them, but he selected agents who troubled him with no such embarrassing
+details. This was a practical attitude, but something told him that in
+it Conscience would hardly see eye to eye with him.
+
+It was late in May that Jimmy Hancock wrote a note to the girl with whom
+he had ridden horseback in the Valley of Virginia.
+
+"I've just had a stroke of luck," he said, "in meeting our old friend
+Stuart Farquaharson, who is touring the world, crowned gorgeously with
+bays of literary fame. I ran into him yesterday in Yokohama and from him
+learned for the first time of your marriage. If I am the last to
+congratulate you, at least I am among the first in heartiness and
+sincerity....
+
+"There are some charming Americans here--though I don't think of any
+others whom I should mention as common acquaintances. Or did you know
+Mrs. Larry Holbury? She has been reigning graciously over us, and I am
+among the smitten. However, since both she and Stuart are to sail on the
+_Nippon Maru_ I have no great modicum of hope."
+
+Poor Jimmy! Never was man less bent on purveying morsels of deleterious
+gossip. Never was man, in effect, more stupidly blundering.
+
+He wrote the day after the dance on his cruiser and he spoke of the
+things near his current thoughts.
+
+When Conscience had read the note, her eyes wandered thoughtfully and at
+the end her lips curled. "So she followed him across the world, did
+she?" she said half aloud, since she was quite alone. Then she added
+quietly: "Still I guess she didn't pursue him without knowing that she
+would be welcome. It was just as well that the dream ended in time."
+
+
+Until his stroke had disabled the Reverend William Williams, his
+congregation had thought of him less as an individual than as an
+institution. In their minds he had shared the permanence of the church
+steeple. Trained through two generations to his intensity and fiery
+earnestness they saw in other clergymen a tame half-heartedness.
+Exponents of more modern and liberal thinking had since come and gone
+leaving the men and women who had been reared on the thundered Word as
+expressed in his firstlies, secondlies, thirdlies and finalies unable to
+fill their pulpit to their satisfaction.
+
+Then it was that Sam Haymond, D.D., came to them, as a visiting preacher
+for a single Sabbath. He came heralded by tidings of power in oratory
+and zeal of spirit beyond the ordinary. Report had it that his shoulders
+were above the heads of mediocrity and that, like Saul of Tarsus, he had
+entered upon his ministry, not through the easy stages of ecclesiastical
+apprenticeship, but with the warrior-spirit of a man wholly converted
+from the ranks of the scoffers. Accordingly it was appropriate that he
+should come as the guest of Eben Tollman, the keystone in the arch of
+the church's laity and of the old minister who still held power as a
+sort of director _emeritus_.
+
+Eben being engaged by peremptory affairs in his study, Conscience drove
+to the station to meet him on a fine young Saturday morning at the
+beginning of June. She set out from the house which maintained a sort
+of lordly aloofness among pine-covered hills, more than usually
+conscious of the lilt of summer in air and landscape.
+
+The Tollman farm had been one of goodly size when Eben had inherited it
+and outlying tracts had since augmented it by virtue of purchase and
+foreclosure, until the residence, which faced a lake-like cove, was
+almost isolated of site. On either side of the sandy road, as Conscience
+drove to the station, elms and silver oaks and maples were wearing new
+and tender shades of green. Among the sober pines they reminded her of
+fashionables flaunting their finery in the faces of staid conservatives.
+
+Between the waxen profusion of bayberry bushes, wild-flowers sprinkled
+the carpet of pine needles and blackberry trailers crawled in a bright
+raggedness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Sam Haymond, D.D., gathering together his belongings, as the train
+whistled for the village, fancied that he could visualize with a fair
+accuracy the gentleman who had written, "You will be met at the
+station." Eben Tollman used, in his correspondence, a stilted formality
+which conjured up the portrait of one somewhat staid and humorless.
+
+Conscience and her husband had, on the other hand, formed no mental
+portrait of the visiting minister, save that his reputation and
+accomplishment would indicate mature years.
+
+When the train stopped, and only one stranger emerged upon the
+crushed-stone platform, Conscience thought that their guest had missed
+his train. Sam Haymond, D.D., in turn, seeing no elderly gentleman of
+sober visage, inferred that his host had failed to meet him. There was
+only a young woman standing alone by a baggage truck and for an instant
+the thoughts of the minister were fully occupied with the consideration
+of her arrestingly vivid beauty: a beauty of youth and slender litheness
+and exquisite color.
+
+Then their glances met and the girl moved forward. It flashed
+simultaneously upon both of them that faulty preconceptions had caused a
+failure of recognition.
+
+The tall, young man, whose breadth of shoulder and elasticity of step
+might have been a boy's, spoke first with an amused riffle in his eyes.
+
+"My name is Sam Haymond. Are you, by any chance, Mr. Tollman's
+daughter?"
+
+Under the challenge of his humorous twinkle, a sudden mischief flashed
+into Conscience's face. She was tempted to announce herself as William
+Williams' daughter and let it go at that, but with a swift
+reconsideration she laughed and told the whole truth.
+
+"I am Mr. Tollman's wife."
+
+The minister raised his brows in surprise. "Now I don't know why I
+pictured Mrs. Tollman as a delightful but maternal lady with a gift for
+mince pies--yet I did."
+
+"I'm afraid I'm below par on my mince pies," she confessed with a
+mockery of humiliation. He could not, of course, know that the youth in
+her was leaping up to his bait of spontaneity as a trout leaps to the
+fly when flies are few. Conscience went on: "But you're below par,
+too--on ecclesiastical solemnity. I expected a grave-faced parson--"
+
+Sam Haymond's laughter pealed out with a heartiness which seemed gauged
+to outdoor spaces rather than to confining walls.
+
+"I haven't always been a minister," he acknowledged as he put down his
+suit-case. There was in his whole appearance an impression of physical
+confidence and fitness, which made Conscience's thoughts revert to
+Stuart Farquaharson.
+
+"Once I preached a very bad sermon in a log meeting-house in the
+Cumberland mountains," he went on. "It is a country chiefly notable for
+feuds and moon-shining. I was introduced by a gentleman whose avocations
+were varied. He explained them to me in these words, 'I farms some; I
+jails some an' I gospels some.' Perhaps I'm cut to a similar pattern."
+
+For both of them the drive proved short. Like a brook which has been
+running in the darkness of an underground channel, and which livens with
+sparkle and song as it breaks again into the sun--Conscience found
+herself in holiday mood and her companion was responsive and frankly
+delightful.
+
+Haymond was, she understood, a preacher who could move men, but just
+now he was only a splendidly alive companion. If she thought of him as a
+preacher at all it was a preacher whose conception was rather that of a
+knight serving a divinely royal master than a prosecutor thinking in
+terms of dogma.
+
+As an experiment in psychology, the luncheon was interesting because of
+the riffles and undercurrents that passed below the conversation's even
+tenor. The white-haired minister and his bronze-faced junior joined no
+issues of conflicting opinion and each saw only the admirable in the
+other--although two men so unlike in every quality except a common zeal
+might more easily have found points of disagreement than concord.
+
+Tollman was rather the listener than the talker, but when his eyes met
+those of the visitor, Conscience fancied she detected an instinct of
+vague hostility in those of the host and a dubiousness in those of the
+guest. It was as if the waving antennae of their minds had touched and
+established a sense of antagonism.
+
+Sam Haymond knew types as a good buyer knows his line of wares. Here, he
+told himself, was a nature cramped and bigoted. Such men had smirched
+the history of religion with inquisitions and tortures--and had retarded
+the progress of human thought.
+
+Tollman's impression was less distinct. He fancied that in the
+penetrating quality of the other's gaze was an impertinence of prying.
+
+Had the visiting clergyman carried his analysis far enough to discover
+that both men were bigots, he would still have drawn this distinction:
+the lion and the jackal have the same general motive in life, yet the
+jackal is hardly a lion.
+
+Possibly it was a feeling of disquiet under silent observation which
+caused Tollman, after luncheon, to turn his guest over to his wife for
+entertainment, and Haymond acquiesced with enthusiasm to Conscience's
+suggestion that they go for a sail to the greater bay.
+
+To Conscience this was all retrieving from monotony a little scrap of
+the life for which she had so eagerly yearned: the life of progress,
+stimulus and breadth.
+
+And then they were in the tilting boat, racing before a wind which
+bellied the taut mains'l and drummed upon its canvas. She and Eben had,
+once or twice, taken this same sail, but he had endured in patience
+rather than enjoyed it.
+
+On those occasions Ira had revealed a surly personality, which now
+expanded and mellowed into conversation as Haymond asked questions about
+the setting of eel traps and lobster pots and the management of fish
+weirs.
+
+The wind toyed so persistently with Conscience's dark hair that she took
+it down from its coils and let it hang in heavy braids. The color rose
+in her cheeks and the gleam to her eyes making them starry, and a lilt
+sang in her voice.
+
+There was a wealth of sapphire and purple in the water; there were thin
+shore lines of vivid green and dazzling sand. Sails bronzed and reddened
+in the sun and the distance. Gulls quarreled and screamed as they
+fished--and everything was young.
+
+"Them's mackerel gulls," volunteered Ira as he pointed to two birds
+perched on a precariously buffeted buoy. "There's a sayin' that 'When
+the whippoorwills begin to call, the mackerel begins to run'--then the
+gulls come, too."
+
+But as the sailboat drew near its landing stage again and the sunset was
+fading into twilight, the fires died slowly, too, in the eyes of
+Conscience Tollman and she felt that a vacation had ended.
+
+There seemed to be in the sunlight of the following morning a tempered
+and Sabbath stillness.
+
+Perhaps the sun itself remained pagan, but if so it only lent contrast
+to the slumberous restfulness where the shadows fell.
+
+Over the countryside brooded the calm peacefulness of the day and when
+the church bell gave its first call, its notes floated out across
+silences disturbed by no noisier interruptions than bird notes and the
+distant voice of the surf.
+
+When her father had expressed his determination of going, for the first
+time since he had been stricken, to the church where he had so long
+preached, Conscience had demurred without avail. She had been, at first,
+alarmed, lest the associations dwelling between those walls might excite
+him beyond his strength. He must feel that he was going back, broken, to
+a place where, in strength, he had been a mentor and potter whose clay
+was human thought. But he would listen to no objections and when the
+congregation gathered, his invalid's chair stood at the head of the
+center aisle and he looked directly up at the pulpit from which, since
+his youth, he had thundered the damnation of sinners.
+
+When the tall young man took his place in the pulpit, the aged minister
+swung his finely shaped head around with something of pride as though he
+would say, "Here is my successor, in whom I am well pleased."
+
+It was the revered elder who first engaged the interest of the
+congregation, but when Sam Haymond had announced his text: "Let him who
+is without sin amongst you cast the first stone," there came a shifting
+of attention. Here was a man gifted with that quality of voice without
+which there can be no oratory; endowed with that magic of force under
+which human emotion is a keyboard responsive to the touch; commanding
+that power which can sway its hearers at will between smile and tear.
+His reputation was already known to them, but within five minutes after
+his voice sounded reputation had become a pallid label for something
+flamingly real: something under which their feeling stirred; something
+that made their pulses leap like a bugle call; something that soothed
+them like sleep after weariness--and above all something so convincing
+that questioning was stilled as by the voice of a prophet who comes
+direct from the presence of God.
+
+The Reverend William Williams had held their loyalty by virtue of
+vehemence and fire, and in that the visitor matched and surpassed him.
+The intensity was there, but much besides--and yet in all else this was
+a man as opposite to the aged veteran of the pulpit as east is far
+across from west. In all the fire of his words was no mention of the
+fires of hell. He seemed to know nothing of the avenging God, whose name
+had rung terribly from that rostrum for half a century: a God swift of
+anger and mighty to punish: an omnipotently jealous God. The Deity he
+served was one of infinite charity to whose forgiveness nothing was
+unforgivable--except unforgiveness.
+
+He was expounding a doctrine of joy and aspiration: a splendid and
+uplifting message from a God of the onward and upward march. No
+suspicion came to him that, in effect, he was assailing the life work of
+the old man below him, whom he deeply revered, yet he breathed a
+conception of religion not only unlike, but contradictory to the set and
+riveted dogma of his listening predecessor.
+
+Minds that had unquestioningly accepted the old and hard gospel of
+righteousness by duress of brimstone awoke to a new insurgency and eyes
+little given to the light of thought kindled to this new postulate of
+brotherhood and the service of brotherhood.
+
+Conscience sat with her eyes hypnotically fixed on the face of the
+speaker. Yesterday afternoon he had gone sailing with her; to-day he was
+voicing her own beliefs from the pulpit whose former incumbent had
+strangled and throttled them with his tyranny of weakness.
+
+Of her father and the influence this sermon might have on him she did
+not just then think at all. She like the others was being swept on a
+tide of rapt attention--and she had forgotten that William Williams was
+not at home in his study. But as that discourse progressed one might
+have followed the ebb and flow of a man's life-battle, had he watched
+only the face of the old man, in the wheel chair, crowned with a white
+mane.
+
+First there was the expression of exaltation which mutely proclaimed: "A
+prophet is risen among us," but after it came swift doubt and
+foreboding. The eagle eyes, deep-set in the thin face, were clouded and
+hurt. Tho talon-like fingers clutched at their chair arms. Must he sit
+here constrained to silence, while another confounded his teachings?
+
+After doubt came certainty under which the sunken eyes of the paralyzed
+man smouldered fiercely and his face blanched to the deadness of
+parchment. This was all a passionate and revolutionary appeal for
+liberality--or--by his interpretation--for license. It mounted into an
+indictment against the cramping evils of intolerance, it scathingly
+denounced the goodness of the strait-jacket until the old minister saw
+every effort of his life assailed and vilified. His mind, distorted by
+suffering and brooding, beheld a prophet indeed, but a prophet who
+carried Satan's commission and who dared to serve it in the house of
+God.
+
+Would God himself remain silent and unavenging under such insult? He at
+least, the lifelong servant, would not sit voiceless while his Master
+was libeled. He who had spoken here many hundreds of times before would
+speak once more and his last message would be one of scourging from the
+temple desecrators more evil than money-changers.
+
+But he shook with so palsied a fury that for a time he could only
+surrender to his physical weakness. With a mighty effort he braced his
+withered body and pulled himself forward. He knew he was killing
+himself, but he would fall at his sentry post, challenging the enemy.
+
+Sam Haymond, himself oblivious until now to all but his own
+earnestness, brought his gaze back to the chair just below him--and
+suddenly the resonance of his swelling voice fell silent--snapped by
+astonishment with a word half spoken.
+
+Of the tragedy which was acting itself before him he realized little. He
+saw only a venerable colleague stricken by some sudden and terrible
+ailment.
+
+Then William Williams raised his thin arms above his head. Out of his
+eyes rained challenge, denunciation, anathema! Mutely he was hurling the
+curse of God's church. With the last ounce of his attenuated strength he
+was struggling for the voice which at this moment of supreme need had
+failed him. Over the body of the congregation, as the preacher halted,
+fell a deadly stillness.
+
+From the throat of the old man came a strangled groan, which had sought
+to be a command for silence, and he crumpled forward. Life had gone out
+of him, and Sam Haymond, lifting both hands, spoke in a voice of hushed
+awe, "My brethren, the hand of God has fallen here."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+About the churchyard, like sentinels of peace, stood ranks of elms and
+silver oaks. They had been old and gnarled of trunk, when the man whose
+life had just guttered out inside had come, young and militant, to
+preach the letter of that law, whose spirit was to his understanding a
+fourth dimension. Through the long windows of colored but artless glass,
+now partly raised, poured slanting panels of summer sun, mottling the
+interior and its occupants with dashes of red and blue.
+
+Into the hush which had fallen there crept also those minors that seemed
+to belong rather to an exaggerated quiet than to sound: the trill of a
+bird, voicing an overflow of joy and the humming of bees among the vines
+of the church yard, where slanting headstones bore quaintly archaic
+names and life dates of sailors home from the sea. A wandering butterfly
+had drifted in and was winging its bright way about the place where the
+sermon had been interrupted. But the bated breath of awed amazement
+broke at the end of a long-held pause into a buzz of whispered
+exclamation.
+
+Conscience rose unsteadily and started forward, her hands clutched to
+her breast, and the minister came hurriedly down the pulpit stairs.
+
+Later in the day when the body still lay in the parlor of the Tollman
+house and Conscience sat almost as motionless near by, Eben Tollman
+paced the floor with features set in an expression unpleasantly
+suggestive of the undertaker's professional solemnity.
+
+Possibly Tollman was not inconsolably cast down. So long as the old
+man's precarious life spark had been a danger signal, burning against
+the influence of Stuart Farquaharson, it was vital that he should live.
+Now he was entitled to the serenity of a holy man's reward.
+
+It was near to sunset when the husband left the room and the eyes of
+Conscience kindled for the first time out of their lethargic quiet.
+Abruptly she rose from her seat and rebelliously demanded of the young
+minister, "What would you say if I should confess to you that just one
+thing has been clear and outstanding through all the confusion of my
+thoughts since this morning? I've been unspeakably sullen."
+
+"I should say," he responded quietly, "that it is a guise which grief
+often assumes."
+
+"No," she protested, disdaining the cajolery of self-delusion, "my
+sullenness isn't that sort. It's pure rebellion. I've been thinking of
+the abysmal failure of those who dedicate themselves most wholly. _His_
+devotion to righteousness was implacably sincere and severe. It was the
+doctrine of the hair-shirt. He scorned to ride any wave ... he had to
+buffet every one head on ... until he battered out his life and wrecked
+himself."
+
+"A man must serve as he reads his command," her companion reminded her.
+"He has done his work as he conceived it."
+
+"And yet--" she looked into his face with a deep questioning which held
+no note of accusation--"if anything that you said to-day is true, his
+whole effort was not only wasted but perverted, and it was true. It was
+so terribly true that it killed him!"
+
+"What do you mean?" Haymond's gaze searched her eyes with incredulous
+amazement. It seemed to be making an effort to steady her against the
+wild utterances of hysteria, but her response was convincingly calm.
+
+"I mean just that. I myself had nothing in common with his views. To me
+they seemed narrow--pitifully narrow and uncomprehending--and he was my
+father. We were warned that in any sudden gust of anger his feeble life
+spark--would go out, so I put my own conceptions of what counted behind
+me and tried to shield him." Sam Haymond hardly heard the last words. He
+could realize only the dazing and crushing import of his own unwilling
+instrumentality. At last he inquired slowly, "You mean that my
+sermon--that the things I said--" There he broke off and the distress in
+his eyes was so poignantly genuine that Conscience replied softly, "No,
+it wasn't you. It was Fate, I guess. Even I can't blame you. It only
+proves that the thing I warped my own life to prevent was
+inevitable--that's all."
+
+For a little while the minister stood silent and across his face passed
+a succession of bewildered shadows.
+
+"It is hard for me to grasp this," he said at last with a grief-laden
+voice. "It is hard for me to realize that two men serving the same God;
+both preaching His Word with identical earnestness could be so at
+variance that the concept of one should give mortal hurt to the other."
+
+They sat in silence until the sunset pageantry had dimmed to twilight.
+Then the man spoke again, guardedly.
+
+"You said something about warping your life for your father's sake. I
+wonder if--well, I wonder if there's anything it would help you to talk
+about--not to the minister but to the friend."
+
+She met his gaze with one of equal directness, and he could see an
+impulse, rather hungry and eager, dawn only to be repressed in her eyes.
+At last she shook her head. "No," she answered. "But it's good of you to
+ask me. No, there's nothing that talking about will mend."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Eben Tollman's effort at being young was not wholly successful. There
+were times when even he suspected that it lacked something of complete
+attainment. He had now been married six months and his wife, though
+undeniably loyal, was as far as ever from kindling into that eager fire
+of complete love which he had boasted he would awaken in her.
+
+When Conscience had warned him that their marriage would be an
+incomplete relationship Tollman had inwardly smiled. Of her faithfulness
+he could be sure and she herself would be his. The rest was a somewhat
+gossamer and idealistic matter which her youth exaggerated in
+importance.
+
+But after six months, possession was no longer enough--and it was all he
+had. Sometimes indeed it seemed to him that the thing he lacked was
+greater than the sum of the things he possessed.
+
+He had boasted that in indulging her wishes he found his highest
+privilege and pleasure, but he was of those who take their pleasures
+sadly. He had given her unrestricted permission to remodel his house,
+yet in every fresh detail of the alteration he discovered an act of
+vandalism under which his spirit writhed.
+
+To his mind everything gained in sanctity by its age: the moth-eaten
+furniture was hallowed by tradition. The rheumatic old dog of uncertain
+breed, to which he had never vouchsafed a caress became now, when
+banished to the stable, a tried and faithful companion relegated to
+exile.
+
+Privacy, he conceived as a matter of being shut in, and a house without
+cobwebbed shadows became a place bereft of decent seclusion. About him,
+now, all this undesirable metamorphosis was taking place.
+
+"What is this room, my dear?" he inquired one morning as he spread
+before him on the breakfast table blue prints, while Conscience was
+pouring his coffee.
+
+A shaft of early light tilting obliquely through the window fell on her
+head, making a soft nimbus about her dark hair and bringing out the
+exquisite color of her face. As Tollman looked up, raising the plans
+with a finger indicating the spot in question, he recognized the
+radiance of youth which could, under such a searching brilliance, remain
+flawless. He felt in contrast old and sluggish of life current.
+
+"That?" Conscience's brows were lifted in surprise. "Why, Eben, you've
+been over those plans a half-dozen times. Surely you're familiar with
+them. That's your bed-room."
+
+"And this one?" He shifted his finger and his face clouded.
+
+"That's mine."
+
+"Separate apartments?" he inquired dryly, though he was, as she had
+said, discovering no new cause of displeasure.
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"And three baths, and a garage and a car--and a terrace." He paused and
+his face fell into a sullen and stubborn expression. After a moment he
+added coldly, "That's all going to run into money."
+
+Conscience set down the coffee cup and looked at him as she quietly
+asked, "Is there any reason why it shouldn't? If you were poor, I would
+share your poverty without complaint, but as you told me, unasked, we
+are not poor. Economy carried beyond the point of virtue becomes
+unlovely, I think."
+
+Eben shifted his line of objection. Separate apartments hinted at that
+modern trend which he believed sought to rob marriage of its sacred
+intimacy.
+
+"It is not only the expense," he announced stolidly. "Our people have
+always held close to a certain conception of home and marriage. From the
+days of the Mayflower these words have stood for a life fully shared.
+People who play lightly with sacred things are the sponsors for the
+other style of life: for houses where the husband and wife lead
+separate existences and substitute small dogs for children."
+
+He felt, as he concluded, the deep eyes of his wife fixed on him with an
+expression which he could not quite fathom. Her lips were parted and the
+freshness of her cheeks colored with a tinge of indignation.
+
+"Have I ever seemed to prefer small dogs to children?" she asked him in
+a still voice which bordered dangerously on anger. "You talk of a life
+fully shared. Have I failed to share anything except the business part
+of your life--which you closed to me?"
+
+Eben Tollman did not wish to pursue that topic.
+
+"I was only expressing general views," he hurriedly assured her, and
+again under her level scrutiny, he felt the contrast between her vibrant
+vitality and his own autumnal maturity. But Conscience went steadily on
+in the unmistakable manner of one who has no intention of being
+misunderstood.
+
+"But I won't share any cramped delusion that things are good merely
+because they are dusty and immobile. I won't share the fallacy that to
+call a thing conservative sanctifies it. There is more virtue in a tiled
+bathroom than in a cob-webbed chapel. If we change this house at all we
+will do it thoroughly."
+
+Eben Tollman rose and pushed back his chair. Conscience's face had taken
+on the glow of something like Amazonian defiance. To her beauty had come
+a new quality which stirred the senses of her husband like a roll of
+drums. It was an emotion which he believed to be love and coming around
+he caught her rather pantingly in his arms.
+
+It was an intolerably wretched misfit, this union of Conscience and Eben
+Tollman, but so bent was the woman upon redeeming the hopeless
+experiment that she sought to brace the doomed and tottering structure
+with fictitious props. To be an "unimpeachable" wife was not to her
+thinking a sufficient meeting of her problem. Her own fastidiousness and
+cleanness of character would have made that less a duty to her husband
+than to herself. The more difficult requirement was to close, and keep
+closed the port of her thoughts against those dreams and yearnings that
+stole in like blockade-runners, but these buccaneer thoughts came
+insistently and impertinently invested with a colorful challenge to the
+imagination.
+
+From every dream-ship that sailed in, looked out the face of Stuart
+Farquaharson.
+
+This, she told herself, was a pure perversity. All memories should fade
+as distance widens, yet of late the banishment of Stuart had been less
+complete than heretofore.
+
+Slowly she prosecuted Stuart Farquaharson in the court of her own
+judgment and condemned him to mental exile. The steps of his
+deteriorating course were clear enough. He had loved her sufficiently to
+do everything but stand firm in stress. When he thought her lost he had
+consoled himself with another woman. When the second lady, too, had come
+to grief through his devotion, he had withdrawn. Then with the reception
+of Conscience's letter at Cairo, the past had risen with Phoenix
+upblazing and he had recklessly cabled her to halt at the step of the
+altar. She confessed with deep humiliation that had the message come in
+time, she might have obeyed. But that, too, had failed--and now with his
+versatile capacity for the expedient, he was dallying again with the
+affections of Marian Holbury. It was, she admitted, not a pretty record.
+She told herself almost savagely that she hated Stuart Farquaharson as
+one can hate only where contempt succeeds love.
+
+This was the bulwark of fallacy with which Conscience Tollman sought to
+safeguard her dwindling confidence in the ultimate success of her
+wifehood and she clung to it with a bitter determination.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Where the old iron urns, painted a poison green, had stood in the front
+yard of Tollman's house there was no longer any offense to the eye.
+Where an unsightly fence had confined a somewhat ragged yard, low stone
+walls, flower bordered, went around a lawn as trim as plush. The house
+presented to the eye of the visitor that dignity which should invest the
+home of a gentleman whose purse is not restricted. The spirit of the
+colonial had been preserved and amplified, and from the terrace one
+looked out on a landscape of hill view and water glimpse, as from a
+fitting and harmonious place.
+
+One afternoon Conscience Tollman was walking among her flowers. They
+would be gone before long, for already the woods were beginning to burn
+with the colors of autumn and the bogs where cranberry-pickers worked
+were blazing into orange and claret. The road that came out of the
+pines, formerly deeply rutted and sandy, was now metaled and approached
+the house in a graded curve.
+
+Looking off down the hill to where it turned from the highway into the
+farm, she saw a motor which she did not recognize and which even at the
+distance showed, dust-whitened, as from a long journey. It had entered
+between the stone gate pillars, and Conscience, with a glance at her
+garden apron, muddied from kneeling at the flower beds, turned and went
+hastily into the house. The car evidently brought visitors and as, from
+her bed-room window, she watched it round the nearer curve and draw up
+at the yard entrance, her perplexity grew.
+
+It was a large machine of foreign make and, when the liveried chauffeur
+opened the tonneau door, a woman stepped out whose face was obscured by
+her dust veils.
+
+When the maid appeared above stairs a few minutes later the mystery of
+the unknown visitor's identity remained unsolved.
+
+"The lady said," announced the servant, "that she hoped you would see
+her for a few minutes."
+
+"Who is the lady?"
+
+"I don't know, ma'am. She said she had no card with her and would I
+please just deliver that message."
+
+As Conscience came noiselessly and lightly down the stairs a few moments
+later her guest was standing by one of the pillars of the terrace,
+looking off across the breadth of landscape, but her figure and profile
+were revealed. The veil, thrown back, was faintly aflutter about a head
+crowned with red-brown hair and a face delicately chiseled. Her eyes
+held the clear luminosity of lighted amber, but, unconscious of being
+observed, they held a note of pain--almost of timidity. Conscience's
+first impression untinged by any bias of preconception expressed itself
+in the thought, "Whoever she is, she is very lovely." Then she stepped
+out onto the tiles and the lady turned. The eyes of the two met and the
+lips of the two smiled.
+
+"You are Mrs. Eben Tollman?" inquired the visitor and Conscience nodded
+with that quick graciousness of expression which always brought to her
+face a quality of radiance.
+
+"Yes, the maid didn't get your name, I believe."
+
+The hint of pain and timidity had left the amber eyes now and in their
+place had come something more difficult to define.
+
+"No, I preferred giving it to you myself. I am Marian Holbury."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+The visitor did not miss the sudden and instinctive change on the face
+of her hostess or the impulsive start as if to draw back in distaste.
+Conscience evidently saw in this visit a violation of all canons of good
+taste. At all events she remained standing as if letting her attitude
+express her unwillingness to prolong the situation.
+
+"I suppose if I were diplomatic," went on Marian when it was evident
+that the other had no intention of making inquiries as to the cause of
+her coming, "I might say that I'd turned in to make inquiry about these
+bewildering roads--or to borrow gasoline."
+
+"If there is any motoring assistance I can give--" began the hostess,
+but the other woman interrupted her with a short laugh and a glance of
+almost reckless straightforwardness.
+
+"No, it isn't for that, that I came. You see I'm _not_ diplomatic. I'm
+said to be startlingly frank. I came to talk with you, if you'll let me,
+about Stuart Farquaharson. He is a common friend of ours, I believe."
+
+A pale flush rose to Mrs. Tollman's cheeks and she volunteered no reply.
+
+The two women, each unusual in her beauty and each the other's opposite
+of type, stood with the quiet repression of their breeding, yet with an
+impalpable spirit of enmity between them: the enmity of two women who at
+heart love one man. Mrs. Holbury spoke first.
+
+"You are thinking that my coming here is an unwarrantable impertinence,
+Mrs. Tollman. Perhaps that's true, but I think my reason is strong
+enough to justify it. At all events I'm not doing this because it's
+easy for me, or because I have anything to gain. Do you think you can
+spare me ten minutes and reserve hostility of judgment until you hear
+what I came to say?"
+
+Conscience was somewhat bewildered, but she answered quietly, "Of
+course, Mrs. Holbury. You must forgive me if I seemed discourteous.... I
+was so surprised. Won't you be seated?"
+
+"Thank you." The visitor took a chair and for a moment sat gazing across
+the coloring hills where the maples were flaring with yellow and the
+oaks were russet-brown. "Stuart Farquaharson has been a friend ... more
+than a casual friend ... to both of us."
+
+"Stuart Farquaharson," said Conscience quickly, "was one of my best
+friends. I hope he is still, but for a long while I haven't seen him. He
+drifted into another world ... a world of travel and writing ... and so
+I think of him as belonging to the past--a sort of non-resident friend."
+
+Marian Holbury's face flushed. "My interest, on the contrary," she made
+candid declaration, "is not the sort that will ever be of the past,
+though I doubt if I shall see him again, either."
+
+Even now under their composure they had the masked feeling of fencers
+and antagonists.
+
+"I saw him last years ago," said Conscience, and Marion answered at
+once, "I have just returned from the Orient. Mr. Farquaharson was a
+fellow passenger."
+
+"I had happened to hear of it." Eben Tollman's wife spoke casually and
+Marion countered with an equal urbanity.
+
+"Yes, one does happen to hear of these things, doesn't one? He called
+the meeting a coincidence and was surprised."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I could hardly be astonished because you see I had, without his
+knowledge, waylaid him."
+
+The hostess may have indicated the astonishment she sought to conceal,
+for Mrs. Holbury laughed and again her eyes had that unmasked frankness
+which made surprisingly unconventional assertions seem quite normal.
+
+"I am wondering, Mrs. Holbury," Conscience spoke now without any hint of
+hostility--disarmed by her visitor's candor, "why you are telling me
+this."
+
+"When one has valued a friend and has had reports of him which are both
+deleterious and unfair it is quite conceivable, don't you think, that
+that person would wish to know the truth and to see the friend
+vindicated?"
+
+Mrs. Eben Tollman met the direct eyes with a level glance almost of
+challenge.
+
+"What reports do you mean?"
+
+"Mrs. Tollman," said Marian earnestly, "you have agreed to listen.
+Please don't let us fence evasively. You had the same reports of Stuart
+that the rest of the world had; reports for which I feel largely
+responsible because many things which seemed most damaging, he might
+have explained to his own full credit. He refrained on my account." She
+paused a moment, then continued resolutely, "Incidentally he knows
+nothing of this effort I am making to have you understand the truth. Do
+you want to hear the unfalsified story of how I was discovered by my
+husband in his cottage and in his arms?"
+
+Conscience nodded gravely and when, ten minutes later, her visitor had
+finished a narrative in which she had not spared herself, the hostess
+had an unpleasant feeling that her own attitude had been priggish while
+the other woman's had been astonishingly generous.
+
+That conviction gave a softness to her voice as she put her next
+question softly. "Why should it mean anything to Mr. Farquaharson
+now--my opinion?"
+
+"In the Philippines," said Marian Holbury, "the army officers have a
+name for a dishonorable discharge from the service. They call it the
+'yellow furlough.' Do you imagine that Stuart Farquaharson could
+willingly retire in that fashion? Don't you see how greatly he would
+covet an honorable discharge?"
+
+Conscience felt suddenly glad that Eben would not return to the house
+before evening. She had another thing yet to learn and she asked
+faintly, "But it must have been hard for you to come and tell this to a
+stranger. Why did you do it?"
+
+"Hard!" For the first time the even control of Marian's voice broke into
+vehemence. "It was more than hard. It was all but impossible. But he
+couldn't tell you himself, without discrediting me and there was no one
+else to do it."
+
+"Even so I don't quite see--"
+
+But Mrs. Holbury cut her short with an imperious gesture and her voice
+held a vibrant thrill of feeling.
+
+"You say that Stuart Farquaharson stands for a past chapter in your
+thoughts. I love him and I know him. If the good opinion of a woman to
+whom he is only a memory means more to his happiness than the possession
+of everything in life I can give--and would gladly give--" She broke off
+and added with regained composure, "Well, I love him enough to try to
+get him what he wants, that's all."
+
+She wheeled and went hurriedly down the path toward her car, leaving
+Conscience standing on the terrace, with her lips parted and her hands
+nervously clenched.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Conscience did not mention to her husband the visit of Marian Holbury.
+To do so would not only have been the violation of a self-sacrificing
+confidence but the pleading of a cause for which Eben could feel no
+response except distaste. She knew that Eben thought of Marian as a
+light and frivolous woman who had been cashiered from matrimony.
+
+During the next two years--which passed in labored slowness, she kept
+the matter to herself, though to her it was not merely a visit. It was a
+time from which she dated other times. It was the day upon which her dam
+had broken: the dam of her carefully reared fallacy. From that day on
+she could no longer fall back on the idea of a discredited Stuart in
+support of her efforts to exile him from her thoughts.
+
+Thus disarmed, she asked herself, how was she to carry on the fight to
+find contentment; and to the question came two and only two answers.
+Children might fill the void of her existence or she might in time
+school herself into a tame acceptance by a sheer crushing of impulses.
+
+In the responsibilities of motherhood there might be even now a fullness
+of compensation which would make of sacrifice an enthusiasm. The whole
+unsatisfied abundance of her nature could laugh at disappointment,
+striking out the past and living afresh in the lives of her children.
+
+This was not a new thought and it held little hope. For two years she
+had prayed for its fulfillment and now her faith faltered.
+
+So the one thing left seemed to be a vapid and colorless resignation.
+
+Alone in her bedroom one night, which was typical of many nights, she
+pondered these matters. By her dresser mirror burned bayberry candles
+and in their faintly wavering illumination she caught an occasional
+glimpse of herself. She was not vain, but neither was she totally blind.
+She knew that God had given her a mind suitable for alert companionship.
+God had bestowed upon her, too, beauty of body and face, which might
+have been gifts for the glorification of love.
+
+It was one of those midsummer nights when the air, no longer void,
+teems with an indefinable influence of restlessness. Like prisoners
+beating on their iron doors at night, the repressed longings were all
+awake, too--and clamorous. A sense of fear obsessed her, almost of panic
+gaining force of volume like an inrunning tide.
+
+Eben, she knew, was slowly but very certainly reading an aversion to
+himself into every small manifestation of personal independence.
+
+Suddenly her eyes grew wide and terrified. Was not her feeling, after
+all, if only she had the courage to admit it, one of aversion for him?
+Vehement denial rose at the thought, prompted by the discipline of fixed
+ideas.
+
+"But why," whispered a small voice of inner mockery, "did you just now
+turn the key in your door? What was _that_ but an impulse of
+withdrawal--a barrier?"
+
+There had been another night when she had felt such a nameless and
+restless fear. Then she had dreaded being left alone. Now she was afraid
+she might not be. Then a man had come to her and soothed her, but it had
+been another man.
+
+Why should these thoughts of Stuart Farquaharson always obtrude
+themselves on every revery?... Was there no key she could turn against
+him, whom it was her duty to shut out?
+
+If he were ever to return to her and find her in such a mood as
+possessed her now, she feared that she would throw herself into his
+arms. Thank God he would never come!
+
+Something of the same restlessness that obsessed her was at work with
+her husband, too, that night, though it led him less into panic and
+self-questioning than into a brooding conviction of life's injustice.
+
+Above the mantel of his study hung a portrait of an ancestor garbed in
+the blue and buff of the army of Independence. Until quite recently this
+portrait's features had been well-nigh extinguished under the
+accumulated soot and tarnish of many decades, but Eben had revered them
+with that veneration of ancestor-worship which is an egoism overflowing
+the boundaries of a single generation. Lately Conscience had had the
+picture restored and now the renovated forebear, almost jaunty in his
+refurbishing, looked down on his descendant and the descendant's pride
+was quickened.
+
+To-night, however, the eyes of the portrait seemed full of grim
+accusation. In their cold depths Eben could fancy the question sternly
+put, "Where are your sons? Are you going to let the flame of our
+honorable line flicker out with your own death?"
+
+Perhaps the root of ancestor-worship, in all forms, lies deep in the
+wish of the devotee to be, in his own turn, honored. Perhaps, too, the
+obsession of self-perpetuation grows rather than wanes as the line
+becomes less worth perpetuating.
+
+At all events Eben Tollman had no children and his thoughts fell into
+brooding and bitterness. His present attitude needed only a spark, such
+as jealousy or suspicion might supply, to fire it into some quirk of mad
+and bitter resentment.
+
+He turned out the lamp and went slowly up the stairs. Outside his wife's
+door he paused, and, without knocking, tried the knob--to find the door
+locked against him. A deep flush of resentment spread over his cheeks.
+He drew back his hand, being minded to rap peremptorily--then he
+refrained and went on to his own room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Conscience was sitting on the terrace one day with a book, which she
+smilingly laid down as her husband joined her. Eben took up the small
+volume of Browning's verse and idly turned its pages, his eyes falling
+almost immediately on the old inscription, "Stuart to Conscience." His
+unfixed jealousy seized upon a frail mooring but he stifled the scowl
+that instinct prompted and turned the pages to the point where a narrow
+ribbon marked "The Statue and the Bust."
+
+He had often wondered what people found to admire in Browning, but now
+he read with an unflagging interest. Here was a document in evidence:
+the narrative of a wife who dissembled her love and the ungodly moral of
+the thing was that the culpability of the lovers lay--not in their
+clandestine devotion but in their temporizing postponement of a guilty
+love:
+
+
+     "And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost ...
+     Is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin...."
+
+
+Before Eben Tollman's eyes swam spots of red and in his heart leaped a
+withering flame of betrayed wrath.
+
+Had Conscience, after all, through these months and years, deceived him?
+Had she surreptitiously kept in touch with the erstwhile lover who had
+already wrecked one home? Had she been letting memories kindle fires in
+her which all his faithful love had left unquickened?
+
+The long incubating dourness had hatched from its egg and, like the
+young quail which runs while the shell still clings to its pin feathers,
+it was alive and seeking nourishment.
+
+If such guilt existed, it called for condign punishment and as God's
+instrument he must mete it out. But he was a righteous man and must
+first be certain. Therefore, he would not let her suspect his own
+doubts. If she were dissembling he would dissemble, too, but to a better
+end. In her this deceit was a sinful hypocrisy, but in him it would be
+as virtuous as the care with which the prosecutor cajoles the criminal
+into self-conviction. So he inquired with a reserved and indulgent
+suavity, "Are you particularly fond of that poem, my dear?"
+
+Conscience gazed pensively away beyond the hillside, where the heat
+waves played, to the cool blue of the cove. Her manner impressed him as
+preoccupied.
+
+"It has beauty, I think, and in some respects a true psychology. It
+recognizes that even straight-forward sin may be less ugly than
+hypocritical virtue."
+
+All the prejudices of the man's illiberal code arose snarling, but he
+stifled their expression and, abandoning the immediate subject, turned
+absently back to the title page. "'Stuart to Conscience,'" he read
+reminiscently. "This book must be quite an old keepsake."
+
+The Virginian's name had not been recently mentioned between them. There
+had been no agreement, tacit or otherwise, to that effect, but the wife
+had inferred that this was a topic which he was willing to have drop
+with the lapse of time out of their conversation. If he recurred to it
+now it must indicate that any vestiges of animus once entertained for
+Farquaharson had died. That was rather pleasing and generous, she
+thought.
+
+"Yes, quite old," she responded with a smile.
+
+Tollman nodded understandingly. A short while before he had been reading
+his Providence newspaper and a brief paragraph, which would otherwise
+have escaped his eye, had caught his attention like the red lantern at a
+railroad crossing--because it contained the name of Stuart
+Farquaharson. The lines were these: "'The Longest Way Round,' a comedy
+in three acts, by Stuart Farquaharson, will have its premiere at the
+Garrick Theater on Monday evening. After a road engagement the piece
+will be presented to Broadway early in the fall. The cast includes--"
+But Eben had not troubled about the cast. He was speculating just now
+upon whether his wife had seen the item--and if so whether she would
+speak of it.
+
+"I wonder what has become of him," he suggested speculatively, and
+Conscience shook her head as she answered, "It's been a long while since
+I've heard of him."
+
+If she had read the morning paper--and she usually read it--she must be
+lying. This circumstance the husband duly noted in the case which he was
+building up against her.
+
+"I dare say he rather dropped out, socially speaking, after his escapade
+with that New York woman," he volunteered. "It was a pity."
+
+"The reports we had about his conduct," defended Conscience with a
+straightforward glance, "were grossly untrue. He suffered the effects of
+the circumstantial out of consideration for her."
+
+"Indeed!" Tollman's voice was one of quickened interest, seemingly of
+pleased surprise. He was developing an excellent facility in the actor's
+art. "That is gratifying news. One likes to think well of an old friend,
+but how did you learn?"
+
+The woman bit her lip. She had made her assertion in so categorical a
+form that to withhold her authority now meant to appear absurd, and she
+had not wished to betray the confidence of Marian Holbury. So she fell
+back on the alternative of a partial explanation.
+
+"Mrs. Holbury herself explained the matter to me. It was a chapter of
+accidental appearances."
+
+Tollman was gazing at his wife with brows incredulously arched but his
+scepticism appeared amused--almost urbane.
+
+"But where in the world did you and Mrs. Holbury meet? Your orbits have
+no points of contact."
+
+"She was driving to Provincetown--and stopped here."
+
+"Ah!" Tollman might have been pardoned in making further inquiries, but
+already his plan of proceeding cautiously had seemed to supply him with
+such valuable points of evidence that he meant to continue the fruitful
+policy, so he contented himself with the casual inquiry, "Was this
+recently?"
+
+"No, it was about two years ago."
+
+Two years ago and until now she had never mentioned it! Then she _had_,
+through at least one ambassador, held communication with her lover. A
+moment ago she had declared herself without news of him. The woman whom
+he had trusted was at heart unfaithful. It was just as well that he had
+decided to assume the role of the blind man. Now he would proceed
+further and devise a trap into which she should unwittingly walk and
+from which there should be no escape.
+
+A plan presented itself with the fully formulated swiftness of an
+inspiration. He would arrange a meeting between his wife and
+Farquaharson. He, himself, seemingly unsuspicious and fatuously trustful
+of demeanor, would observe them. He would throw them together--and when
+the truth was indisputably proven he would act.
+
+Already the terrific force of the purely circumstantial was at work; a
+force which has sent innocent men by scores to prison and the scaffold.
+To the man who was to be both prosecutor and judge the links seemed to
+be joining nicely. Then with the force of a climax, a climax for which
+even he was unprepared, Conscience said, "Will you be using the car
+Monday?"
+
+"I had meant to. Why?"
+
+"I thought I'd go to Providence for some shopping. However, I can go by
+train."
+
+Providence! Monday! The place and day of Stuart Farquaharson's opening
+with his comedy in three acts.
+
+Yesterday such a suspicion would have seemed impossibly absurd. To-day
+he realized that yesterday he had been a blind fool.
+
+"Do you mind my going with you?" He made the suggestion in a tentative,
+almost indifferent fashion. "I have some business with my bank there. I
+sha'n't be in your way."
+
+That should give her pause, he thought, craftily pleased with himself.
+It should drive her back upon self-betrayal or a plausible objection.
+Incidentally it should indicate to her that he suspected nothing.
+
+"I should be glad to have you go," she declared at once. "I want your
+opinion on hangings and furniture for the new guest room."
+
+For an instant Tollman was bewildered. Her acquiescence seemed
+spontaneous and cordial, and since she was going for a clandestine
+meeting with her lover it should be neither. Perhaps, however, this only
+showed how swiftly her brain worked in intrigue.
+
+Although Conscience had not, in fact, read the paper and knew nothing
+whatever of Stuart Farquaharson's presence in Providence, it must be
+confessed that, to a suspicious mind the circumstances built
+consistently to that conclusion.
+
+In due time Eben wrote and mailed a brief note to Mr. Stuart
+Farquaharson at the Garrick Theater, Providence. It said:
+
+
+     "My Dear Mr. Farquaharson: My wife requests me to invite you to
+     join us for lunch on Monday at one at the Crown Hotel. We know you
+     will be extremely busy, but we hope that the principle of Auld Lang
+     Syne will prevail and that you can spare us an hour."
+
+
+On Sunday evening after Conscience had gone to her room, Eben Tollman
+sat in his study alone, except for his reflections, which were both
+numerous and active.
+
+His note should reach the man to whom it was addressed on Monday
+morning. What would be the emotions of the recipient? He, of course,
+would already have an appointment with the wife, believing the husband
+to be totally deluded. The unwelcome discovery that instead of a
+tete-a-tete there was to be a censored meeting would in itself sadly
+alter matters, but what other construction would Stuart put upon the
+development? Would he assume that Conscience, fearing discovery, had
+sought to cover their plans under this excusing subterfuge? Would he
+imagine that the husband had possessed himself of the guilty secret and
+meant to confront him with an accusation? At whatever conclusion the
+lover arrived, Eben imagined Stuart pacing his room in a confused and
+thwarted anxiety. That was in itself a pleasurable reflection--but it
+was only the beginning. When the young Lothario met him he would find a
+man--to all seeming--childishly innocent of the facts and fondly
+incapable of suspicion. He, Eben Tollman, would lead them both slowly
+into self-conviction by as deliberate a campaign as that which had won
+him his wife in the first instance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Stuart Farquaharson came into the hotel breakfast-room that Monday
+morning with dark rings under his eyes and an unaccustomed throb of pain
+in his temples. He wore the haggard aspect of one wrestling with a deep
+anxiety. Already about the tables were gathered a dozen or more men and
+women in whose faces one might have observed the same traces of fatigue.
+To Stuart Farquaharson they nodded with unanimous irritability, as
+though they held him responsible for their condition of unstrung
+exhaustion.
+
+When the Virginian had ordered he sat gazing ahead of him with such
+troubled eyes that had he still been under the surveillance of the
+Searchlight Investigation Bureau, those keenly zestful observers would
+doubtless have reported the harrowed emotions of a guilty conscience.
+Soon, however, Stuart drew from his pocket a blue-bound and much-thumbed
+manuscript and fell to scribbling upon it with a stubby pencil. Into
+this preoccupied trance broke a somewhat heavy framed man whose
+smoothly-shaved face bore, despite traces of equal stress, certain
+remnants of an inexhaustible humor.
+
+"Did you rewrite that scene in the third act?" he demanded briskly as he
+dropped into a vacant chair across the table and, with a side glance
+over his shoulder, added in the same breath, "Waiter, a baked apple and
+two eggs boiled three minutes--and don't take over two minutes on the
+job, see?"
+
+As the servitor departed, grinning over the difficulties of his
+contract, Mr. Grady sent an appraising eye about the room and proceeded
+drily, "All present or accounted for, it seems--and Good Lord, how they
+love us! It's really touching--they're just like trained rattle-snakes."
+
+"Can't say I blame 'em much," Farquaharson stifled a yawn. "Dress
+Rehearsal until two this morning followed by a call for line rehearsal
+again at eleven. When they get through that, if they ever do, there's
+nothing more except the strain of a first night."
+
+Mr. Grady grinned. "That's the gay life of trouping. It's what girls
+leave home for. By the way, how much sleep did you get yourself?"
+
+"About three hours."
+
+"You'll feel fine by to-night when the merry villagers shout 'Author!
+Author!'" The heavy gentleman looked at his watch and added, with the
+producer's note of command, "When we finish here we'd better go to my
+room and see how the dialogue sounds in the rewritten scene."
+
+Later Stuart sat in the empty auditorium of the theater where the
+sheeted chairs stretched off into a circle of darkness. The stage, naked
+of setting; the actors whose haggard faces looked ghastly beyond the
+retrievement of make-up; the noisy and belated frenzy of carpenters and
+stage crew: all these were sights and sounds grown so stale that he
+found it hard to focus his attention on those nuances of interpretation
+which would make or ruin his play. He was conscious only of a yearning
+to find some quiet place where there was shade along a sea beach, and
+there to lie down and die happily.
+
+About noon Mr. Grady, who had for some purpose gone "back," resumed his
+seat at the author's side and, between incisive criticism shouted
+through his megaphone, suggested, in the contrast of a conversational
+tone, "Don't you ever look in your letter box? Here's mail for you."
+
+Absently Stuart took the envelope and when the scene ended made his way
+to the light of the open stage door to investigate its contents. There,
+seeking asylum from the greater heat of the wings he came upon the
+ingenue, indulging in the luxury of exhausted tears.
+
+Farquaharson glanced at the note carelessly at first and the signature
+momentarily baffled him. Eben Tollman signed his name with such marked
+originality that it was almost as difficult to decipher as to forge.
+
+But that was a minor and short-lived perplexity. It was indubitably Eben
+Tollman who had sent this invitation and he said that he did so at the
+request of his wife.
+
+The face of Stuart Farquaharson, which had a moment before seemed
+incapable of any expression beyond lethargic fatigue, underwent so
+sudden a transformation that the ingenue interrupted her weeping to
+watch it. There was a prefatory blankness of sheer amazement followed
+by an upleaping of latent fires into the eyes; fires that held hints of
+revived hopes and suppressed yearnings. Within the moment this fitful
+light died again into a pained gravity. What was the use of reopening
+the perilous issues?
+
+Of course he wanted to see her. He wanted to see her so intensely that
+to do so would be both foolish and dangerous. He had spent these years
+drilling himself into a discipline which should enable him to think of
+Conscience as someone outside his personal world. To see her now would
+be to set into eruption a volcano which he had meant that the years
+should render extinct. No one but himself could know by what a doubtful
+margin he had won his fight that day on the P. and O. steamer. Could he
+do it again with the sight of her in his eyes and the sound of her voice
+in his ears?
+
+Yet, how could he without utter gracelessness decline?
+
+The fashion of the invitation, communicated through the husband, proved
+its motive. Conscience wished to show him that she could receive
+cordially and with no misgivings as to the outcome. She probably wished
+also to assure him that from all possible charges, he was now absolved.
+These motives were all gracious, but, he admitted with a queer smile of
+suffering, their result was rather akin to cruelty. He decided that he
+must meet her in the same spirit and allow her to feel that, through
+her, his life had suffered no permanent scar. It was palpably a case for
+gentlemanly lying.
+
+Though Eben's note to Farquaharson had said that Conscience requested
+him to extend the invitation, he had not yet mentioned to her the
+circumstance of its sending. He wished to study an unwarned face when
+she met Farquaharson. If she attempted to flash a warning of any sort;
+if her words cleverly shaped themselves into forms of private meaning
+for the lover: he would be there to note and correlate.
+
+During the morning's shopping Conscience had not seemed, to his narrow
+watching, impatient to separate from him, but shortly after noon she
+suggested, as though blaming herself for her previous remissness, "But
+you had business with your banker, didn't you? Doesn't that have to be
+seen to early?"
+
+"There's an abundance of time," he hastened to assure her. "I can look
+after that matter after lunch. I expect a telephone call regarding it at
+one, which can reach me in the hotel dining-room--unless you prefer
+being alone."
+
+But Conscience laughed.
+
+"Prefer being alone? Why should I? It's something to have a man along
+who's willing to be bored and carry parcels."
+
+As they entered the dining-room promptly on the hour, Conscience saw in
+the doorway the back and shoulders of a man who seemed to be searching
+the place for an acquaintance. In the bearing and erectness of the
+figure was something so familiar that it stabbed her with a sharp
+vividness of memory. She started and just then the man turned and she
+found herself face to face with Stuart Farquaharson.
+
+The Virginian stepped promptly forward with hand extended and a smile of
+greeting, but for the moment Conscience neither advanced nor lifted her
+hand. She stood unmoving and wide-eyed as if she had seen a ghost and
+her cheeks went deadly pale.
+
+"I only got your note a little while ago," he explained easily. "I am
+such a new hand at this theatrical game that I haven't learned yet to
+expect mail in the stage-door box. I hope I'm not inexcusably late."
+
+But the woman still stood mystified and startled. When she did speak it
+was to repeat blankly, "My note? What note?"
+
+Tollman had been standing a pace to the rear and his gaze, for all its
+schooling, was one of tense appraisal.
+
+Now he smilingly interposed, "Let me explain, Mr. Farquaharson, I took
+the liberty of couching my invitation in my wife's name because I knew
+she shared my wish to have you with us--but for her I reserved the
+pleasure of a complete surprise."
+
+There was for an instant an awkward tableau of embarrassment. A flush of
+instinctive anger rose to Farquaharson's temples. He had come because he
+thought Conscience wished to show him that she was happy and he
+forgiven. Now it appeared that her wishes had not been consulted, and
+she stood there with an expression almost stricken. Tollman had been
+impertinent--if nothing worse.
+
+To Eben Tollman it was all quite clear. Here was a guilty pair too
+confounded for immediate recovery. Farquaharson, being warned, was
+attempting to carry it off smoothly enough for both.
+
+But immediately the color swept back into the woman's face and
+cordiality came to her lips and eyes. Taking the Virginian's hand she
+smiled also on her husband. The very fact that Eben did not realize her
+reasons for dreading such an encounter was a proof of his complete trust
+in her, and this surprise had been planned by him in advance for her
+pleasure.
+
+"This is wonderful, Eben," she declared impulsively. "I was so
+astonished that it took my breath away. I didn't know, Stuart, that you
+were on this side of the ocean."
+
+"Such is fame," laughed Farquaharson with a mock disappointment, "with
+my name on every ash barrel and every alley fence in this delightful
+city!"
+
+They were acquitting themselves rather adroitly, under the
+circumstances, thought Eben, though their assumption of innocence was,
+perhaps, a shade overdone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+As they took their seats at the table reserved for them, a conflict of
+emotions made difficulty of conversation for two members of the trio.
+
+Their prefatory talk ran along those lines of commonplace question and
+answer in which the wide gap between their last meeting and the present
+was bridged.
+
+This, reflected Eben, was a part of the play designed to create and
+foster the impression that they had really been as completely out of
+touch as they pretended.
+
+"And so you left us, an unknown, and return a celebrity!" Conscience's
+voice and eyes held a hint of raillery which made Stuart say to himself:
+"Thank God she has not let the fog make her colorless."--"When I saw you
+last you were starting up the ladder of the law toward the Supreme
+Court--and now you reappear, crowned with literary distinction."
+
+A thought of those days when he had closed his law books and his house
+in Virginia to begin looking out on the roofs and chimney pots of old
+Greenwich village, rose to the Virginian's mind. It had all been an
+effort to forget. But he smiled as he answered.
+
+"I'm afraid it's a little early to claim celebrity. To-morrow morning I
+may read in the Providence papers that I'm only notorious."
+
+"You must tell me all about the play. You feel confident, of course?"
+she eagerly demanded. "It seems incredible that you were having your
+premiere here to-night and that I knew nothing of it--until now."
+
+It not only seemed incredible, mused Eben: It _was_ incredible. He was
+speculating upon what would have happened had he really been as blind as
+he was choosing to appear.
+
+"They say," smiled Stuart, "that every playwright is confident at his
+first opening--and never afterwards."
+
+It was hard for him to carry on a censored conversation, sitting here at
+the table with his thoughts falling into an insistent refrain. He had
+always known Conscience Williams and this was Conscience Tollman. He had
+told himself through years that he had succeeded ill in his determined
+effort of forgetting her; yet now he found her as truly a revelation in
+the vividness of her charm and the radiance of her beauty as though he
+had brought faint memories--or none--to the meeting. His blood was
+tingling in his arteries with a rediscovery which substituted for the
+old sense of loss a new and more poignant realization. It would have
+been better had he been brusque, even discourteous, replying to the
+morning's invitation that he was too busy to accept. But he had come and
+except for that first moment of astonishment Conscience had been gay and
+untroubled. She at least was safe from the perils which this reunion
+held for him. So, as he chatted, he kept before his thoughts like a
+standard seen fitfully through the smoke of battle the reminder, "She
+must feel, as she wishes to feel, that it has left me unscathed."
+
+"But, Stuart," exclaimed Conscience suddenly, "all these night-long
+rehearsals and frantic sessions of rewriting must be positive deadly.
+You look completely fagged out."
+
+Farquaharson nodded. His weariness, which excitement had momentarily
+mitigated had returned with a heavy sense of dreariness. He was being
+called upon now not to rehearse a company in the interpreting of his
+three-act comedy, but to act himself, without rehearsal, in a drama to
+which no last act could bring a happy ending.
+
+"I _am_ tired," he admitted. "But to-night tells the story. Whichever
+way it goes I'll have done all I can do about it. Then I mean to run
+away somewhere and rest. After all fatigue is not fatal."
+
+But Mrs. Tollman was looking at the ringed and shadowed eyes and they
+challenged her ready sympathy. This was not the splendidly fit physical
+specimen she had known.
+
+"Yes, you must do that," she commanded gravely, then added in a lighter
+voice: "I'd always thought of the first night of a new play as a time of
+keen exhilaration and promise for both author and star."
+
+"Our star is probably indulging in plain and fancy hysterics at this
+moment," he said with a memory of the last glimpse he had had of that
+illustrious lady's face. "And as for the author, he is dreaming chiefly
+of some quiet spot where one can lie stretched on the beach whenever he
+isn't lying in his bed." He paused, then added irrelevently, "I was
+thinking this morning of the way the breakers roll in across the bay
+from Chatham."
+
+Eben had been the listener, a role into which he usually fell when
+conversation became general, but now he assumed a more active
+participation.
+
+"Chatham is quite a distance from us, Mr. Farquaharson," he suggested,
+"but it's only about two hundred yards from our terrace to the float in
+the cove. However, you know that cove yourself."
+
+Into Farquaharson's face came the light of keen remembrance. Yes, he
+knew that cove. He and Conscience had often been swimming there. He
+wondered if, on a clear day, one could still see the schools of tiny
+fishes twelve feet below in water translucently blue.
+
+"Yes," he acknowledged, "I haven't forgotten the cove. It opens through
+a narrow channel into the lesser bay and there used to be an eel pot
+near the opening. Is that eel pot still there?"
+
+Eben Tollman smiled. His manner was frankly gracious, while it escaped
+effusiveness.
+
+"Well, now, Mr. Farquaharson," he suggested, "I can't say as to that,
+but why don't you come and investigate for yourself? You can leave by
+the noon train to-morrow and be with us in a little over two hours--I
+wish we could wait and see your play this evening, but I'm afraid I must
+get back to-day."
+
+An instinctive sense of courtesy alone prevented Stuart's jaw from
+dropping in amazement. He remembered Eben Tollman as a dour and
+illiberal bigot whom the community called mean and whom no man called
+gracious. Had Conscience, by the sunlight of her spontaneity and love
+wrought this miracle of change? If so she was more wonderful than even
+he had admitted.
+
+"It's good of you, Mr. Tollman," he found himself murmuring, "but I'm
+afraid that's hardly possible."
+
+"Hardly possible? Nonsense!" Tollman laughed aloud this time. "Why,
+you've just been telling us that you were on the verge of running away
+somewhere to rest--and that the only undecided point was a choice of
+destination."
+
+Stuart glanced hurriedly toward Conscience as if for assistance, but her
+averted and tranquil face told him nothing. Yet under her unruffled
+composure swirled a whirlpool of agitation and apprehension, greater
+than his own.
+
+In a spirit of amazement, she had heard her husband tender his
+invitation.
+
+Now as Stuart sat across the table, she was rediscovering many little
+tricks of individuality which had endeared him as a lover, or perhaps
+been dear because he was her lover, and in the sum of these tremendous
+trifles lay a terrific danger which she did not underestimate. His
+presence would mean comparison; contrast between drab reality and
+rainbow longings.
+
+But how could she hint any of these things to the husband who, by his
+very invitation, was proving his complete trust, or the lover to whom
+she must seem the confidently happy wife?
+
+"I'm sure Conscience joins me in insisting that you come," went on Mr.
+Tollman persuasively. "You can wear a flannel shirt and do as you like
+because we are informal folk--and you would be a member of the family."
+
+That was rather a long speech for Eben Tollman, and as he finished
+Conscience felt the glances of both men upon her, awaiting her
+confirmation.
+
+She smiled and Stuart detected no flaw in the seeming genuineness of her
+cordiality.
+
+"We _know_ he likes the place," she announced in tones of whimsical
+bantering, "and if he refuses it must mean that he doesn't think much of
+the people."
+
+Stuart was so entirely beguiled that his reply came with instant
+repudiation of such a construction.
+
+"When to-morrow's train arrives," he declared, "I will be a passenger,
+unless an indignant audience lynches me to-night."
+
+They had meant to meet surreptitiously, mused Eben Tollman, and being
+thwarted, they had juggled their conversation into an exaggeration of
+innocence. Conscience's face during that first unguarded moment in the
+dining-room had mirrored a terror which could have had no other origin
+than a guilty love. His own course of conduct was clear. He must, no
+matter how it tried his soul, conceal every intimation of suspicion. The
+geniality which had astonished them both must continue with a convincing
+semblance of genuineness. Out of a pathetic blindness of attitude he
+must see, eagle-eyed.
+
+But Conscience, as they drove homeward, was reflecting upon the frequent
+miscarriage of kindness. Her husband had planned for her a delightful
+surprise and his well-meaning gift had been--a crisis.
+
+Stuart sat that night in the gallery of the Garrick theater with
+emotions strangely confused.
+
+Below him and about him was such an audience as characterizes those
+towns which are frequently used as experimental stations for the drama.
+It regarded itself as sophisticated in matters theatrical and was keenly
+alive to the fact that it sat as a jury which must not be too
+provincially ready of praise.
+
+Yet the author, hiding there beyond reach of the genial Grady, and the
+possibility of a curtain call, was not thinking solely of his play.
+Stones had been rolled to-day from tombs in which he had sought to bury
+many ghosts of the past. With the resurrection came undeniable fears and
+equally undeniable flashes of instinctive elation. He was seeing
+Conscience, not across an interval of years but of hours--and to-morrow
+he was to see her again.
+
+When the first act ended the man who had written the comedy became
+conscious that he had followed its progress with an incomplete
+absorption, and when the curtain fell, to a flattering salvo of
+applause, he came, with a start, back from thoughts foreign to the
+theater.
+
+The conclusion of the second act, with its repeated curtain calls and
+its cries of "Author, Author!" assured him that his effort was not a
+failure, and when at last it was all over and he stood in the wings
+congratulating the members of his company, the wine of assured success
+tingled in his veins--and his thoughts were for the moment of that
+alone.
+
+"They don't hate us quite so much now," said Mr. Grady as he clapped a
+hand on Stuart's shoulder. "The thing is a hit--and for once I've got a
+piece that I can take into town without tearing it to pieces and doing
+it over."
+
+Yet in his room afterward he paced the floor restively for a long while
+before he sought his bed.
+
+He was balancing up the sheets of his life to date. On the credit side
+were such successes as most men would covet, but on the debit side stood
+one item which offset the gratification and left a heavy balance.
+
+This visit of to-morrow was a foolish thing. It might be wiser to
+telegraph Tollman that unexpected matters had developed, necessitating a
+change of plan.
+
+It is a rash courage which courts disaster. From the small writing desk
+near his bed he took a telegraph blank, but when he had written, torn up
+and rewritten the message he halted and stood dubiously considering the
+matter. The hand which had been lifted to ring for a bell-boy fell at
+his side.
+
+After all this was simply a running away from the forms of danger while
+the danger itself remained. Into such action Conscience must read his
+fear to trust himself near her--and he had undertaken to make her feel
+secure in her own contentment. It was too late to draw back now. He must
+go through with it--but he would make his stay brief and every moment
+must be guarded.
+
+At noon the next day he dropped, clad in flannels, from the train at the
+station. It had been a hot trip, but even with a cooler temperature he
+might not have escaped that slight moisture which excitement and doubt
+had brought to his temples and his palms.
+
+These miles of railway travel since he had reached the Cape had been so
+many separate reminders of the past and he had not arrived unshaken.
+
+But there on the platform stood Conscience Tollman, with a serene smile
+of welcome on her lips, and as the chauffeur took his bags she led him
+to the waiting car.
+
+"Come on," she said, as though there had been no lapse of years since
+they had stood here before, "there's just time to get into our bathing
+suits and have a swim before luncheon."
+
+The main street of the village with the shade of its elms and silver
+oaks, and the white of tidy houses, setting among flowers, was a page
+out of a book long closed; a book in which had been written the most
+unforgettable things of life. Besides well-remembered features, there
+were details which had been forgotten and which now set free currents of
+reminiscence--such as the battered figurehead of an old schooner raised
+on high over a front door and a wind-mill as antique of pattern as those
+to which Don Quixote gave battle.
+
+And when the winding street ran out into a sandy country road Stuart
+found himself amid surroundings that teemed with the spirit of the past.
+
+But over all the bruising comparisons of past and present, the peace of
+the sky was like a benediction, and his weariness yielded to its calming
+influence. He had been away and had come back tired, and for the
+present, it was better to ignore all the revolutionary changes that lay
+between then and now.
+
+They talked about trivial things, along the way, with a lightness of
+manner, which was none the less as delicately cautious as the footsteps
+of a cat walking on a shelf of fragile china. Each felt the challenge
+and response of natures keyed to the same pitch of life's tuning fork.
+
+"Why are all the Cape Cod wagons painted blue and all the barn doors
+green?" asked the man, and Conscience demanded in return, "Why does
+everything that man controls in New England follow a fixed color of
+thought?"
+
+When the car drew up before the house which he remembered as a miser's
+abode, his astonishment was freshly stirred. Here was a place
+transformed, with a dignified beauty of residence and grounds which
+could scarcely be bettered.
+
+"How did the play go?" demanded Tollman from the doorway, with an
+interest that seemed as surprising as that of a Trappist Abbot for a
+matter of worldliness. "The papers came on the train with you, so we
+haven't had the verdict, yet."
+
+And then while Stuart was answering Conscience enjoined him that, if
+they were to swim before lunch, time was scant and these amenities must
+wait.
+
+"Aren't you going in?" demanded the visitor and the host shook his head
+with an indulgent smile.
+
+"No," he answered. "That's for you youngsters. I may drop down to the
+float later, but, barring accident, I stay out of salt water."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+Less in words than by a subtle though unmistakable manner, the husband
+made it clear to Stuart Farquaharson that his status in this
+establishment was to be as intimately free as if he had been the brother
+instead of the former lover of Conscience. It was difficult to reconcile
+this unqualified acceptance with every impression he had formed of Eben,
+and while he unpacked his bag in his bedroom a sense of perplexity
+lingered with him. But as he was changing into his bathing suit a
+solution presented itself which seemed to bear the stamp of four-square
+logic.
+
+Eben Tollman was neither the ogre he had formerly seemed nor yet the
+utterly careless husband that his present conduct appeared to indicate.
+He had simply recognized in the days of Stuart's ascendancy something
+akin to disdain in the Virginian's attitude toward him. Now time had
+demonstrated which was the victor, and Tollman was permitting his pride
+the pardonable gratification of showing the younger man its security and
+confidence.
+
+Conscience had not yet appeared when Stuart came down, and neither was
+Eben in evidence, so the visitor stood in the open door with the summer
+breeze striking gratefully against his bare arms and legs until he heard
+a laugh at the stair-head and wheeled to look quickly up. The picture he
+saw there made his heart beat fast and brought a sudden fire into his
+eyes.
+
+Conscience stood above him with her arms lifted in an attitude of one
+about to dive and in the gay colors of her bathing dress and cap; in the
+untrammeled grace of slender curves she seemed the spirit of vivid
+allurement. With an answering laugh the man stepped to the lower
+landing and raised his own arms.
+
+"Come on!" he challenged. "Jump, I'll catch you."
+
+But as suddenly as though he had been struck, he dropped his arms at his
+sides, realizing the wild, almost ungovernable impulse which had swept
+him to take her in his arms in contempt of every consideration except
+the violence of his wish to do so. Moments like this were
+unsettling--and to be guarded against.
+
+Then she had come down to the hall and he was on his knees, as he had
+been on that other day at Chatham, tying the ribbons of her bathing
+slippers with fingers that were none too steady.
+
+But while they dived in water which was almost unbelievably blue and
+clear, they might have been two children as irresponsibly full of sheer
+zest and sparkle as the bubbles that leaped brightly up from their
+out-thrust and dripping arms. Forty minutes later Stuart was following
+her up the twisting path between pines and bayberry bushes while the
+salt water streamed from them.
+
+Eben Tollman had not after all found time to join them at the float, and
+glancing up from his chair on the terrace where he sat almost completely
+surrounded by a disarray of daily papers, he was now somewhat
+disconcerted at their early return.
+
+He had been inwardly writhing in a tortured frame of mind which their
+arrival brought a necessity for masking and the things which had made
+him so writhe had been the reviews in these papers of "The Longest Way
+Round."
+
+Eben was not an habitual reader of dramatic comment. The theater itself
+he regarded as an amusement designed for minds more tinctured with
+childish frivolity than his own.
+
+Yet since Conscience and Stuart had left the house he had been mulling
+over, with the fascination of a rising gorge and a bitter resentment,
+paragraphs of encomium upon his hated guest. Had he ever indulged
+himself in the luxury of profanity it would have gushed now in torrents
+of curses over Stuart Farquaharson, upon whom life seemed to lavish her
+gifts with as reckless a prodigality as that of a licentious monarch for
+an unworthy favorite.
+
+"Nothing but applause!" exclaimed Eben to himself, with a quiet madness
+of vituperation--entirely unconscious of any taint of falsity or
+injustice. "He makes no effort beyond the easy things of
+self-indulgence, yet because he has a supercilious charm, he parades
+through life seizing its prizes! Women love him--men praise him--and
+every step is a forward step!"
+
+He had, indeed, been reading no ordinary words of praise, bestowed with
+the critic's usual guardedness. In Providence last night the unusual had
+occurred and the reviewers had found themselves acclaiming a new
+luminary in the firmament of present-day playwrights. Later the men with
+New York reputations would be claiming Stuart Farquaharson's discovery,
+and here in the Rhode Island town they had recognized him first. They
+had no intention of relinquishing that distinction which goes with the
+first clear heralding of a rising genius.
+
+As Eben Tollman read these details in cold type, each note of their
+eulogium scorched a nerve of his own jealous antipathy. Of course,
+Conscience would take all this flattery, spread before her lover, as a
+mark of genuine merit--as the conqueror's cloth of gold. It seemed that
+he himself had succeeded in bringing Stuart on the scene only that the
+woman might smell the incense being burned in his honor.
+
+But Eben regulated his features into a calm and indulgent smile as the
+two of them came across the clipped lawn.
+
+They made a splendid pair with the sun shining on their wet shoulders;
+the woman's neck and arms gleaming softly with the tint of browned
+ivory; the man's tanned and strong over rippling muscles. Their drenched
+bathing suits emphasized the delicacy of her rounded curves, and his
+almost Hellenic fitness of body.
+
+"I've been reading what the critics say, and my congratulations are
+ready," announced the elder man calmly with a semblance of sincerity.
+"It would appear that last night was a triumph."
+
+For the next few days Stuart Farquaharson surrendered himself to the
+_dolce far niente_ of salt air and sun and the joy of their reviving
+influences. All contingent dangers he was satisfied to leave to the
+future.
+
+There was a new and spontaneous gayety in the woman's manner, but the
+Virginian did not know that it was new. Eben Tollman, however, marked
+the contrast and was at no loss in attributing it to its fancied cause.
+He gave no thought to the truth that she was splendidly striving to keep
+flying at the mast-head of her life the colors of artificial success.
+
+So each in his own way, Eben and Stuart were deceived by Conscience, one
+believing her indubitably guilty and the other thinking her
+unquestionably happy.
+
+In the elder man a ferment of bitterness was working toward the ends of
+deranged deviltry--and its influence was all secret so that its tincture
+of insanity left no mark upon his open behavior.
+
+The difficulty of maintaining a surface guise of friendliness toward the
+man whom he believed to be successfully wrecking his home might have
+appeared insuperable. In point of the actual it was made easy--even a
+thing of zest--by virtue of a lapse into that moral degeneracy which was
+no longer sane. The growth of craftiness for the forwarding of a single
+idea became uncanny in its purposeful efficiency and a morbid pleasure
+to its possessor. Eben seemed outwardly to have lain aside his
+strait-jacket of bigotry and to have become singularly humanized.
+
+One afternoon Stuart and Conscience went for an all-day sail. The
+husband had promised to accompany them, but at the last moment pleaded
+an excuse. It was in his plan to continue his seeming of entire
+trustfulness--and nothing better furthered that attitude than sending
+them away together in the close companionship of a sail boat--while, in
+reality, the presence of Ira Forman, tending tiller and sheet, was as
+effective as the watchfulness of a duenna or the guardianship of a
+harem's chief eunuch.
+
+Ira Forman rose from his task of packing the luncheon paraphernalia on
+the white beach near a life-saving station. He had regaled them as they
+picniced with narratives of shipwreck and tempest, swelling with the
+prideful importance of a singer of sagas. Now he bit into a plug which
+looked like a chunk of black cake and spat into the sand.
+
+"See that boat over yon in the norrer channal? You wouldn't never
+suspicion that a one-armed man was sailin' her now, would you?"
+
+"No!" Stuart spoke with the rising inflection of a flattering interest.
+"Has he only one arm?"
+
+Ira's nod was solemnly affirmative. "He shot the other one off oncet
+while he was a-gunnin' and, in a manner of speakin', it was the makin'
+of him. Until he lost his right hand an' had to figure out methods of
+doin' double shift with the left, he wasn't half as smart as what he is
+now. In a manner of speakin' it made a man of him."
+
+The amused glance which flashed between Conscience and her companion at
+this bit of philosophy was quickly stifled as they recognized the
+gravity which sat upon the face of its enunciator, and Stuart inquired
+in all seriousness, "But how does he manage it? There's mains'l and jib
+and tiller--not to mention center board and boom-crotch--and sometimes
+the reef-points."
+
+The boatman nodded emphatically. "But he does it though. He's educated
+his feet an' his teeth to do things God never meant 'em to." Then in a
+voice of naive emphasis he demanded, "Did either one of you ever lose
+anything that belonged to you? I mean somethin' that was a part of
+yourselves--somethin' that was just tore out by the roots, like?"
+
+Stuart wondered uneasily if the stiffness of his expression was not a
+thing which Conscience could read like print; if the simple-minded
+clam-digger had not quite unintentionally ripped away the mask which he
+had, until now, worn with a reasonable success.
+
+But Conscience had missed the moment of self-betrayal because an
+identical anxiety had for the instant blinded her intuition.
+
+"Wa'al," continued Ira complacently, "I ain't never lost a leg nor yet
+an arm--but, in a manner of speakin', I cal'late I know just round about
+what it's like. A feller's life ain't never the same ag'in. That man
+that's handlin' that boat now--he wasn't worth much to hisself nor
+nobody else a'fore he went a-gunnin', that time."
+
+He paused, wondering vaguely why his simple recital had brought a
+constrained silence, where there had been laughter and voluble
+conversation, then feeling that the burden of talk lay with him, he
+resorted to repetition.
+
+"The reason I spoke the way I did just now was I wondered if either one
+of you ever had anything like that happen to you. Not that I presumed
+you'd ever lost a limb--but there's lots of other things folks can lose
+that hurts as much; things that can be hauled out by the roots, like;
+things that don't never leave people quite the same afterwards."
+
+Stuart smiled, though with a taint of ruefulness.
+
+"I guess, Ira," he agreed, "almost everybody has lost something."
+
+Ira stood nodding like a China mandarin, then suddenly he came out of
+his preoccupation to announce:
+
+"I'll begin fetchin' all this plunder back to the boat now. I cal'late
+to catch the tide in about half an hour. You folks had better forelay to
+come aboard by then."
+
+Conscience and Stuart strolled along the stretch of beach until, around
+a jutting elbow of sand dunes, the woman halted by a blackened fragment
+of a ship's skeleton. She sat for a while looking out with a reminiscent
+amusement in her eyes--and something more cryptic.
+
+The man turned his gaze inward to the green of the beach-grass beyond
+the sand where he could make out a bit of twisting road. There was
+something tantalizingly familiar about that scrap of landscape;
+something which stirred yet eluded a memory linked with powerful
+associations.
+
+Then abruptly it all came back.
+
+His car had been standing just at that visible stretch of road on the
+afternoon when Conscience had begged him not to criticize her father and
+he had retorted bitterly. He could see again the way in which she had
+flinched and hear again the voice in which she had replied, "You know
+why I listen to him, Stuart. You know that I didn't listen ... before
+his stroke. I didn't listen when I told him that if you went, I went,
+too, did I?"
+
+That was long ago. Now she was studying him with a grave scrutiny as she
+inquired, "I've been wondering, Stuart, why you have never married. You
+ought to have a home."
+
+The man averted his face quickly and pretended to be interested in the
+vague shape of a steamer almost lost in the mists that lay along the
+horizon. Those sweetly curved lips had been torturing him with their
+allurement. From them he wanted kisses--not dispassionate counsel--but
+he replied abstractedly:
+
+"I'm a writer of fiction, Conscience. Such persons are under suspicion
+of being unstable--and temperamental. Matrimonially they are considered
+bad risks."
+
+Her laughter rang with a teasing mockery, but, had he known it, she had
+caught and been startled by that absorption which had not been wholly
+banished from his eyes. It was not yet quite a discovery, but still it
+was something more than a suspicion--that he still loved her. In its
+breaking upon her was a strange blending of fright and elation and it
+directed her subsequent questions into channels that might bring
+revelations to her intuition.
+
+"I've known you for some time, Stuart," she announced with a whimsical
+smile which made her lips the more kissable. "Much too long for you to
+attempt the pose of a Don Juan. I hate to shatter a romance, but the
+fact is, you are perfectly sane--and you could be reliably constant."
+
+This constancy, he reflected, had already cost him the restlessness of a
+Salathiel, but his response was more non-committal than his thought.
+
+"If my first reason is rejected," he said patiently, "I suppose I must
+give another. A writer must be absolutely unhampered--at least until his
+storehouse is well stocked with experience."
+
+"Being unattached isn't being unhampered," she persisted with a spirited
+flash in her eyes. "It's just being--incomplete."
+
+"Possibly I'm like Ira's one-armed man," he hazarded. "Maybe 'in a
+manner of speakin' I wouldn't be half as smart as what I am' if I didn't
+have to face that affliction."
+
+But with her next question Conscience forced him from his defense of
+jocular evasiveness.
+
+"Did you know, Stuart, that--that Mrs. Holbury came to see me?"
+
+He feared that she had caught his flinch of surprise at that
+announcement but he replied evenly:
+
+"Marian wrote to me that she had seen you. How you two happened to meet,
+I have never guessed."
+
+"She came here, Stuart, to explain things which she thought put you in
+an unsightly light--and to say that whatever blame there was belonged to
+her."
+
+"She did that?" Stuart Farquaharson's face reddened to the temples and
+his voice became feelingly defensive. "If Marian told you that she had
+been more to blame than I, she let her generosity do her a wrong. I
+can't accept an advantage gained at such a cost, Conscience. I think all
+of her mistakes grew out of an exaggerated innocence and she's paid high
+enough for them. Marian Holbury is a woman who needs no defense unless
+it's against pure slander."
+
+"Stuart," Conscience's voice was deep with earnestness, "a woman only
+sets herself a task like that because she loves a man."
+
+"Oh, no," he hastily demurred. "It may be from friendship, too."
+
+But his companion shook her head. "With her it was love. She told me
+so."
+
+"Told you so!" Farquaharson echoed the words in tones of almost militant
+incredulity, and Conscience went on thoughtfully:
+
+"I was wondering if, after all, she might not make you very happy--and
+might not be very happy herself in doing it."
+
+If she was deliberately hurting him it was not out of a light curiosity
+or any meanness of motive. Her own tranquillity was severely pressed,
+but she must know the truth, and if a love for herself, which could come
+to no fruition, stood between him and possible happiness, she must do
+what she could to sweep it away. This was a new thought, but a grave
+one.
+
+For a while Stuart was silent, as he studied the high colors of the sea
+and sky, contracting his eyes as if the glare pained them, and in his
+face Conscience read, clear, the truth of her suspicion.
+
+"Conscience," he said at last, "I asked Marian to marry me two years
+ago--and she refused. That's all I can say."
+
+But for the woman it was enough. She needed no explanation of why Marian
+had refused an offer from the lips and unseconded by the heart. She came
+to her feet, and her knees felt weak. She was afraid to let this
+conversation progress. He loved her--and if he could read the prohibited
+eagerness of her heart he would come breaking through barriers as a
+charging elephant breaks its way through light timber.
+
+"Ira is calling," she announced lightly, "and he speaks with the voice
+of the tide. We must hurry or we won't make it back across the
+shallows."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+But that night it happened, as it had happened once before, that the
+stars seemed exaggerated in size and multiplied in number. On the breeze
+came riding the distant voice of the surf with its call to staring
+wakefulness and restlessness of spirit.
+
+Conscience went early to her room, feeling that unless her taut nerves
+could have the relaxation of solitude, she must scream out. To-day's
+discovery had kindled anew all the fires of insurgency that burned in
+her, inflaming her heart to demand the mating joy which could make of
+marriage not a formula of duty and hard allegiance, but a splendid and
+rightful fulfillment.
+
+As she sat by the window of her unlighted room, her eyes were staring
+tensely into the night and the pink ovals of her nails were pressed into
+the palms of her hands. Her gaze, as if under a spell of hypnosis, was
+following the glow of a cigar among the pines, where Stuart was seeking
+to walk off the similar unrest which made sleep impossible. "He still
+loves me," she kept repeating to herself with a stunned realization, "he
+still loves me!"
+
+She hoped fervently that Eben was asleep. To have to talk to him while
+her strained mood was so full of rebellion would be hard; to have to
+submit to his autumnal kiss, would make that mood blaze into revulsion.
+
+But at last she heard a footfall on the stair and in the hall and held
+her breath in a sort of terror as they ended just outside her threshold.
+She knew that Eben was trying her door--trying it first without knocking
+after his churlish custom. She hoped that he would pass on when
+darkness and silence were his answers, but after a moment came a rap and
+when it met with no reply it was repeated with a peremptory insistence.
+Conscience drew a long breath, and, shivering with distaste, she slowly
+lighted a candle. Then she went shudderingly to the door and opened it.
+
+In the stress of the moment, as she shot back the bolt, she surrendered
+for just an instant to her feelings; feelings which she had never before
+allowed expression even in the confessional of her thoughts. She knew
+now how Heloise had felt when she wildly told herself that she would
+rather be mistress of Abelarde than wife to the King.
+
+Eben standing in the doorway, smiling, seemed to her disordered mood the
+figure of a Satyr.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I've had a letter from Ebbett," Tollman commented one day at luncheon.
+"Like Stuart here, he's been working too hard and he wants to know if he
+can run down for the week-end."
+
+When Conscience had declared her approval the host turned to
+Farquaharson. "I shouldn't wonder if you'd like Ebbett. We were
+classmates at college, and he was my best man. Aside from that, he's one
+of the leading exponents, in this country, of the newer psychology--a
+disciple of Freud and Jung, and while many of his ideas strike me as
+extreme they are often interesting."
+
+The prophecy proved more than true, for with Dr. Ebbett as a guide,
+Farquaharson gratified that avid interest which every sincere writer
+must feel for explorations into new fields of thought.
+
+One evening the two sat alone on the terrace in the communion of lighted
+cigars and creature comfort long after their host and hostess had gone
+to their beds, and Ebbett said thoughtfully, and without introduction:
+
+"It seems to have worked out. And God knows I'm glad, because I had my
+misgivings."
+
+"What has worked out?" inquired the younger man and the neurologist
+jerked his head toward the house.
+
+"This marriage," he said. "When I came to the wedding, I could not
+escape a heavy portent of danger. There was the difference in age to
+start with and it was heightened by Eben's solemn and grandiose
+tendencies. His nature had too much shadow--not enough sunlight. The
+girl on the other hand had a vitality which was supernormal."
+
+He paused and Stuart Farquaharson, restrained by a flood of personal
+reminiscence, said nothing. Finally the doctor went on:
+
+"But there was more than that. I'm a Massachusetts man myself, but Eben
+is--or was--in type, too damned much the New Englander."
+
+Stuart smiled to himself, but his prompting question came in the tone of
+commonplace.
+
+"Just what does that mean to you, Doctor--too much the New Englander?"
+
+Ebbett laughed. "I use the word only as a term--as descriptive of an
+intolerance which exists everywhere, north and south, east and west--but
+in Eben it was exaggerated. Fortunately, his wife's exuberance of spirit
+seems to have brightened it into normality."
+
+"But what, exactly, did you fear, Doctor?"
+
+"I'm afraid I'd have to grow tediously technical to make that clear, but
+if you can stand it, I'll try."
+
+"I wish you would," the younger man assured him.
+
+Dr. Ebbett leaned back and studied the ash of his cigar. "Have you ever
+noticed in your experience," he abruptly demanded, "that oftentimes the
+man who most craftily evades his taxes or indulges in devious business
+methods, cannot bring himself to sanction any of the polite and innocent
+lies which society accepts as conventions?"
+
+Stuart nodded and the physician went on:
+
+"In short we encounter, every day, the apparent hypocrite. Yet many such
+men are not consciously dishonest. They are merely victims of
+disassociation."
+
+"I'm afraid," acknowledged Stuart, "I'm still too much the tyro to
+understand the term very fully."
+
+"None of us understand it as fully as we'd like," Dr. Ebbett assured
+him. "But we are gradually learning. In every man's consciousness there
+is a stream of thought which we call the brain content. Below the
+surface of consciousness, there is a second stream of thought as
+unrecognized as a dream, but none the less potent."
+
+The speaker paused and Farquaharson waited in silence for him to
+continue.
+
+"The broader a man's habit of thought," went on the physician slowly,
+"the fewer impulses he is called upon to repress because he is frank.
+The narrower his code, the more things there are which are thrust down
+into his proscribed list of inhibitions. The peril lies in the fact that
+this stream of repressed thought is acting almost as directly on the
+man's life and conduct, as the one of which he is constantly aware. He
+has more than one self, and since he admits but one, the others are in
+constant and secret intrigue, against him."
+
+"And this makes for unconscious hypocrisy?"
+
+"Undoubtedly. Such a man may be actively dishonest and escape all sense
+of guilt because he has in his mind logic-proof compartments in which
+certain matters are kept immured and safe from conflict with the reason
+that he employs for other affairs. It was this exact quirk of lopsided
+righteousness which enabled our grandsires to burn witches while they
+sang psalms."
+
+"You think our host is of the type most susceptible to such a danger?"
+
+"Yes, because the intolerant man always stands on the border of
+insanity."
+
+"But, Doctor," Stuart put his question with a keenly edged interest,
+"for such a condition as you describe, is there a cure, or is it only a
+matter of analysis?"
+
+"Ah," replied Ebbett gravely, "that's a large question. Usually a cure
+is quite possible, but it always depends upon the uncompromising
+frankness of the patient's confessions. He must strip his soul naked
+before we can help him. If we can trace back into subconsciousness and
+identify the disturbing influences, they resolve themselves into a sore
+that has been lanced. They are no longer making war from the
+darkness--and with light they cease to exist."
+
+As the neurologist broke off the aged and decrepit dog for which Eben
+Tollman had discovered no fondness until it had been exiled to the
+garage, came limping around the corner of the terrace and licked
+wistfully at Stuart's knee.
+
+"That dog," commented the physician, "ought to be put out of his misery.
+He's a hopeless cripple and he needs a merciful dose of morphine. I'll
+mention it to Eben."
+
+"It would be a gracious act," assented the younger man. "Life has become
+a burden to the old fellow."
+
+Dr. Ebbett rose and tossed his cigar stump outward. "We've been sitting
+here theorizing for hours after the better-ordered members of the
+household have gone to their beds," he said. "It's about time to say
+good night." And the two men climbed the stairs and separated toward the
+doors of their respective rooms.
+
+Dr. Ebbett left just after breakfast the next day, but on the verge of
+his departure he remembered and mentioned the dog.
+
+"I've been meaning to shoot him," confessed Tollman, "but I've shrunk
+from playing executioner."
+
+"Shooting is an awkward method," advised the doctor. "I have here a
+grain and a half of morphine in quarter-grain tablets. They will cause
+no suffering. They are readily soluble, won't be tasted, and will do the
+work."
+
+"How much shall I give? I don't want to bungle it."
+
+"It's simply a question of dosage. Let him have a half grain, I
+shouldn't care to give that much to either a dog or a man--unless a drug
+habitue--without expecting death--but there's the car and it's been a
+delightful visit."
+
+Possibly some instinct warned the superannuated dog of his master's
+design. At all events he was never poisoned--he merely disappeared, and
+for the mystery of his fading from sight there was no solution.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The case for the prosecution was going well, thought Eben Tollman, and
+building upward step by step toward a conviction. But step by step, too,
+was growing the development of his own condition toward madness, the
+more grewsomely terrible because its monomania gave no outward
+indication.
+
+One evening as the three sat on the terrace, it pleased Eben Tollman to
+regale them with music. He was not himself an instrumentalist, but in
+the living-room was a machine which supplied that deficiency, and this
+afternoon had brought a fresh consignment of records from Boston. This,
+too, was a night of stars, but rather of languorous than disquieting
+influences, and the talk had flowed along in serenity, until gradually,
+under the spell of the music the two younger members of the trio fell
+musingly silent.
+
+Tollman had chosen a program out of which breathed a potency of passion
+and allurement. Voices rich with the gold of love's abandon sang the
+songs of composers, wholly dedicated to love's own form of expression.
+
+Stuart Farquaharson's cigar had gone out and he sat meditative in the
+shadows of the terrace--himself a shadowy shape, with his eyes fixed
+upon Conscience, and Conscience, too, remained quiet with that
+unstirring stillness which bespeaks a mood of dreams. Something in the
+air, subtle yet powerful, was working upon them its influence.
+
+"Eben seems to be in a sentimental mood this evening," suggested
+Farquaharson at last, bringing himself with something of a wrench out of
+his abstraction and speaking in a matter-of-fact voice. He remembered
+belatedly that his cigar had gone out and as he relighted it there was a
+slight trembling of his fingers.
+
+"Yes, doesn't he?" Mrs. Tollman's laugh held a trace of nervous tremor,
+too. "And I remember saying once that that was just as possible as the
+idea of Napoleon going into a monastery."
+
+"Are we going to swim before breakfast to-morrow?" asked the man,
+distrusting himself just now with topics touching the past and
+sentiment.
+
+"Suppose we walk down to the float and have a look at the state of the
+tide," she suggested. "Then as Ira would say we can 'fore-lay' for the
+morning."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+AS they went together down the steep path, there was no flaw in the
+woman's composure and no fault in the lightness of her manner, but when
+they reached the float, with the dark water fall of mirrored stars she
+turned abruptly so that she stood face to face with the man. In the
+light of the crescent moon he saw that her eyes were wide and full of a
+deep seriousness. For a moment she did not speak and recognizing the
+light of fixed resolve and the attitude of steeling herself for some
+ordeal, he also refrained from words until she should choose her moment.
+
+There was an ethereal quality in the beauty of her pale face,
+jet-crowned in the starlight, and a Jeanne d'Arc gallantry in the
+straightness of her slender figure. When at last she began to speak it
+was in a low voice, vibrant with repression, but unwavering and full of
+purpose.
+
+"Stuart," she said, "I am going to call on you to help me, by being all
+that a friend can be--by proving your loyalty and obeying a command
+that's very hard to give ... by obeying it without even asking why."
+
+"Command me," he said quietly, and for just a moment there was a threat
+of faltering in her manner, as though the edict were indeed too hard,
+but almost at once she went on in a firm voice.
+
+"You must go away. You must go to-morrow. That's what I brought you down
+here to tell you."
+
+"Of course, I have no choice but obedience," he replied simply. "But I
+can't go without asking questions and having them answered."
+
+"Yes, you must."
+
+"Why are you sending me away?"
+
+"I hoped it would be possible," she said as her dark eyes filled with
+pain and conflict, "for this visit to end without these things having to
+be said. I hoped you'd just go away without finding out.... I've done my
+best and tried to play the part ... but I can't keep it up forever....
+Now I'm asking your help."
+
+"Conscience," he reminded her, and his tone held a sympathy which
+discounted his stubbornness in demanding the full reasons for her
+decision, "I don't want to press you with questions when you ask me, in
+the name of friendship, not to do it ... but--" He paused a moment and
+continued with a shake of his head. "We must be honest with each other.
+Once before we let a failure to fully understand separate us. I can't
+make the same life-wrecking mistake twice. Don't you see that I must
+know why I am being banished?"
+
+Slowly she nodded her head in reluctant assent. Her figure seemed to
+waver as with faintness, but when Stuart reached out his arms to catch
+her, she stepped back and stood with regained steadiness.
+
+"I suppose ..." she acknowledged, "I must be fully honest with you.... I
+suppose I was only trying to make it easier for myself ... and that I
+must face it fully."
+
+"Face just what, Conscience?"
+
+"The facts. When you came, Stuart, I believed that you had been cured of
+the old heartbreak. I believed it until--the other day when we talked
+about Marian Holbury--then I knew--that you were still in love with me."
+
+Farquaharson's face paled and his lips tightened.
+
+"I had tried," he said slowly, "to let you think the things which might
+make you happier--but I don't seem to be a good actor."
+
+"You were a splendid actor, Stuart, but you had a woman's intuition
+against you."
+
+He remained looking across the water for a while before he replied, in a
+hurt tone.
+
+"I understand. Now that you've discovered the truth ... I must go
+because you could entertain the friend ... but not the lover.... Even if
+the lover could maintain his attitude in everything but thought."
+
+But Conscience shook her head.
+
+"No, you don't understand yet ... must you still have the whole truth
+... even if I tell you that you can serve me best by not asking it?"
+
+"I must have it, because I am honest in believing that I can serve you
+best by knowing it all."
+
+"Very well." She raised her hands in a half-despairing gesture and into
+her eyes welled a flood of passion as if a dam had broken and made
+concealment futile. Her words came with a low thrill, and the man's
+brain swam with an ecstatic sense of discovery which for the moment
+obscured all other thought.
+
+"You must go, Stuart, because the basis we met on has been destroyed.
+You must go because--because it isn't just that you love me, but that we
+love each other."
+
+"Conscience!" The name broke from his lips with the ringing triumph of a
+bugle-call, and he had almost seized her in instinctive embrace, but she
+put out her own hands and pressed them, at arms length, against his
+breast as though to hold him off. Her eyes met the burning eagerness of
+his gaze with a resolved and unshakable steadiness.
+
+"Please--" she said very quietly. "Please don't make me fight you,
+too--just now."
+
+Slowly with the dying of his momentary elation into misery Farquaharson
+stepped back and his arms fell at his sides.
+
+"Forgive me," he murmured. "I can't touch you--here--now--with that
+look in your eyes. You are right."
+
+"I must send you away," she continued, "because I want you to stay so
+terribly much--because it's all a false position for us both.... Do you
+remember what Ira said about losing something that was pulled out ...
+'by the roots, like'?... The time has come for that Stuart, dear ... the
+roots are taking too strong a hold ... they must be torn out."
+
+"Do I mean as much as that to you?"
+
+"You mean so much--that everything else in life means nothing.... You
+mean so much that I compare all others with you to their injustice ...
+so much that I follow the glow of your cigar at night when you are
+walking ... that I watch the light in your window before I go to bed ...
+that I wake up with the thought that you are in the house ... that I
+think of you ... want you ... in a way I have no right to think and
+want."
+
+"Conscience," he began, gripping his hands at his back and schooling his
+syllables so sternly that, in what seemed to him his hour of Gethsemane,
+he spoke with a sort of unedged flatness, "your semblance of success has
+been splendid, magnificent. Until to-night I believed absolutely that
+you no longer cared for me--and that you were happy.
+
+"From the first I had seen in this marriage a certainty of disaster ...
+but when I came here I found a succession of bewildering surprises.
+These surprises entirely blinded me to the truth. Your serene bearing
+had every mark of genuineness, but there were other things, too--things
+beyond your control. The very place was transformed. Eben Tollman
+himself was really another man. His manner was no longer that of the
+bigot. He had learned the art of smiling."
+
+Conscience shook her head.
+
+"That is only another reason why you must go away, Stuart. Eben has
+always been the soul of generosity to me. He hates from the core of his
+heart these changes of which you speak. He has tolerated them only
+because I wanted them. With you here I can't be just to him. I contrast
+the little characteristics in him that grate on me and annoy me with the
+qualities in you that set me eagerly on fire. I tell you it's all unjust
+and it's all my fault."
+
+She paused and then, because her knees still felt weak and her head was
+swimming, she dropped wearily down and sat on the small bench at the
+side of the float.
+
+Stuart's senses were keyed to concert pitch. Some tempting voice
+whispered to his inner realization that, should he pitch the battle on
+the plane of passion's attack, he could sweep her from her anchorage. To
+his mind she was more beautiful and desirable than Circe must have
+seemed to Ulysses, but like the great wanderer he battled against that
+voluptuous madness. If he lost it would be the defeat of a man, but if
+he won, by that appeal, only the victory of an animal. His voice
+remained almost judicially calm.
+
+"But this changed attitude--this positive urbanity where there used to
+be utter intolerance--how do you account for that?"
+
+She looked very straight into his eyes and spoke steadfastly.
+
+"I can only account for it in one way--and it's a thing which doesn't
+make me feel very proud of myself, Stuart. I think that he, too, has
+been deluded by what you call my splendid semblance. I believe he trusts
+me utterly. He has seen us together and thinks I've stood the acid
+test--and I've got to do it."
+
+"But why did he ask me here, if he thought there was danger?"
+
+"Because he had the courage to trust his happiness under fire."
+
+"That implies that until now--at least--he was in doubt."
+
+"Grave doubt. I think he was almost ready to call it all a failure."
+
+After a long silence Stuart Farquaharson spoke with a quiet of
+resolution which held more feeling than could have been voiced by
+vehemence.
+
+"You have told me enough, Conscience. I will _not_ go. _You_ have tried
+it with a desperate sincerity for three years--and it's a failure. You
+have fought splendidly to vindicate the whole monstrous travesty, but it
+can't be vindicated. It was doomed by every law of nature from the
+start. We have now not only the right but the duty to rectify it, and to
+rectify it together. You must divorce him."
+
+"Divorce him!" The woman came to her feet and her eyes were starry with
+a light that held a momentary flicker of scorn. "Divorce him when his
+whole married life has been dedicated to the single purpose of trying to
+make me happy ... when his only fault is that he has failed to interest
+me?... Divorce him because we find too late that we still love each
+other? If that is your only counsel, Stuart, you have nothing to
+offer--but treason!"
+
+"Conscience," he reminded her as a deep flush spread over the face that
+had been pale, "so long as there remained a chance for you to succeed, I
+made no suggestion that might unsettle you. My love for you has never
+changed or wavered. It has incalculably grown. But, until to-night, have
+I in any manner assumed the guise or asked the prerogatives of a lover?"
+
+"Until to-night," she retorted, "I've never appealed to you for help.
+Now I tell you of fires I'm trying to control--and you are only setting
+matches to them."
+
+"I am begging you to conquer this undertow of your heredity, and to see
+things as they are, without any spirit of false martyrdom. I am calling
+upon you to rouse yourself out of this fanatic trance--and to live! By
+your own confession you love me in every way that a woman of flaming
+inner fires can love. Under all your glacial reserve and perfect
+propriety you have deeps of passion--and you know that _he_ can never
+stir them. You say you will conquer this love for me. Have you overcome
+it in these three years? What has this travesty of a hopeless marriage
+given you, but a pallid existence of curbed emotions and a stifled
+life?"
+
+He had begun speaking with a forced calmness that gave a monotony to his
+voice, but the sincerity of his plea had brought a fire into it that
+mingled persuasively with the soothing softness of the voice itself.
+Conscience felt herself perilously swept by a torrent of thoughts that
+were all of the senses; the stifled senses of which he had just spoken,
+straining hard for release from their curbing. His splendid physical
+fitness; the almost gladiatorial alertness of his body; the glowing
+eagerness of his face were all arguing for him with an urgency greater
+than his words. This was the man who should have been her mate.
+
+Perhaps it would be better to end the interview; to tell him that she
+could no longer listen to assaults upon her beliefs and her
+marriage--but she had come out here with the militant determination to
+fight the matter out, and it was not yet fought out. She must let him
+make his attacks and meet them without flinching. Into the tones with
+which she began her reply came the softness and calmness of a dedication
+to that purpose. Stuart recognized the tone with something like despair.
+Against this antagonism of the martyr spirit he might break all his
+darts of argument, to no avail.
+
+"Do you suppose you have to tell me," she asked, "what is lacking in my
+life or how hungry I am for it? I knew years ago what it was to love you
+... and I've dreamed of it ever since. But all your appeal is to
+passion, Stuart--none of it to the sense of fair play. I'm neither
+sexless nor nerveless. When I held you off a little while ago, my hands
+on your breast could feel the beat of your heart--and the arms that kept
+us apart were aching to go round your neck. I've sat back there in the
+window of my room night after night and watched you walking in the
+pines, and I've wanted to go out and comfort you.... I've been hungry
+for the touch of your hand on mine ... for everything that love can
+give."
+
+It was difficult for him to stand there under the curb of self-restraint
+and listen, but as yet he achieved it. And in the same quiet, yet
+thrilling voice she continued: "Your coming here brought a
+transformation. The fog lifted and I've been living the life of a
+lotus-eater--but now I've got to go back into the fog. Every argument
+you've made is an argument I've made to myself--and I know it's just
+temptation."
+
+"Don't you see, dearest, that you are utterly deluding yourself?" The
+fervency of combat came with his words. "Don't you see that all that is
+finest and most vital in you, is that part that's in protest? Don't you
+see that you are just reacting in every crisis to the cramped puritanism
+you once denounced?"
+
+"Puritanism!" she exclaimed, and the gentle manner of her speech
+stiffened suddenly into a timbre more militant.
+
+"Call it what you like. Yes, I _am_ a puritan woman, Stuart, and I thank
+God for the heritage--if I am always to have to fight these battles
+against passionate rebellion. I know puritanism now for what it is. I
+guess Christ might have been called a puritan, when Satan took him up on
+the high mountain and offered him the world." She paused only a moment,
+then swept on with the fervor of an ultimatum. "And since you choose to
+put it that way," she looked at him with eyes full of challenge, "I mean
+to stay the puritan woman. You've come with your southern fire and the
+voluptuous voice of your southern pleading, to unsettle me and make me
+surrender my code. You can't do it, Stuart. I love you, but I can still
+fight you! If that's the difference between us--the difference between
+puritan and cavalier--there's still a line that mustn't be crossed. To
+cross it means war. If you fire on Fort Sumpter, Fort Sumpter can still
+fire back."
+
+"How am I firing on Fort Sumpter?" he asked and she quickly responded.
+"You're assailing my powers of endurance. You're trying to make me take
+the easy course of putting desire above duty. You're trying to make me
+forget the ideals of the men at Valley Forge--the things that your
+ancestors and mine fought for when they went to war to build a nation:
+before they fought each other to disrupt one--loyalty and
+steadfastness!"
+
+"Conscience," he said with the momentary ghost of a smile, "you are
+speaking from your father's pulpit. That is all an excellent New England
+sermon--and about as logical."
+
+"At least it's sincere," she retorted, "and I think sincerity is what I
+need most just now."
+
+The kindled glow of the woman turned fighter gave an enhanced beauty to
+the face into which the Virginian looked.
+
+"Now certainly," he declared, "I shall not go. You say I have fired on
+Fort Sumpter--very well, I'll fight it out. You accuse me of assaulting
+your duty, but I'm trying to rouse you to a bigger conception of duty. I
+see in this idea to which you are sacrificing yourself as distorted a
+sense of honor as the suttee's, who ascends her husband's funeral pyre
+and wraps herself in a blanket of fire. I see in it, too, the dishonor
+of a woman's giving her body to one man while her heart belongs to
+another. By your own confession you are part Eben Tollman's and part
+mine. He holds only a pallid and empty allegiance: I hold, and held
+first, your heart, a splendid, vital heart.... I can offer you life ...
+and you belong to me!"
+
+"Then you mean--that I must fight you, too--as well as myself?"
+
+"I mean that you must, if that's the only way you can find yourself.
+I've asked you to divorce him--and let me be your husband. You refuse,
+but I have the right to take back what has been stolen from me, and I
+mean to do it. From this moment on I am avowedly and openly your
+lover--with all that that means. You have challenged me to attack. I
+mean to attack."
+
+Conscience drew back a step and her hands came up to her bosom as she
+regarded him, at first with unbelief, and then with an anger that made
+her seem an incarnation of warring principle.
+
+"I sought the wrong ally," was all she said, but she said it with such a
+cold ring of contempt that the man's answer broke out almost fiercely.
+
+"You don't know it, Conscience, but you are still the deluded daughter
+of men who burned witches in the name of God; people who could sing
+psalms through their noses, but couldn't see beyond them; men who
+exalted a dreary bigotry above all else. I inherited traditions as well
+as you. My fathers have committed homicide on the field of honor and put
+woman on a pedestal. They made of her a being, half-angel and half-toy,
+but I refuse to be bound by their outworn ideas.
+
+"Nowadays we prate less priggishly about honor because it is no longer a
+word with a single meaning." He paused a moment, then went on in a
+climax of vehemence. "From this moment on your New England code and my
+inherited chivalry may be hanged on the same gibbet! This revered temple
+of your marriage is just as sacred to me as a joss house--and I mean to
+invade it--and break its false idols--if I can!"
+
+Conscience stood for a brief space with her hands clenched on the rail
+that guarded the edge of the float. She was almost hypnotically
+conscious of his eyes burning with a sort of wildness into her own, but
+when she spoke it was in a manner regally unafraid--even disdainful.
+
+"You are quite welcome to break them if you can," she declared, and the
+next moment he saw her going with a superbly firm carriage up the
+path--and found himself alone and tremendously shaken.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+For the best part of an hour Stuart sat confusedly looking out across
+the cove. Then with the wish for some stimulating fillip he stripped and
+plunged into the sobering coolness of the water. Even after that he did
+not return to the house, but struck out aimlessly across the hills with
+little realization of direction and small selection of course. Once or
+twice a blackberry trailer caught his foot and he lurched heavily,
+recovering himself with difficulty.
+
+Led by the fox-fire of restlessness, he must have tramped far, for the
+moon went down and curtains of fog began to draw in, obscuring hills and
+woods in a wet and blinding thickness. From the saturated foliage came a
+steady dripping as though there had been heavy rain, and far away, from
+the life-saving station, wailed the hoarse, Cassandra voices of the
+sirens. At last physical fatigue began to assert itself with a clearing
+of the brain and he turned his steps back toward his starting point. He
+was trusting now to his instinctive sense of direction, because the
+woods and thickets were fog-choked and his course was groping and
+uncertain. A half mile from the house he set his foot on a treacherously
+shelving rock, and found himself rolling down a sharp embankment, with
+briars tearing his face and hands. Throwing out his right arm, in
+defense of his eyes, he felt his hand bend back at the wrist with so
+violent a pain that a wave of nausea swept over him and for a moment he
+was content to lie where he had fallen, listening to the sobbing drip of
+the pines. When he rose and started on again his right hand hung with
+fingers that he could not move and the fever of swollen pain in its
+wrist. But when he drew near the house he saw that there was still a
+light in the window of Conscience's room and that she herself sat,
+framed against, the yellow candle glow, in an almost trance-like
+attitude of stress. She was silhouetted there, no longer self-confident
+and defiant but a figure of wistful unhappiness. From the raw wetness,
+her bare shoulders and arms were unprotected. Her hair fell in heavy
+braids over the sheer silk of her night dress and her bosom was
+undefended against the bite of the fog's chill.
+
+At breakfast the next morning Eben Tollman, who was usually the least
+talkative at table, found that the burden of conversation fell chiefly
+upon himself.
+
+Conscience was pale and under her eyes were dark smudges of
+sleeplessness while Farquaharson kept his right hand in his lap and
+developed an unaccustomed taciturnity. But Eben appeared to notice
+nothing and stirred himself into an admirable and hospitable vivacity.
+
+His concert of last night had borne fruit, he thought.
+
+If his knowledge of actual occurrences was sketchy his imagination had
+filled all the blank spaces with colorful substitutes for fact.
+
+"Stuart," he demanded suddenly, "what's happened to you? You've hurt
+your right hand and you're trying to conceal it."
+
+"It's nothing much," explained Farquaharson lamely. "I went for a walk
+last night and when the fog came up I strayed over an embankment--and
+had a rather nasty fall."
+
+"My dear boy!" exclaimed Eben Tollman in a tone of instant solicitude.
+"We must call the doctor at once. But you must have been out all night.
+The fog didn't gather until two o'clock this morning."
+
+Farquaharson only nodded with an uncommunicative smile, and Conscience
+spoke in quiet authority.
+
+"If it's a sprain, I can do as much for it as a doctor could. Wait for
+me on the terrace, Stuart, I'll be out in a few minutes with hot water
+and bandages."
+
+A half hour later, grumbling remonstrances which were silently
+overruled, the Virginian found himself in efficient hands.
+
+The fog had not lasted long and this morning the hills sparkled with a
+renewed freshness. A row of hollyhocks along the stone wall nodded
+brightly, and the sun's clarity was a wash of transparent gold.
+
+Stuart Farquaharson studied the profile of the woman who was busying
+herself with bandages and liniments.
+
+The exquisite curve of her cheek and throat; the play of an escaped curl
+over her pale temple and the sweet wistfulness of her lips: none of
+these things escaped him.
+
+"It's not necessary, after all, that you should go away, Stuart," she
+announced with a calm abruptness to Farquaharson's complete
+mystification. "Last night I was in the grip of something like hysteria,
+I think. Perhaps I'm still young enough to be influenced by such things
+as music and moonlight."
+
+"And this morning?"
+
+"This morning," she spoke in a matter-of-fact voice as she measured and
+cut a strip of bandage, "I am heartily ashamed of my moment of panic.
+This morning I'm not afraid of you. Whether you go or stay, I sha'n't
+give way again."
+
+"Conscience," protested the man with an earnestness that drew his brow
+into furrows of concentration, "last night I said many things that were
+pure excitement. After years of struggling to put you out of my life and
+years of failure to do it, after believing absolutely that it had become
+a one-sided love, I learned suddenly that you loved me, too. The
+summed-up spell of all those hungry times was on me last night. Can't
+you make allowances for me?"
+
+"I have made allowances," she assured him steadily. "I've made so
+many--that I'm no longer angry with you. You see I spent most of last
+night thinking of it. We were both moon mad. Only now--we can't go on
+pretending to be Platonic friends any more. When war has been declared
+comradeships between enemies have to end."
+
+"You are both very fair and very unfair, Conscience," suggested Stuart
+Farquaharson thoughtfully. "I said some wild things--out there in the
+moonlight--with my senses all electrified by the discovery of your
+love--and yet--"
+
+He broke off, and Conscience, rising from her finished task, stood
+gazing out with musing eyes over the slopes of the hills. Suddenly she
+said:
+
+"I realize now that if you'd gone away just because I asked it, we would
+always have felt that nothing was settled; that instead of winning my
+battle I'd just begged off from facing it."
+
+"Among all the unconsidered things I said last night, Conscience,"
+Stuart began again, "there were some that I must still say. It was like
+the illogical thread of a dream which is only the distortion of a waking
+thought-flow. The essence of my contention was sound."
+
+"A soundness which advises me to divorce my husband and marry you," she
+demurred with no more anger than she might have felt for a misguided
+child, "though he and I both made vows--and he has broken none of
+them."
+
+"You made those vows," he reminded her, "under the coercion of fears for
+your father. You distorted your life under what you yourself once called
+a tyranny of weakness."
+
+"And to remedy all that you counsel an anarchy of passion." She seemed
+to be speaking from a distance and to be looking through rather than at
+the horizon.
+
+"I believe that even now my father knows--and that he's no more
+willing to have me surrender my convictions--than when he was on earth."
+
+"And I believe," the response came reverently but promptly, "that where
+he is now his eyes are no longer blinded by any scales of mistake. If he
+looks down on us from the Beyond, he must see life with a universal
+breadth of wisdom."
+
+For an instant tears misted her eyes and then she asked in a rather
+bewildered voice, "Stuart, stripped of all its casuistry, what is your
+argument except a plea for infidelity?"
+
+"Revolt against that most powerful and vicious of all autocracies," he
+confidently declared, "the tyranny of weakness over strength!"
+
+But Conscience Tollman only shook her head and smiled her unconverted
+scepticism.
+
+"Was it being true to such an ideal as that which made a certain king in
+Israel send a certain captain into the front of the battle, because he
+loved that captain's wife? I have listened to all this argument, because
+I wanted you to feel sure that I wasn't afraid to hear it. But it can
+never persuade me. And what have you to say of the trust of a husband
+who accepts you in his house as a member of his family--without
+suspicion?"
+
+"I say that he has had his chance in all fairness and has failed. I say
+that during the years of this ill-starred experiment you have fought
+valiantly to make him win. I have, at least, not interfered by act or a
+word. If he had not arranged this meeting I should never have done
+so--and since he is responsible for our being brought together now he
+must face the consequences."
+
+"Then your attitude of last night was not just moon madness, after all?"
+
+"I mean to penetrate your life as far as I can and to recognize no
+inner sanctum from which I am barred. He is the usurper and my love is
+not tame enough to submit. I am your lover because, though your words
+deny me, your heart invites me. I'm coming to stay."
+
+This time the woman's eyes did not kindle into furious or contemptuous
+fires, but her voice was so calmly resolute that Stuart felt his own had
+been a blustering thing.
+
+"Then, Stuart, I'm still the puritan woman. I'm asking no quarter--and I
+have no fears. Attack as soon and as often and as furiously as you wish.
+I'm ready."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Eben Tollman noted that under the steady normality and evenness of his
+wife's demeanor there stirred an indefinable current of nervousness,
+since the evening of the tryst at the float and that the whole manner of
+the visitor toward himself was tinctured with a new brusqueness, as
+though the requirement of maintaining a cordial pretense were becoming
+over tedious.
+
+These were mere bits of chaff in a light breeze and he flattered himself
+that it had taken his own perspicacity to detect them. A less capable
+diagnostician might have passed them by unobserved. But to him they
+marked a boundary.
+
+Alone in his study, the husband ruminated upon these topics. Here he had
+sanctuary and the necessity of a hateful dissimulation was relaxed. He
+could then throw aside that mantle of urbanity which he must yet endure
+for a while before other eyes. He formed the habit of gazing up at the
+portrait of the ancestor who had died in the revolution and almost
+fancied that between his own eyes and those painted on the canvas there
+was an interchange of understanding.
+
+He was in truth a man who had already parted company with reason while
+still invested in its perfect masquerade. His bitter and unfounded
+suspicions, denied all outer expression, had undermined his sanity--and
+any one who had seen him in these moments of sequestered brooding would
+have recognized the mad glitter in his eyes.
+
+"The pair of them are as guilty as perdition," he murmured to himself,
+"and I am God's instrument to punish." Punish--but how? That was a
+detail which he had never quite thought out, but at the proper time the
+Providence which commanded him would also show him a way. But before
+punishment there must be an overt act--an episode which clinched,
+beyond peradventure, the sin of these two hypocrites before his hand
+could fall in vengeance.
+
+These reflections were interrupted one afternoon by a rap on the study
+door to which, for the space of several seconds, Eben Tollman did not
+respond.
+
+He was meanwhile doing what an actor does before his dressing-room
+mirror. Eben Tollman alone with his monomania and Eben Tollman in the
+company of others were separate personalities and to pass from one to
+the other called for making up; for schooling of expression and the
+recovery of a suave exterior. In this process, however, he had from
+habit acquired celerity, so the delay was not a marked one before, with
+a decorous face, unstamped of either passion or brooding, he opened the
+door, to find Conscience waiting at the threshold.
+
+"Come in, my dear," he invited. "I must have inadvertently snapped the
+catch. I didn't know it was locked."
+
+"There's a man named Hagan here who wants to see you, Eben," announced
+Conscience. "He didn't seem inclined to tell me his business beyond
+saying that it was important."
+
+"Hagan, Hagan?" repeated the master of the house with brows drawn in
+well-simulated perplexity. "I don't seem to recognize the name. Do you
+know him?"
+
+"I never saw him before. Shall I send him in?"
+
+"I suppose it might be as well. Some business promoter, I fancy."
+
+But as Conscience left, Tollman's scowl returned.
+
+"Hagan," he repeated with a soft but wrathful voice to himself. "The
+blackmailer!"
+
+His face bore a somewhat frigid welcome, when almost immediately the
+manager of the Searchlight Investigation Bureau presented himself.
+
+Mr. Hagan had the appearance of one into whose lap the horn of plenty
+has not been recently or generously tilted, and the clothes he wore,
+though sprucely tailored, were of another season's fashion.
+
+But his manner had lost none of its pristine assurance and he began his
+interview by laying a hand on the door-knob and suggesting: "The
+business I want to take up with you, Mr. Tollman, had best be discussed
+out of hearing of others."
+
+Tollman remained unhospitably rigid and his eyes narrowed into an
+immediate hostility.
+
+"Whatever business we may have had, Mr. Hagan," he suggested, "has for
+some time been concluded, I think."
+
+But on this point the visitor seemed to hold a variant opinion.
+Momentarily his face abandoned its suavity and the lower jaw thrust
+itself forward with a marked hint of belligerency.
+
+"So?" he questioned. "Nonetheless there is business that can be done at
+the present time in this house. It's for you to say whether I do it with
+you--or others."
+
+Tollman's scowl deepened and the thought presented itself that he had
+been unwise in ever giving such a dishonest fellow the hold upon him of
+a prior employment. But he controlled himself and invited curtly, "Very
+well. Sit down."
+
+Mr. Hagan did so, and this time it was Mr. Tollman himself who somewhat
+hastily closed and latched the door which protected their privacy of
+interview, while the guest broached his topic.
+
+"The best way to start is with the recital of a brief story. You may
+already have read some of it in the newspapers but the portion that
+concerns us most directly wasn't published. It's what is technically
+called the 'inside story.'"
+
+"The best way to start, Mr. Hagan," amended Tollman with some severity
+of manner, "is that which will most quickly bring you to the point and
+the conclusion. I'm a very busy man and can spare you only a short
+time."
+
+But despite that warning the detective sat for a moment with his legs
+crossed and gave his attention to the deliberate kindling of a cigar.
+That rite being accomplished to his satisfaction, he settled back and
+sent a cloud of wreathed smoke toward the ceiling before he picked up
+again his thread of conversation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+Even when he had comfortably settled himself Mr. Hagan's initial comment
+was irrelevant.
+
+"Your place is decidedly changed, Mr. Tollman. Improved I should call
+it."
+
+"Thank you. Please state your business."
+
+"On one of the cross streets in the forties in New York City there's a
+hotel called the Van Styne with a reputation none too savory and
+downtown there's a sort of mission organization in which a minister,
+name of Sam Haymond, takes an interest. He's a live-wire reform worker."
+
+"Indeed?" Eben Tollman's monosyllabic rejoinder conveyed the impression
+of an interest unawakened, but Mr. Hagan was not so soon discouraged.
+
+"Doesn't interest you yet? Maybe it will later. Recently a girl by the
+name of Minnie Ray fell out of a window at the hotel I'm speaking
+of--the Van Styne. It killed her."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I thought likely you'd read the item in the papers. The coroner's
+verdict was accident."
+
+"Yes?" These brief, interrogatory replies might have proved dampening to
+some narrators. Not so with Mr. Hagan. He nodded his head, then he
+asserted briefly. "But as a matter of fact the Ray woman committed
+suicide."
+
+"You disagree, it appears, with the coroner."
+
+"I have the facts--and it was seen to that the coroner didn't."
+
+"What bearing has this deplorable episode on our alleged business, Mr.
+Hagan?" asked Tollman, and the detective raised an index finger.
+
+"That's what I'm coming to. The Ray woman is only incidental--like
+others that get adrift in New York and end up in places like the Van
+Styne. Anyhow I'm not starting out to harrow you with any heart-interest
+stories.... I'm here to talk business, but you know how it sometimes is,
+Mr. Tollman. A share or two of stock worth par or less may swing the
+control of a corporation ... and a piece of human drift like Minnie
+might turn out to be a human share of stock."
+
+"I'm afraid I don't follow you, sir."
+
+"Don't let that trouble you. You will. Minnie Ray didn't have much
+education when she came on east from Indiana and I expect she didn't
+have a very heroic character either. But until she went to the Van
+Styne, she seems to have been straight."
+
+"There is always an 'until' in these cases," observed Mr. Tollman dryly
+and the head of the "Searchlight" nodded his acquiescence.
+
+"Sure there is. She was young and what the rounders call a good-looking
+chicken. At first she was inclined to be haughty and upstage when men
+she worked for got fresh with her which didn't help her to get jobs--or
+hold them. So she hit the toboggan. She spent what little money she
+brought with her and after that it was the old story. So far as Minnie
+could figure prospects there wasn't a thing she had or a thing she could
+do that would bring in money--except the one asset that wasn't on the
+market: her virtue. As I said I didn't start out to tell a sob story,
+but in this business we see quite a few cases like that. It's usually
+just a question of how long these girls can hold out before they sell
+the one thing that's saleable. Maybe you can't blame them at that. If
+virtue is measured that way--and it's a practical way--the 'until,' as
+you call it, came to Minnie at the end of quite a siege."
+
+Mr. Tollman's impatience grew into actual fretfulness as his visitor
+delayed coming to the point of his proposition.
+
+"It seems to have been a case," went on the detective unhurriedly, "of
+dropping down the scale for her until she was up against the question of
+diving into East River--or hypothecating the one asset."
+
+"How about this mission that you speak of? Didn't it help her?"
+
+"All it could--but that wasn't enough. It got her one or two temporary
+jobs--but there were hundreds on its lists and it had to spread charity
+thin. So for the time being they were trying down there to keep her
+courage up, and that was about all they could do."
+
+"I will take the address of this mission and send a contribution,"
+announced Mr. Tollman benignly. "I suppose your business here is
+soliciting that--is it not?"
+
+"Yes--it is not," exploded Mr. Hagan emphatically with a smile that
+savored of a snarl, "though I don't doubt they'd appreciate it. Well,
+there was a cold-blooded party laying siege to Minnie. He was one of the
+rat-faces that you can see any time you stroll along Broadway, and up to
+date she'd been refusing to play with him. But he had the chance to put
+money in her way--and all he asked was that she'd 'be nice to him.'"
+
+"You put things very bluntly--I might almost say, vulgarly, Mr. Hagan,"
+objected Eben Tollman with a fastidious shiver and his visitor flashed
+his answer back in a manner of menacing aggressiveness.
+
+"It strikes you that way, does it? Perhaps you know a way to talk about
+things like this that isn't vulgar. Personally, I don't. Well, the long
+and the short of it is this, after so many weeks of fighting this thing
+out with herself Minnie Ray reached the point where she fell for a
+dinner with the rat-faced gentleman at the Van Styne, and after he'd
+opened some wine--" The raconteur shrugged his shoulders. "Well, you see
+she wasn't accustomed to drinking bubbles and topping it off with brandy
+and benedictine."
+
+"The climax of your story lacks the full force of surprise," Eben
+reminded his guest. "You forecast the result at the commencement."
+
+"No, I haven't, gotten to the result yet. This is only one stage of it.
+It happened that the Rev. Sam Haymond heard of a job as a lingerie model
+in a department store, that would fit Minnie nicely, and he rushed
+around to her room to carry the glad tidings. The landlady said that
+Minnie had gone to the Van Styne with a gentleman friend--so the dominie
+took a taxi and went there, too. You see he didn't know until he got
+into the lobby and saw all them red lights and heard some little of the
+conversation there, that it wasn't a _regular_ hotel. But there he
+was--so he had her paged."
+
+"Did he find her?"
+
+"He did not. The clerk didn't mention that she was in the house and of
+course 'Jim Smith and wife' on a register didn't mean much to him.... So
+the Rev. Haymond didn't connect with Minnie--and Minnie didn't connect
+with the job. But the rat-faced gentleman who had left her there after a
+pleasant evening and was on his way out heard her real name paged. He
+beat it back to inquire what in the Sam Hill Haymond wanted with her? He
+found her in the sort of despair that would come to a girl like that at
+a time like that. What you call the 'until' Minnie probably called the
+'too-late.' Maybe she guessed what the minister had cone for and what
+she had just missed. Anyhow her 'gentleman-friend' warned her that there
+had been a raid on a place nearby and that downstairs they were having a
+scare-- He said that he himself was leaving and she'd better be
+careful. Well, she went clear out of her head--and she jumped out of
+the window. It was the fifth floor, you see."
+
+Mr. Tollman's face was gravely serious as he put a question which might
+have seemed less near the kernel of the matter than several others, "Why
+did they fear a raid?"
+
+"They sometimes happen, you know. The police get periodically active.
+The Van Styne has been pinched before." Mr. Hagan rose from his seat and
+added with the solicitude of one wishing to make the _amende honorable_,
+"However, Mr. Tollman, I believe that was before you owned the place."
+
+The anxious anticipations of the host during the course of the story had
+not quite prepared him against the bluntness of this announcement, and
+his surprise vented itself in a sudden start. But immediately recovering
+his poise, he spoke coldly. He even smiled.
+
+"Now that your story is ended, what is the real matter that brought you
+here?"
+
+"I represent others," Mr. Hagan informed him evenly, "who, to quote your
+own words on a previous occasion, prefer remaining unnamed. If that
+hotel should happen to be raided and its record should be
+published--together with the name of the owner--it might prove an
+embarrassment to you. I'm authorized--under certain conditions--to offer
+you immunity against that unpleasant chance."
+
+Eben Tollman rose from his seat. He stood for a moment gazing into the
+eyes of the portrait above the mantel and then he spoke with a measured
+dignity:
+
+"Mr. Hagan, your proposition is just about what I fancied it would
+be--an attempt at blackmail. But it's abortive. I do own the property of
+which you speak, but in understanding so precisely the sort of business
+done there, you have the advantage of me. This renting has all been
+conducted through agents whom I seem to have trusted unduly. You _have_
+done me a service in acquainting me with the facts and I thank you for
+your information which, I take it is authentic. I shall at once rid
+myself of such a despicable property. I shall also place in the hands of
+the District Attorney of New York, the facts you have given me, and
+suggest that he call upon you to ratify them." The speaker paused
+impressively and then swept virtuously into his peroration:
+
+"To the anonymous gentlemen who offer me immunity against a raid--for a
+consideration--you may say that I will conduct the matter through the
+District Attorney's office. As for yourself, Mr. Hagan, permit me to add
+that I regard you as a most extraordinary scoundrel with whom I could
+have nothing in common."
+
+The detective, who had been thus conclusively defeated, continued to sit
+with an attitude of composure, and spoke without chagrin:
+
+"Hard words ain't going to kill me, and as for the balance of it I don't
+most generally lay all my cards on the table at once. You say you'll rid
+yourself of this property and that you didn't know how it was being
+used. All right, but why didn't you know? You could of known, couldn't
+you, if you hadn't taken damned good care _not_ to know? Do you think
+that story will stand scrutiny with the public or with your wife?"
+
+"Be good enough," cautioned Tollman ominously, "to leave my wife's name
+out of this talk. It's hardly an appropriate combination."
+
+"No," assented Hagan with readiness, "and it's going to be less so
+before I finish. How do you expect to rid yourself of the Van Styne? By
+selling it, at a profit, to somebody else that'll go on getting rich on
+other Minnie Rays? And when you've done that are you going to carry the
+same policy of high-minded reform through the rest of your property in
+New York find Boston? I've got a list of the lot."
+
+"I'm through answering questions," asserted Tollman with finality.
+"You've made your bluff and it has failed."
+
+"Just as you say." The detective rose and stretched himself luxuriously.
+"By the way as I came in, I passed your wife on the porch, and I
+happened to notice that Mr. Farquaharson was visiting you."
+
+Eben Tollman had started toward the door, but this remark gave him
+pause.
+
+"He didn't recognize me of course," mused Mr. Hagan, "but then in a way
+we are old acquaintances, I suppose--I shadowed that bird some time."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+Mr. Hagan's manner underwent an abrupt transformation. He wheeled and
+faced his host with a dangerous glint in his eye.
+
+"This is what I mean! You called me a blackmailer and a scoundrel just
+now. Sure I'm a crook! We're both of us crooks, but I admit it and you
+don't. So to my thinking, I'm honester than you. I came to you first.
+Next I'm going to Stuart Farquaharson out there and to your wife.... Mr.
+Farquaharson might be interested to know that you hired me once to try
+to frame him. Your wife might be interested to know that you hired me to
+send her those scandal magazines that roasted him. They both might be
+interested to know where you got your money from. Now it's just a
+question of who I do business with, but before I leave here I do
+business with _somebody_."
+
+As Mr. Hagan declared himself his lower jaw came more protuberantly
+forward and his eyes blazed with an increasing truculence. And in the
+exact degree of his growing aggression, Mr. Tollman quailed and became
+clammily moist of brow.
+
+"Perhaps, Mr. Hagan," he tentatively suggested, "you had better sit
+down again. Possibly we aren't quite through yet after all."
+
+The detective reseated himself and his composure returned.
+
+"Frankness is always best," he vouchsafed complacently. "I thought when
+we once came to understand each other, we'd get along."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While Eben Tollman was entertaining his unwelcome guest in the study his
+wife and Stuart Farquaharson were having tea on the terrace. Upon the
+recent combat of their wills there seemed to have succeeded a calmness
+of aftermath. If Stuart had as Conscience expressed it "fired on Fort
+Sumpter" his subsequent conduct had in a fashion belied his vehemence of
+pronunciamento. Now his artillery of resource was silent. Perhaps the
+weariness and heightened pallor of the woman's face, which gave it an
+ethereal quality, made an appeal upon the chivalry his postulates
+denied.
+
+This afternoon the entire landscape carried a tuneful message and a
+brilliant sparkle and play of colors. It was a day for peace and
+laughter, rather than for heart-bruising discussion--and they were still
+young enough to seize upon and avail themselves of such respites.
+
+Farquaharson laid aside the manuscript of an unfinished novel, with
+which Conscience had been assisting him as critic and amanuensis, and
+let his eyes dwell on her face.
+
+She was wearing a smock of rose-colored silk which fell like drapery,
+rather than mere clothing, about her and seemed to kindle a delicate
+echo of its pinkness in the ivory of her cheeks. For a little while the
+author forgot his work.
+
+"Dearest," he said suddenly, and though he couched his words in form
+and voice of the whimsical they held the essence of entire sincerity, "I
+hate to seem unduly impressionable or sentimental--but there's something
+rather marvelous about you. You'd make a man--even a hardened one--want
+to go down on his knees before you in worship and at the same time you'd
+make a timid one want to dare hellfire to take you in his arms. In
+short, you're a secret and a riddle: an enticement and a sobering
+inspiration."
+
+The woman's cheeks momentarily reflected more warmly the rosy color of
+her smock and to her eyes came a mischievous riffle.
+
+"Or to say all that more briefly, Stuart," she replied in a
+disconcertingly matter-of-fact voice, "I'm a woman--and incidentally you
+mustn't drop into the habit of calling me dearest."
+
+The old boyhood smoldering blazed briefly in the man's face, but cleared
+at once into a smile.
+
+"You were criticizing the woman psychology of my heroine, I believe," he
+said calmly, lifting the neglected manuscript in his one good hand.
+"What's wrong with her?"
+
+"She's mid-Victorian. She's not modern," ruled the critic. "Her virtue
+is just a sugary saintliness that doesn't ring true. Any real woman in
+her circumstances would feel more disgraced by her marriage than by a
+divorce."
+
+Farquaharson raised his brows, then his laugh rang out with a somewhat
+satirical merriment.
+
+"And this from you! You admit in fiction the exact truths that you deny
+in life."
+
+"But your lady was tricked into marriage in the first place," responded
+Conscience with spirit. "You show me half the reason that woman had and
+I'll start my lawyer filing a petition the same day. I'll go further
+than that." Her eyes were twinkling since she meant to treat all these
+allusions so lightly as to disarm his own seriousness. "As a
+self-inflicted penalty I'll marry you."
+
+"I wonder if you would."
+
+"On my word of honor, and meanwhile our tea is getting cold. One lump,
+isn't it?"
+
+He nodded; then, as he watched the deftness with which her hands made a
+pretty ceremony of pouring tea, he inquired: "Have I seen that ring
+before--the opal with diamonds?"
+
+"I don't believe you have. Eben gave it to me last Christmas."
+
+"And you're not afraid of the opal's ill-luck?"
+
+"I love them enough to take the chance. Haven't I ever shown you my
+others--there's quite a collection of them."
+
+"No."
+
+"They're in the safe. I'll get Eben to open it as soon as Mr. Hagan
+leaves."
+
+Teasingly the man inquired, "Doesn't your husband trust you with the
+combination?"
+
+Conscience flushed. Her companion had touched a sensitive nerve. This
+was one of the details that went into the summary of Eben's excluding
+her from his business life, and it had hurt her.
+
+"I can't ever master it somehow," she evaded, and as she spoke Eben
+Tollman ushered Mr. Hagan out upon the terrace.
+
+As stranger and host passed out Stuart fancied that he detected in
+Tollman's manner a certain eagerness to speed the parting guest and when
+the visitor had gone, Eben withdrew at once to his sanctum, declining a
+cup of tea. The bad half hour had shaken him and sent his thoughts
+coursing in channels of apprehension. The past was refusing to lie dead
+and he found himself thinking of what might occur if two wisely
+intercepted letters should ever fall into the wrong hands.
+
+They lay securely immured in the safe, but he had overheard the teasing
+reference to his withholding, from his wife, the combination--and it
+vexed his anxiety. He treasured these trophies of his acumen and
+victory, but palpably the time had arrived for their sacrifice.
+
+He reconsidered an impulse to lock himself in. Once to-day he had
+apologized for inadvertently throwing on the catch and a repetition
+would seem pointed. The letters were in an envelope inscribed "S. F. &
+C. W." and there would be no difficulty in finding them.
+
+So Eben Tollman opened the safe, and unlocked a certain strong box
+filled to overflowing with papers of divers sorts.
+
+As he stood holding the tin dispatch case with its cover raised he heard
+Stuart's voice beyond the threshold and it was a voice couched in a tone
+of annoying and unthinking levity.
+
+"Don't forget! If I prove a case as strong as my heroine's you will act
+as you say she should act."
+
+"It's a bargain," came the quick and laughing response. "I'm ready to
+prove my faith by my works." Then as the pair appeared framed in the
+door, Conscience explained, "Eben, I want to show Stuart my opals."
+
+To Tollman it seemed a most untimely interruption. Possibly that was why
+the fingers that held the box trembled, as he came around to his chair
+at the desk and said shortly, "They're in the larger drawer at the
+left."
+
+As Conscience came over to the safe Stuart followed her until he stood
+across the width of the desk from his host whom he regarded absently.
+Then something quite unaccountable occurred. Mrs. Tollman, in putting
+down the somewhat heavy metal tray containing her trinkets, let it slip,
+so that it spilled its rings, and pins and necklaces on the desk
+top--and as if responsive to her clumsiness in handling her treasures,
+though really because of nervous tension, Eben started violently, and
+the box which he held fell from his quaking hands, scattering papers in
+a confused litter about the floor.
+
+Instantly Tollman was on all fours retrieving, and the undignified
+posture had the advantage of serving to conceal the wild terror of his
+face; a terror such as may stamp itself upon the features of a man who
+cannot swim and who has twice gone down.
+
+As he searched in a feverish panic, pretending an impartial interest in
+the generality of scattered documents, Eben was tortured by the
+knowledge that Stuart and Conscience were searching, too, and a
+conviction that if either of them found that envelope first, the legend
+"S. F. & C. W." would prove sufficiently illuminating to require an
+accounting.
+
+Finally the elder man straightened up, and stood panting. The vital
+package was still unfound. Stuart Farquaharson tossed a sheaf of ancient
+bill receipts across the desk with the casual comment, "Well, that seems
+to be the crop."
+
+Over the harrowed visage of the host swept an almost felicitous wave of
+relief and then, as abruptly, his cheeks changed color again, fading to
+an ashen pallor tinged with greenish sickliness. In his eyes the light
+appeared to die. He licked his lips and a palsy shook him like a violent
+chill. The Virginian's eyes were still searching the floor, but his left
+hand,--the uninjured one--rested lightly on the table, and as Mr.
+Tollman looked he saw that the fingers were spread upon a yellowed
+envelope, of which the exposed surface bore the clearly legible
+inscription "S. F. & C. W."
+
+And while the victim of terror stood, transfixed with his premonition of
+crisis, Farquaharson also glanced down and, seeing the envelope, added:
+"No--here's one more. It must have been lying here all the time."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+To Tollman's eyes familiar with content and superscription, it was all
+glaringly conspicuous. The initials seemed to stand out like headlines,
+but Farquaharson was without suspicion and he saw only one more paper in
+which his interest was most perfunctory. The whole issue had narrowed
+now, Eben realized with a tension of fear which brought out sweat beads
+on the pasty white of his face, to the hairbreadth narrowness of one
+question. Would Stuart see the initials or would they escape his notice?
+
+But the Virginian was not yet broken to the habit of being a cripple. He
+could not remember that he must avoid the effort to use the right hand
+which he had always used. Now he reached down and picked up the
+envelope--still with the lettered surface turned up to sight--and
+rapping still swollen knuckles on the desk top, he let the envelope fall
+just as he raised it.
+
+But this time it fell face down--and the perilous letters lay hidden.
+
+Eben grabbed forward with such precipitate haste that Farquaharson
+looked up in astonishment and for the first time recognized something of
+the agitation which shook the other: the spasmodic panting of his breath
+and the outstanding arteries on his temples. "Why, you are ill, man!" he
+exclaimed. "What's the matter with you?"
+
+Tollman made a supreme effort to rally his powers of self-control. The
+envelope lay between them--but out of his own reach and that spelled the
+wavering balance of suspense.
+
+"This stooping after papers seems to have brought on a touch of
+vertigo," he explained and he had the sense, costly in self-restraint,
+to let his eagerly outstretched hand drop at his side, "Conscience, I
+think I'll have a little brandy."
+
+After his wife had gone he spoke again.
+
+"Didn't you--have another paper, Stuart?" The question came casually
+from the chair into which he had collapsed. "I might as well put it with
+the rest while I'm waiting for the brandy."
+
+"Yes, I'd forgotten it. Here it is," and the younger man handed back the
+envelope--this time using his left hand.
+
+Once more Tollman's luck had held good.
+
+Later in the analysis of retrospect Stuart began to wonder at his host's
+strange behavior until of idle speculation suspicion was born, but as to
+that circumstance he held his counsel.
+
+The last summer month brings to the Cape the August twister and the
+August tide. The twister seems to be a simultaneous rushing in of
+tornado-like winds from every quarter and a whirling bluster of elements
+gone mad. And in that month the high tide is the highest in the year.
+
+For the household of Eben Tollman as well as for the weather the season
+seemed charged with the unquiet influences of equinox.
+
+In the older man himself the currents of hatred and jealousy were rising
+to a danger line of unbalanced deviltry and as for the two who still
+responded to the nameless yet invincible clarion of youth, the elements
+of passion and insurgency were awake, ready for an August twister and an
+August tide.
+
+Then there befell the household a series of coincidental labor problems
+that left them all at once without servants. The chauffeur, who hated
+his employer, was summarily discharged for drunken insolence. The cook
+was taken dangerously ill and her sister, the housemaid, went with her
+to her home at Provincetown. The gardener and outside man alone remained
+on duty and since both of these came and went from a distance,
+Conscience and Stuart found themselves promoted to kitchen and pantry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A day of bluster and storm had ended in a sunset of brilliant color,
+which dyed the cloud-ramparted west with a victorious pageantry of
+crimson and gold. The night would be different, for in the east the
+moon, just climbing over the horizon, was a disc of pale tranquillity
+dominating a symphony of blue and silver.
+
+In the pantry, with windows giving to the east and west, Conscience was
+washing dishes and Stuart, whose right hand was once more usable, stood
+nearby drying them. Pausing, with her eyes first on the changing fires
+of the west and then on the soft nocturne of the east, the woman spoke
+softly:
+
+"The sun and the moon are the same size, and the same distance above the
+horizon. How differently they paint their pictures of the world."
+
+Her companion only nodded.
+
+While Eben Tollman contributed his part to the program of housekeeping
+without servants, by manipulating the phonograph from the living-room,
+Stuart had been studying the aproned figure at the sink.
+
+Her face, in repose, held a pallid unrest of tried endurance, and
+occasionally she paused in her task to listen, with unexpressed
+nervousness, to the voluptuous swell of the music.
+
+As he reached out for a rinsed plate their hands touched and she
+started.
+
+"Conscience," said the man thoughtfully, "you've been very studiously
+avoiding me of late. I mean avoiding me when I could talk to you alone.
+For all your boasts of self-confidence, you're afraid of me. Isn't that
+true?"
+
+"No," she said, "I'm only avoiding unnecessary battles." Suddenly her
+voice became almost querulous. "That phonograph is getting on my nerves.
+Aren't you sick of it?"
+
+"Jack London wrote a story once," he replied calmly, "of a Klondike
+prospector and his dog. Between them there was a feud of long-treasured
+hatred."
+
+Conscience glanced at him questioningly.
+
+"What has that to do with Eben and the phonograph?" she inquired.
+
+"The dog couldn't endure music. When a violin string spoke, he howled
+his misery. It was as if the bow were being drawn across the rawness of
+his own taut nerves.... That dish is ready for me, isn't it?"
+
+She handed it to him, and he went on imperturbably: "The man would let
+the violin strings cry out until the beast's howls of sheer agony
+mingled with their strains. There came a time when the dog squared
+accounts. Eben's music reminded me of the story."
+
+Conscience turned off a water faucet and faced her companion
+indignantly. She was inwardly trembling, with a nameless disquiet and
+anxiety.
+
+"Stuart," she exclaimed, "this campaign of vague accusation isn't a very
+brave device and, in theory at least, you've always stood for fairness."
+
+"I've ceased to believe in _his_ fairness," he told her promptly. "I
+believe that what he thinks isn't fit to print and he's trying to drive
+you, whether or no, into vindicating his rotten implications."
+
+A piece of chinaware slipped from his hands and crashed on the floor and
+so tense were the woman's nerves that a low scream escaped her lips.
+
+The mail wagon passed the tin box down by the edge of the pine thicket
+twice a day and the latest of these visits was between eight and nine
+o'clock in the evening.
+
+The household duties were finished before that and the three were
+sitting on the terrace with a world of silver light and cobalt shadows
+about them. That is to say, two of them sat there in silence while the
+third came and went about his duties of changing records and needles and
+the winding of the machine--for he still dedicated himself to
+minstrelsy.
+
+And in Conscience the germ of an idea which seemed trivial and foolish
+was beginning to grow into a sort of obsession. Her nerves like those of
+the dog in the story tightened into such rebellion under this music,
+singing always of love, that she, too, wanted to cry out. Her head was
+swimming with the untrustworthy sense of some cord of control snapped;
+of a power or reason become unfocused; of a hitherto staunch morale
+breaking.
+
+At last, with the feeling that she could sit there no longer, she rose
+abruptly from her chair. "I'm going down to get the mail," she
+announced.
+
+Both men rose, offering her escort, but she shook her head in determined
+negation.
+
+"No, thank you both, I don't need either of you."
+
+Stuart watched her figure following the twisting thread of the path
+among the apple trees, whose gnarled trunks made fantastic shapes in the
+moonlight. Then he glanced at the stolid and seated figure of her
+husband and his face darkened. When Eben essayed comment his visitor
+vouchsafed replies in monosyllables so that conversation languished. At
+last the younger man rose from his chair.
+
+"I think, after all, I'll go down and walk back with her," he said and
+Eben Tollman only nodded.
+
+Leaving the house behind him, Stuart had silence except for the
+occasional call of a whippoorwill, and as he drew nearer to the sleepy
+darkness at the pines a clear and fragrant scent of honeysuckle came to
+his nostrils.
+
+He guessed that in this sudden withdrawal to the isolation of the firs,
+Conscience had followed the same instinct that takes a wounded animal
+off, to be alone with its pain. So he approached with a noiseless
+caution abetted by the sound-deadening carpet of pine needles, searching
+the shadows for her unannounced and at first vainly.
+
+In the sea of moonlit brightness this strip of trees afforded a margin
+of soft, almost sooty obscurity, save where here and there darts of
+light fell through the raggedness of the foliage.
+
+Finally he saw her. She was seated on a rounded bowlder and both her
+hands were pressed tightly against her face. Her pose was rigid and
+unmoving; an attitude of distress and high-keyed misery of spirit.
+
+Her thoughts were her own and safe from penetration, but their tenor was
+as obvious as though, instead of sitting alone in a stunned silence, she
+were proclaiming her crisis in Hamlet's resonant soliloquy.
+
+There was a droop of surrender in her usually gallant shoulders and a
+limpness in her whole body which even the darkness did not entirely
+conceal. Within herself she admitted that her resolution had come to the
+condition of a stronghold so long besieged that it is no longer strong:
+where only the grim spirit of holding out against odds is left to keep
+the colors flying.
+
+But perhaps if she could have a half hour of relief from the pitiful
+counterfeit of strength she might develop a fresh power of resistance.
+In all sieges there must be moments like that: moments when, if the
+enemy only knew, a quick assault would end the fight. If the enemy did
+not discover them, they passed without defeat.
+
+Her young and splendid body seemed to her a temple out of which she had
+driven the love god, the deity of motherhood and the glowing lights of
+wholesome sex ... and where she had set up instead a pale allegiance of
+soulless form. Her life seemed a thing of quenched torches and unlit
+lamps.
+
+Conscience Tollman was in a dangerous mood, and some of her belligerency
+of spirit Stuart Farquaharson saw as he came quietly to her side and
+spoke her name, gently, as one might speak to a sleep walker.
+
+"Why did you come?" She looked at him a little wildly and her voice
+shook. "I wanted to be alone."
+
+"I was troubled about you," he said very gently. "You had been away so
+long."
+
+Her courage was almost prostrate, but it still had that resilient power
+which rises from exhaustion for one effort more. There was in her the
+spirit of the Phoenix, and realizing how clearly he would read defeat
+in the limp droop of her shoulders, she straightened them, not abruptly,
+but as one who has been sitting at ease draws up into a less careless
+attitude upon the arrival of another. She even smiled and spoke with a
+voice no longer tremulous.
+
+"Yes, I did stay longer than necessary. The music bored me and down here
+it was very quiet--and inviting."
+
+"Conscience," he said seriously, "you were more than bored, you were
+distracted."
+
+But at that, she laughed almost convincingly. "Must one be distracted to
+enjoy an occasional moment of solitude? It's the favorite recipe of
+philosophers."
+
+"Your attitude wasn't that of enjoying solitude. It was that of
+despair."
+
+"I was a little fagged. I'm all right now."
+
+As if in demonstration of her assertion she rose with a dryad lightness
+and stepped forward for inspection into a spot of moonlight, where she
+stood illuminated--and smiling.
+
+"Do I look like a victim of despair?" she challenged and the man, with
+a quick, almost gasping intake of his breath, leaned toward her and
+declared in a voice of passionate fervor, "To me you look like the
+incarnation of heart's desire."
+
+Now, her mirth was less convincing, but for a time she fenced gallantly,
+adroitly, though with a waning remnant of resistance. It was a sword
+play of wills, but the man attacked with a saber of tempestuous love,
+and the woman defended herself with a weakening rapier of finesse. She
+was desperately tired and her heart was not in the fight, so she grew
+less lightning-like of thrust and less sure of parry as the play went
+on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+When they had talked for ten minutes Stuart abruptly exclaimed,
+"Dearest, it was not far from this spot that you once told me you loved
+me in every way you knew how to love: that you wanted to be, to me, all
+that a woman could be to a man. Have you forgotten? I told you that my
+love was always yours ... have you forgotten that?"
+
+Her hands went spasmodically to her breast and her eyes glowed with the
+fire of struggle. Suddenly the physical impulses, which she could not
+control, deserted the rallying strength of her mind, and she trembled
+visibly.
+
+"The two men who say they love me," she broke out vehemently, "are
+succeeding between them in driving me mad."
+
+"Because," he as emphatically answered, "you are trying to reconcile a
+true and a false allegiance--because--"
+
+"This isn't a time," she broke in on him desperately, "for preaching
+theories to me. I'm hardly sane enough just now to stand that."
+
+"I'm not preaching," he protested. "I'm asserting that no amount of
+bigotry can white-wash a living sepulcher."
+
+"I told you I wanted to be alone.... I told you--" Her voice broke. "I
+told you that I _must_ be alone."
+
+"You defied me to attack when and where and how I chose," came his
+instant rejoinder. "I'm fighting for your salvation from the undertow."
+
+His eyes met hers and held them under a spell like hypnosis, and hers
+were wide and futile of concealment so that her heart and its secrets
+were at last defenseless.
+
+"I--I will go back to the house," she said, and for the first time her
+voice openly betrayed her broken self-confidence.
+
+"_Can_ you go?" he challenged with a new and fiery assurance of tone.
+"Don't you know that I can hold you here, without a word, without a
+touch? Don't you realize that I can stretch out my arms and force you,
+of your own accord, to come into them?"
+
+She seemed striving to break some spell of lethargy, but she only
+succeeded in swaying a little as she stood pallid and wraith-like in the
+moonlight. Her lips moved, but she failed to speak.
+
+"I will never leave you again." Farquaharson's voice leaped suddenly
+with the elation of certain triumph. "Because you are mine and I am
+yours. I said once with a boy's assurance that they might surround you
+with regiments of soldiers but that I would come and claim you. Now I've
+come. There is no more doubt. Husband or lover--you may decide--but you
+are mine."
+
+Her knees weakened and as she tried to retreat before his advance she
+tottered, reaching out her hands with a groping uncertainty. It was then
+that he caught her in his arms and crushed her close to him, conscious
+of the wild flutter that went through her soft body; intoxicated by the
+fragrant softness of the dark hair which he was kissing--and at first
+oblivious to her struggle for freedom from his embrace.
+
+"Stuart ... Stuart...!" she pleaded in the wildly agitated whisper of a
+half-recovered voice. "Don't--for God's sake, don't!"
+
+But as she turned up her face to make her final plea, he smothered the
+words with his own lips upon hers.
+
+For years she had dwelt for him on the most remote borderland of
+unattainable dreams. Now her heart was throbbing against his own and he
+knew exultantly that whatever her mind might say in protest, her heart
+was at home there. In his brain pealed a crescendo of passion that
+drowned out whispers of remonstrance as pounding surf drowns the cry of
+a gull.
+
+But at last her lips were free again and her panting protests came to
+him, low but insistent. "Let me go--don't you see?... It's my last
+chance.... The tide is taking me." Then feebly and in postscript, "I'll
+call for help." But the man laughed. "Call, dearest," he dared her.
+"Then I can break silence and be honest again. Do you think I'm not
+willing to fight for you?"
+
+The moment had come which she had faithfully and long sought to avoid:
+the moment which nature must dominate. Even as she struggled, with an
+ebbing strength of body and will she realized that in the wild moment of
+his triumph she was a sharer. If he were to release her now she would
+crumple down inertly at his feet. Almost fainting under the sweep of
+emotion, her muscles grew inert, her struggles ended. The tide had taken
+her.
+
+Slowly, as if in obedience to a command from beyond her own initiative,
+she reached up the arms that had failed to hold him off and clasped her
+hands behind his head and when again their lips met hers were no longer
+unresponsive. Slowly she said in a voice of complete surrender, "Take
+me--my last gun is fired. I tried--but I lost--Now I can't even make
+terms."
+
+"You have won," he contradicted joyously. "You've conquered the
+undertow. 'The idols are broken in the Temple of Baal.'"
+
+She was still dependent upon the support of his arms: still too
+storm-tossed and unnerved to stand alone and her words came faintly.
+
+"I surrender. I am at your mercy.... There is in all the world nothing
+you can ask that I can refuse you."
+
+"You have chosen--finally?" he demanded and he spoke gravely, unwilling
+that she should fail to understand. "There will be no turning back?"
+
+"You have chosen--not I," she replied, her eyes looking up into his.
+"But I accept ... your choice ... there will be no turning back."
+
+"You are ready to repudiate, for all time this life ... Eben Tollman ...
+the undertow? You will be big enough and strong enough to break these
+shackles?"
+
+"I am ready--" she said falteringly.
+
+"And you will not feel that you have proven a traitor--to the memory of
+your father?"
+
+That was a hard question to ask, but it must be asked. He felt a shiver
+run through her body and _he_ saw in her eyes a fleeting expression of
+torture.
+
+"I am ready," she repeated dully. Somehow he remembered with a shudder
+hearing a newspaper acquaintance describe an execution. The poor wretch
+who was the law's victim went to the chair echoing in a colorless
+monotony words prompted into his ear by the priest at his side. Then he
+heard her voice again.
+
+"Are you through questioning me, Stuart? Because if you are ... I have
+something to say."
+
+"I am listening, dearest."
+
+"You see you must understand. You have conquered. I have
+surrendered--unconditionally. But it's not a victory to be very proud of
+or a surrender to be proud of. Once I could have given you
+everything--with a glory of pride--but not now." He had to bend his ear
+to catch her words so faintly were they breathed. "I'm overwhelmed, but
+not convinced. I'm ready to choose because your will has proven the
+stronger--but I know that it's only a triumph of passion over right.
+Some day we may both realize that--and hate each other."
+
+"But you have chosen! You've risen above the bigotry of your blood!"
+
+"No. I'm just conquered--whipped into submission. I told you you might
+attack when you liked.... I thought I was strong ... and I wasn't. It
+isn't a victory over my strength--but over my weakness. To-night I was
+utterly helpless."
+
+She seemed stronger now, and in a sudden bewilderment the man released
+her and she stood before him pale but no longer inert.
+
+"Then--then," he spoke with a new note of misgiving, "your decision is
+not final after all?"
+
+That word "helpless" was ringing like a knell over his late triumph. It
+tinged victory with a hideous color of rapacity and brutality.
+
+"Yes--it's final." She spoke slowly and laboriously. "It's final because
+I've confessed my helplessness. If I rallied and resisted you to-night
+... I know now ... that I'd surrender again to-morrow. There's only one
+way I can be saved now."
+
+"Saved--but you've saved yourself. What do you mean?"
+
+"No, I've lost myself. You've won me ... but that's over. I can't fight
+any more.... I tell you I'm helpless." After a moment she added with a
+ghost of new-born hopefulness: "unless you can do my fighting for me."
+
+"What would you have me do?" His words came flatly and with no trace of
+their recent elation.
+
+"It is for you to say, Stuart. I'm yours.... I have no right to ask
+mercy ... when I lost ... when I love you so that ... that I can't
+resist you."
+
+"So, the code of your fathers still holds you," he said miserably. "The
+undertow."
+
+"I believe in what I've always believed," she told him. "Only I can't
+go on fighting for it any longer. It's for you to decide now ... but you
+inherited a code, too ... a code that has honor for its cornerstone, and
+that might be able to put generosity above victory.... I wonder if it
+could ... or if I'm worth the effort."
+
+"Honor!" he exclaimed with deep bitterness. "A word with a thousand
+meanings and no single meaning! A tyrant that smugly rides down thought
+and tramps on happiness!"
+
+"Honor has a single meaning for a woman." She laid both hands on his
+shoulders and looked into his eyes. Her own held a mute appeal stronger
+than words, and her voice was infinitely tender.
+
+"Stuart, whatever you do, I love you. I love you in every way that I
+know how to love ... but in the name of my God and yours and of my love
+for you and your love for me ... I ask you--if you can--take me back to
+the house--and don't enforce your victory."
+
+The man straightened up and stood for a while, very drawn of feature and
+pallid. He lifted a hand vaguely and the arm dropped again like dead
+weight at his side. Without seeing them, he looked at the mirrored stars
+in the fresh-water lake across the way and twice his lips moved, but
+succeeded in forming no words.
+
+At last his head came up with a sudden jerk and his utterance was
+difficult.
+
+"So you put it up to me, in the name of your God: to me who acknowledge
+no God. You ask it in the name of generosity."
+
+"No," she corrected him. "I'm not in a position to ask anything.... I
+only suggest it. I'm too helpless even to plead."
+
+She moved over a few paces and leaned for support against the gnarled
+trunk of a scrub pine, watching him with a fascinated gaze as he stood
+bracing himself against the inward storm under which his own world and
+hers seemed rocking.
+
+With the heavy and dolorous insistence of a muffled drum two thoughts
+were hammering at his brain: her helplessness: his honor.
+
+But he had never put honor underfoot, he argued against that voice; only
+an arbitrary and little conception of honor.... Yet she could not rid
+herself of that conception ... and she was helpless. If he took her now
+into the possession of his life, he must take her, not with triumph but
+as he might pick up a fallen dove, fluttering and wounded at his
+feet--as an exquisitely fashioned vase which his hand had shattered.
+
+He remembered their first meeting in Virginia and his wrath when she had
+laughed at his narrative of the Newmarket cadets.
+
+The Newmarket cadets!
+
+His father had been one of them at fifteen. There came again to his
+ears, across the interval of years, the voice of the old gentleman, so
+long dead, telling that story in a house where traditions were strong
+and hallowed.
+
+Across a wheat field lay a Union battery which must be stormed and taken
+at the bayonet's point. Wave after wave of infantry had gone forward and
+broken under its belching of death. The line wavered. There must be a
+steady--an unflinching--unit upon which to guide. The situation called
+for a morale which could rise to heroism. General Breckenridge was told
+that only the cadets from the Virginia Military Institute could do the
+trick: the smooth-faced boys with their young ardor and their
+letter-perfect training of the parade grounds. Appalled at the thought
+of this sacrifice of children, the Commander was said to have exclaimed
+with tears in his eyes, "Let them go then--and may God forgive me!"
+
+And they had gone! Gone because there burned in their boyish hearts
+this absurd idea that honor is a word of a single meaning: a meaning of
+sacrifice. They had gone in the even unwavering alignment of a
+competitive drill, closing-up, as those who fell left ugly gaps in their
+formation, until those who did not fall had taken the gun which the
+veterans had not been able to take.
+
+That had been the honor of his fathers, the honor which he had been
+declaring himself too advanced to accept blindly. Suddenly his boyhood
+ideals and his mature ideas fell into the parallel of contrast--and
+beside that which he had inherited, his acquired thought seemed tawdry.
+Of course, charging a field gun was an easy and uncomplicated thing in
+comparison with his own problem, but his father would have met the
+larger demand, too, with the same obedience to simple ideas of honor.
+
+His own contention had been right and Conscience's wrong. That he still
+believed. So the spirit of the French Revolution had been perhaps a
+forward-moving colossus of humanity: a triumph of right over
+aristocratic decadence. And yet the picture of a slender queen going to
+the guillotine in a cart, with her chin held high under the jeers of the
+rabble, made the big thing seem small, and her own adherence to code
+magnificent.
+
+Slowly Stuart went back and spoke in tones of level resolution.
+
+"To make war on you when you defied me was one thing ... to fight you
+when you are helpless is another.... I wasn't fighting you then but the
+rock-bound bigotries of your ancestors." He paused, finding it hard to
+choose words because of the chaotic things in his mind.
+
+She had confronted him with a splendid Amazonian spirit of war and a
+declaration of strength which he could never break, and the cause for
+which she had stood was the cause of a cramped standard which he
+repudiated. Now she no longer seemed a militant incarnation, but a
+woman, softly vibrant: a woman whom he loved and who was helpless.
+
+He added shortly:
+
+"You win, Conscience. I can't accept what you can't freely give."
+
+"Stuart--" she exclaimed, and this time the ring of revived hope
+thrilled in her voice, but he lifted a hand, very wearily to stop her.
+
+"I've complained that when the crisis comes we react to the undertow. If
+you are the exponent of your code, that code is good enough for me. I
+bow to a thing bigger than myself.... Your God shall be mine, too ...
+to-morrow I leave, and I won't come back."
+
+"Now, Stuart, my love," she declared, "you can say it truly: 'The idols
+are broken in the Temple of Baal.'"
+
+But the renewed life of her voice faltered with the sudden realization
+of the other thing: of the bleakness of her future when he had gone, and
+suddenly she broke out in undisguised terror.
+
+"But even until you go, Stuart ... even until to-morrow, protect me
+against myself, because ... I am totally helpless, and I love you rather
+madly."
+
+Instinctively her arms came out and her eyes burst once more into the
+fires of passion, but she made an effort and drew back, and as she did
+so the stress of the fight prevailed and, had he not caught her, she
+would have fallen. She had fainted.
+
+Farquaharson picked her up in his arms, and, distrusting himself to
+remain there, started to the house, carrying her like a sleeping child.
+
+The sight of the man going up the path with the woman in his arms was
+the only portion of the entire interview which Eben Tollman saw, but it
+served his imagination adequately as an index to the rest. He had,
+after a long wait on the terrace, followed them to the pines, but had
+not announced himself. His arrival had been too tardy to give him a view
+of their first--and only--embrace, and his distance had been too great
+to let him hear any of their words. When, after a circuitous return, he
+reached the terrace, his wife was sitting, pale, but with recovered
+consciousness, in a chair, and he himself went direct to his study.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+It was a sleepless night for every one in the house of Eben Tollman.
+Conscience still felt that her long fight had ended in a total defeat
+and that she had been saved from worse than defeat only because her
+victor had risen to her plea for magnanimity. Now she lay staring at the
+ceiling with eyes that burned in their sockets. Self-pity warred with
+self-accusation.
+
+She could not forget that moment of ecstasy in her lover's arms nor
+banish her wish for its repetition. With him the home of her dreams
+might have been a reality where men and women who made splendid
+successes and splendid failures came and talked of their deeds and their
+frustrations, and where children who were the children of love raised
+rose-bud lips to be kissed.
+
+Ahead lay an indefinite future, of Stygian murk, peopled with melancholy
+shades.
+
+Stuart himself did not attempt to sleep. He sat in a chair at his window
+and stared out. Once or twice he lighted a pipe, only to let it die to
+ashes between his teeth. He must not tarry here, beyond to-morrow. He
+had taken either a high and chivalrous ground or a sentimentally weak
+one. In either case it was an attitude to which he stood pledged, and
+one to which Conscience attached the importance of salvation. How long
+could he hold it?
+
+But of the three minds prickled with insomniac activity, the operations
+of the elderly husband's were the strangest and most weirdly
+interesting. They had thrown off the halter of sanity and ranged into
+the imaginative unrestraint of fantastic deviltry.
+
+Sitting alone in the study, Eben sipped brandy and indulged his
+abnormality. For him, weaving certainties out of the tenuous threads of
+hallucination, there developed the spaciousness and might of epic
+tragedies.
+
+The brandy itself was a symptom of his quiet madness. Until recently he
+would as readily have fondled a viper as toyed with a bottle.
+
+Now he had formed the habit of lifting a secret glass, as a rite and a
+toast to the portrait of the ancestor, with whose spirit he seemed to
+commune.
+
+The things that had festered in the unclean soreness of his brain had
+tinctured every thought with their poison of monomania, leaving him
+without a suspicion of his own miserable deceit. He believed that he
+held the imperative commission of the Deity to act as a vicegerent and
+an avenger. God had designated him as a prosecutor, and to-night he was
+summing up the case against the transgressors.
+
+"A sinful and an adulterous generation!" he breathed with curling lips.
+
+Item by item he went over the evidence, and it fitted and jibed in every
+detail. From the first interrupted assignation at Providence to this
+evening when he had seen, silhouetted against a starry sky, the man
+carrying close to his breast the wife of another, no link failed to join
+into a perfect chain of guilt.
+
+But above all he must remain just--as just as the Divinity whose
+commission he served. This essence of absolute and impersonal
+righteousness demanded an overt act of unquestionable guilt. "So saith
+the Lord."
+
+When that deciding proof was established there should fall upon the
+sinning pair the wrath of an outraged heaven, and he, Eben Tollman, in
+whom every feeling of the heart had turned to the gall of hatred, would
+hurl the bolt.
+
+But when he appeared at the breakfast table the next morning he brought
+the only untroubled face to be seen there.
+
+"I am going to New York this afternoon," announced Stuart somewhat
+bluntly, and Eben looked quickly up, frankly surprised.
+
+"Running down for a day or two? You'll be back, of course?" he inquired,
+and the guest shook his head.
+
+"No. I sha'n't be back at all."
+
+"But your Broadway opening doesn't take place until October? Didn't you
+tell us that?"
+
+"Perhaps. I'm not going on that account."
+
+"Then why not finish out your vacation?"
+
+"I have finished it."
+
+The host looked at his guest and read in his eyes a defiant dislike and
+a repressed ferocity, but he chose to ignore it. The long-fostered
+urbanity of his make-believe must last a little longer. But at that
+moment Stuart's eyes met those of Conscience and he acknowledged a sense
+of chagrin.
+
+After all, he was leaving to-day and whatever his feelings, he had so
+far been outwardly the beneficiary of Tollman's hospitality. Nothing was
+to be gained, except a sort of churlish satisfaction, by assuming at the
+eleventh hour a blunt and open hostility of manner.
+
+"I'm sorry," suggested Tollman evenly. "I had hoped that we might have
+you with us longer. You have brought a certain animation to the
+uneventfulness of our life here."
+
+Stuart changed his manner with an effort.
+
+"Thank you," he replied. "But I've already over-stayed the time I had
+allowed myself for a vacation. There are many neglected things to be
+taken up and finished."
+
+"You hadn't spoken of leaving us before." The regret in Tollman's voice
+was sincere, because it was the regret of a trapper who sees game
+slipping away from the snare, and it made him perhaps a shade over
+insistent. "Do you really regard it as so important?"
+
+For just an instant a gleam of anger showed in the visitor's eyes under
+this questioning, and his glance, leveled straight at his host, was that
+of a man who would prefer open combat to veiled hostility.
+
+"Not only important," he corrected, "but vital."
+
+"Of course, in that event," murmured Mr. Tollman, "there is nothing more
+to say."
+
+But an hour later as Conscience and Farquaharson sat on the terrace,
+somewhat silent and constrained, Eben joined them with a deeply troubled
+face.
+
+"I've just come from the telephone," he announced with the air of a man
+in quandary. "It was an imperative call from Boston--and it puts me in a
+most awkward position."
+
+Farquaharson, sitting with the drawn brow of preoccupation, simulated
+for his host's assertion no interest and offered no response, but
+Conscience asked, "What is it, Eben?"
+
+"It's a business matter but one that involves a duty to my associates. I
+don't see how I can ignore it or decline to go."
+
+"But why shouldn't you go?" inquired his wife, and immediately Eben
+replied.
+
+"Ordinarily I should, but Stuart says he must leave for New York to-day
+and there are no servants on the place. You can't stay here absolutely
+alone."
+
+"I shall be all right," she declared, but her husband raised his hands
+in a gesture of reasonable protest.
+
+"I couldn't think of it," he insisted. "Why, it's a half-mile to the
+nearest house. It wouldn't do."
+
+Then with an urgency of manner he turned to Farquaharson.
+
+"Stuart, I dislike greatly to ask you to change your plans--but you
+realize the situation. Can't you put off leaving until to-morrow?"
+
+The younger man turned slowly and his gaze was disconcertingly
+piercing, as he asked, "Don't you regard that as a somewhat
+unconventional suggestion--leaving Conscience here with no one but me?
+What of Dame Grundy?"
+
+Eben only laughed and arched his brows in amusement.
+
+"Why, my dear boy, you're a member of the family, aren't you? Such a
+question is the height of absurdity."
+
+"Your faith is touching," retorted the visitor dryly, then he added:
+"I'm sorry, but I must go this afternoon."
+
+Before him rose the true proportions of the ordeal to which his host so
+casually invited him, and from facing them he flinched with the honesty
+of genuine apprehension.
+
+After last night each hour spent here meant trusting under fire a
+resolution attained only in a moment of something like exaltation. Such
+an experiment seemed the rashness of sheer irresponsibility, and to
+underestimate its danger was only recklessness.
+
+Then he saw Conscience's eyes fixed musingly upon him and in them
+brooded a confidence which he could not analyze or comprehend.
+
+"I wouldn't urge it," went on Eben persistently, "if there were any
+other solution--but there doesn't seem to be. So in spite of your
+objections I believe you'll do as I ask, Stuart, even at the cost of
+some inconvenience to yourself. In a way you can't refuse, my boy,
+because until this morning you gave us no warning of this sudden
+flight."
+
+And with a complacency which the younger man found as galling as an
+insult, the host turned and went into the house with an air of one who
+takes for granted compliance with his expressed wish.
+
+Indeed, his line of reasoning admitted no doubt or shadow of doubt. He
+had construed Stuart's first refusal as a mere trick of intrigue,
+cloaking under the appearance of protest a situation eagerly welcomed.
+Refuse an uninterrupted opportunity to take to his embraces the woman he
+adored with a guilty passion! Eben laughed to himself at the thought.
+Does a hungry lion scorn striking down its prey? Does a thief repudiate
+an unwatched treasury?
+
+But when he had gone, Stuart turned indignantly to Conscience.
+
+"You see, don't you, that it's impossible?"
+
+"Why?" she asked, and in his bewilderment he found himself answering
+excitedly:
+
+"Why? Do you mean that, after last night, you would trust yourself here
+... with me ... and no one else? Didn't we both admit that it was too
+much for us--unless we separated?"
+
+"After last night," she responded, and the fearlessness of her voice
+utterly confounded him, "I would trust myself with you anywhere."
+
+"God in Heaven!" he burst out. "Don't you realize that all strength is
+relative? Don't you know that any boiler ever made will explode if you
+give it enough pressure?"
+
+"It's not a test I welcome either," she declared seriously. "But I do
+believe in you now--and there's another side to it." After a moment's
+hesitation she went on slowly: "After going through last night--and
+after trying to face the future ... there's comfort in feeling that he
+trusts me like that. I don't deserve it, but I'd like to ... and when he
+comes back to-morrow, if there's one day more of fight left in you,
+Stuart dear--I can."
+
+His expression changed and he said dubiously: "It's going to be hard."
+
+"Yes, but how can we tell him that?"
+
+He nodded acknowledgment of the point. "There _is_ something in being
+trusted," he told her resolutely. "If you can feel secure with me one
+day more--I'll go through with it."
+
+So Eben had his way and put his own damaging construction on the result.
+
+"Good!" he announced when the visitor finally acceded; "I felt sure you
+wouldn't leave me in the lurch. I'll drive the buggy to the train and
+leave it at the livery stable until I get back--since we have no
+chauffeur."
+
+When Tollman had gone Stuart came to Conscience on the terrace. "You'll
+be all right here for a while, won't you?" he asked. "I think I'll go
+for a tramp."
+
+She said nothing, but her eyes were questioning, and the man answered
+their interrogation almost gruffly.
+
+"We've got to walk close to the edge," he said with the quiet of
+restrained passion. "You trust me, you say, and even before you said it
+I read it in your eyes. I want that same trust to be in them
+to-morrow.... I don't know how you feel, but I'm like the reforming
+drunkard--tortured by his thirst." He paused, then added, "I think it's
+just as well to walk off my restiveness if I can."
+
+
+It was five o'clock when he returned, hot and weary from fast tramping
+in the blistering heat, but when he presented himself, as dusty as a
+miller to Conscience, who received him among the flowers of her garden,
+the woman recognized, from his face and the smile of self-victory in his
+eyes, that he had come back a dependable ally and not a dangerous enemy.
+In his voice as he hailed her was the old ring of comradeship--and it
+was almost cheerful. "Hurry into your bathing suit," he invited tersely.
+"The water is bluer than water ever was before."
+
+Her eyes met his dubiously. She had not, like himself, burned out her
+wretchedness of spirit in muscular fatigue.
+
+"I feel rather tired, Stuart," she demurred. But he answered
+decisively, "That's exactly why you need a plunge. You'll go in the
+tired housekeeper and come out Aphrodite rising from the foam."
+
+"To-morrow perhaps--" she began, but he shook his head.
+
+"If I'm any judge of weather the furies are brewing something in the
+line of a tempest. To-morrow will probably be a day of storm."
+
+Under his forced lightness of speech, she realized the tenderness of
+solicitude--and acquiesced, because he wished it.
+
+From her window as she changed into bathing things she saw the cove,
+blue as the Bay of Naples. After to-morrow, she thought, she would hate
+that cove. After to-morrow she must begin making her life over, and it
+would be like poverty's task of turning thread-bare seams.
+
+In a little while Stuart, waiting for her in the hall below, heard, as
+he had heard on the day of his arrival, a laugh at the stairhead and
+looked up to see her there, standing once more in the attitude of one
+about to dive.
+
+Her bare arms were raised and her dark hair fell heavily about her face,
+for she had not yet gathered and bound it under her bathing cap.
+
+Through the emptiness of after years, he knew that picture would haunt
+him with the ache of inexpressible allurement, but now he forced a laugh
+and, stretching up his own arms, said challengingly, "Jump; I'll catch
+you."
+
+Each detail of that swimming excursion was a reminder; an emphasis of
+thought upon these little things which association had made
+unaccountably dear, and which must be relinquished, yet the physical
+stimulus of the cooling water and the rhythmic companionship of the long
+swim across the cove and back had their effect, too, and were healing.
+
+As he followed her up the twisting path ... between pine and bayberry
+... for the last time ... the sun shone on her until she sparkled as if
+the clinging silk of her dripping bathing dress were sea weed, and in
+his heart he cursed Eben Tollman.
+
+When they sat alone at table, where shams refuse to survive, a silence
+of constraint fell upon them and each fresh effort at talk broke down in
+pitiful failure.
+
+Later as the last plate was stored in the cupboard and Farquaharson hung
+his dish towel on its rack, he said whimsically, "And to-morrow your
+butler leaves your service. Are you going to give him references?"
+
+With a sudden break in her voice she wheeled on him.
+
+"Please, Stuart," she begged, "don't try to make jokes about it. It's
+ghastly."
+
+Early in the evening Farquaharson's prophecy fulfilled itself and the
+storm broke with a premature ferocity of shrieking winds, and endless
+play of lightning and torrents of rain. Against the French windows of
+the living-room, where they sat, came a pelting like shot against the
+glass.
+
+"Conscience," said Stuart gravely, when the talk had for a time run in
+uneven fits and starts, "I know your views by now, and you know mine.
+But I want you to realize this: it's not your cause that I obey or
+love--it's _you_."
+
+He paused for a moment, then went on: "You told me last night that you
+were helpless. I want you to recognize that you have been splendidly
+victorious--all through: because you are splendid yourself. It's a
+victory that's costing us all the happiness out of life, perhaps, but it
+oughtn't to leave you any room for self-reproach. You stood a long siege
+and it was left for me to make the hardest and most cruel onslaught of
+all on your overtaxed courage. I am sorry--and I capitulate--and I love
+you."
+
+The clock in the hall struck nine and Conscience rose from her chair.
+Her eyes filled with uncontrollable tears and her lips trembled at their
+corners. The man bent forward, but, catching himself, he drew back and
+waited.
+
+"Stuart, Stuart," she told him, "it's all so bleak--ahead! There are
+things that I must say to you, too, but I can't say them now. We can't
+sit here talking like this. It's like talking over the body of our dead
+happiness."
+
+"I know," he replied in a strained voice. "It's just like that."
+
+"I'm going to my room," she declared. "Perhaps I can write it all more
+easily than I can say it. Do you mind?"
+
+"No." He shook his head. "I think it's better--but you must sleep
+to-night. Have you anything to take?"
+
+"I have trional--but maybe I won't need it."
+
+He closed the windows and shot the bolt of the front door; then, at the
+head of the stairs, they both paused.
+
+"I would like to kiss you good-night," he said with a queer smile,
+"but--"
+
+"But what?" she asked, and with their eyes meeting in full honesty he
+answered: "But--I don't dare."
+
+Conscience's own room was at the front and right of the house,
+overlooking the cove and the road. Stuart's was at the back and left,
+separated by the length of the hall and by several rooms now empty.
+
+For a long while after she had switched on her lights the woman sat in
+an attitude of limp and tearless distress. She could not yet attack the
+task of that letter which was to explain so much.
+
+But finally she made a beginning.
+
+
+     "Dearest," she wrote, "(because it would only be dishonest to call
+     you anything else), I am trying to write the things I couldn't say
+     to you. You know and I know that if we acknowledged loving each
+     other, when I have no right to love you, at least it has been a
+     love that has been innocent in everything except its existence.
+     When we look back on it, and try, as we must, to forget it, there
+     will be no ghosts of guilty remembrance to haunt us. We loved each
+     other in childhood, almost, and we loved each other until we let a
+     misunderstanding separate us. I'm afraid, dear, I shall always love
+     you, and yet I shall be more proud than ashamed when I look back on
+     this time here together. Perhaps I should be ashamed of loving you
+     at all, while I am the wife of a man who is good and who trusts me.
+     But I am proud that you proved big enough to help me when I needed
+     you. I shall be proud that when I was too weak to fight for myself
+     you fought for me. I am proud that there was never a moment which
+     Eben might not have seen, or one which he would have resented.
+
+     "I am trying to think, and when one reaches the point of utter
+     honesty with oneself, one sees things more clearly. I told you that
+     I thought Eben himself had come to believe this marriage a failure.
+     But now I see why more clearly.
+
+     "It was my fault. I have been absolutely true to him in act, but
+     perhaps, if I had let myself, I could after all have been true in a
+     larger sense: in the sense of a better understanding. Perhaps I can
+     still--and I mean to try.
+
+     "I know that you distrust him, but since last night I have been
+     thinking of his great generosity, and of what unfaltering trust he
+     has had in me. A trust like that ought to have brought him an
+     allegiance not only of form but of the heart itself.
+
+     "Had he been a mean or suspicious man there were many
+     circumstantial things that might have aroused his jealousy, but he
+     has always been above jealousy.
+
+     "We know that there has been no taint of guilt--that our love has
+     been, by ordinary standards, entirely innocent. But to him it has
+     all been giving--and receiving nothing.
+
+     "From first to last he has trusted me. Leaving me here with you is
+     a final demonstration of that trust--and he loves me.
+
+     "I am writing about Eben because I want you, who are at heart so
+     just, to be fair in your thought of him. In our decision to
+     separate for all time--"
+
+
+There the pen faltered and Conscience had to rest for a moment.
+
+
+     "--you would not think the more of me, if you did not believe that
+     I meant to carry the effort through to the end. I am going to begin
+     over with what you call the hopeless experiment--and even now I
+     think I have a chance ... a fighting chance of winning. If I have,
+     I owe it to you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+In Boston Eben would have been safely housed against the storm, but Eben
+was not in Boston. He had driven to the village and put his horse and
+buggy in the livery stable. At the station he had bought a ticket for
+Boston, but when the express made its first stop he had dropped off to
+buy a paper and had intentionally allowed his train to go on without
+him.
+
+To several acquaintances whom he met he confided the circumstance of his
+clumsy mistake, and one of them remembered in the light of after events
+that though he spoke with his ordinary reserve of manner his eyes had
+held a "queer glitter." Tollman told these persons that he would take
+the later train to his destination, but what he actually did was to
+board the afternoon local going in the direction of his home. As chance
+ordained, he paid his fare to a new conductor, who did not know him, and
+sat in the day coach unaccosted and unrecognized.
+
+He did not remain on the local until it reached his own town of Tanner,
+but dropped off at West Tanner, one station short of the full distance,
+from which point he had a walk of four miles by a road sandy and little
+frequented, to his own house.
+
+Even now Eben did not hurry, but when he had left the limits of the
+village he walked slowly and even paused occasionally to rest and
+reflect, consulting his watch on these halts as though his object was
+not so much the saving of time, as its killing.
+
+In short, the Eben Tollman of this evening was not the same man that he
+had ever been before. To a superficial eye he was, as usual, sedately
+quiet, yet there was a new quality in his mood. This was the sort of
+quiet that might brood at the bottom of an ocean whose surface is being
+lashed into the destructive turmoil of tempest. Only since Eben Tollman
+was a madman--not a noisy and raving maniac but a homicidally dangerous
+and crafty one--his situation was inverted. It was the surface that was
+calm with him and the deeps that were frenzied.
+
+To be sure, all these seeming vicissitudes of his journey were parts of
+a plan symmetrically ordered from the crazed compulsion of suspicion and
+jealousy and now ripe for its fruition, which was to be murder.
+
+Of course the motive which actuated him, locked in its logic-proof
+compartment, would not have been, by him, called murder but obedience to
+a divine mandate. None-the-less it contemplated human sacrifice.
+
+Just as the storm broke with its cannonading of winds and its
+fulmination of lightning he stopped at the edge of a small lake where an
+ice-house, now exhausted of supply, had been left accommodatingly
+unlocked.
+
+He felt no hesitancy to taking refuge there because the place belonged
+to him. Quite recently he had foreclosed, the mortgage which gave him
+title to the small farm upon which it stood.
+
+Eben's plan contemplated neither a premature nor an over-tardy arrival
+at his own house. The two malefactors who were, he felt absolutely
+certain, using his roof for their lustful assignation, had the night
+before them. They would avail themselves of it with that sybarite
+deliberateness which had characterized their epicurean guile and deceit
+from the beginning.
+
+He consulted his watch. He judged that a quarter after nine, or perhaps
+nine-thirty, would be about the psychological time for his entry upon
+the scene, with his contribution of an unforeseen climax to the drama.
+
+It was not yet seven, and it would be as well to wait here while the
+storm, which made the old ice-house tremble about his head, rode out its
+initial fury.
+
+His judgment proved good for before it was necessary to start, the main
+violence of wind and rain had abated into gusts and desultory showers.
+Along the way he encountered evidences of its force, in fallen branches
+and broken trees; and in one place, as he crossed a road, he ran into a
+hanging strand of telephone wire pulled down by broken timber.
+
+As he drew near his own house his wrath mounted to the cold and
+inflexible bitterness of arctic destruction, but his mind seemed to
+clarify into a preternatural alertness such as the absinthe-drinker
+fancies gives a razor edge to his thought functions. Like the keenness
+of absinthe it was hallucination. The tremendous thrill of a madness
+that had been cumulative through months and had finally reached the
+fulfillment of action, was vitalizing him.
+
+When the walls of his house bulked at last before his eyes, he paused
+and began to take an accounting. One detail somewhat dismayed him. The
+entire lower floor was dark, and since it was yet early he had not
+expected that to be the case. The sudden fear attacked him that he was
+too late.
+
+He made a complete and careful circuit of the grounds, noting with the
+fancied shrewdness of his mood every circumstance upon which a meaning
+might be placed.
+
+The blankness of the first floor was merely indicative--but when he
+noted also the dark sash of Farquaharson's window indicativeness assumed
+a more sinister emphasis. It was reasonable to infer that unlighted
+rooms were unoccupied rooms and conversely, it was ominously significant
+that the wide window of his wife's bedroom gave the single frame of
+illumination that broke the darkness of the four walls.
+
+For a better survey, he retreated to a bit of high ground at the right
+of the house which afforded a narrow glimpse into Conscience's room,
+though at an unsatisfactory range.
+
+From this natural watch-tower he could make out the seated figure of his
+wife at her desk and from time co time she turned her head, as one
+might, who speaks to, or listens to, a companion within the same walls,
+though out of sight of a man who commands a circumscribed field of
+vision. Shortly he left that position and lurked for a time among the
+flowers and shrubbery that lined the stone wall of the yard.
+
+From here he saw Conscience move into the zone of light framed by the
+window. Her hair had been loosened from its coils and fell in a heavy
+cascade of darkness over shoulders that were bare.
+
+She seemed to wear a dainty negligee of ribboned silk, and as he watched
+she began slowly braiding her hair into two dusky ropes. After a little
+time she disappeared again from view.
+
+The lunatic, now thoroughly frenzied, and imbued with the phantasy of
+suspicion, went back again to the higher ground and, after a time, saw
+her open the door of her room and disappear into the hall. That hall was
+the road that led to Stuart Farquaharson's room--and perdition!
+
+Once more he, too, went to the rear of the house. There lay the best
+chance of viewing the next and most ominous scene of this drama of
+infamy and unfaithfulness.
+
+But the hall at that angle was dark and told him nothing. Something else
+however told him everything--at least he so believed. The window of
+Stuart Farquaharson's room was no longer black but a frame of light.
+
+Eben stood for a space with breath that came in hurried and panting
+excitement while the madness mounted in his veins and burned fiercely in
+his eyes.
+
+Then, against the illuminated background he saw Stuart, the man whom
+God meant him to kill.
+
+He was wrapped in a bathrobe and was calmly raising a match to his
+pipe-bowl.
+
+The averted face was looking, Eben bitterly told himself, at the door
+which he could not see; was watching it open to admit Conscience
+Tollman.
+
+Now was the appointed time! Now were the judgments loosened! Hastening
+his steps into an awkward trot, Tollman went around to the front door,
+his fingers trembling so that he had to stop and make an effort at
+calming himself before he could manage the key in the lock.
+
+When at last it was fitted and stealthily turned with an attempt at
+noiselessness, the door refused to yield. That, he told himself
+furiously, he might have expected. For all their seeming sense of
+security they had reenforced it by shooting the bolt on the inside so
+that no one could enter without sending an alarm ahead of his coming. It
+was only one proof more of guilty concealment within. But it was far
+past time for needing such corroboration. He had seen enough and the
+problem raised by the present discovery was quite another. He went about
+the place trying side doors and windows, but everywhere his house was
+closed against him--and that meant a complete revision of plan, and the
+relinquishment of the tremendous force of climax to be gained by
+slipping in unannounced and holding over confounded evil-doers the
+irrefutable proof of demonstration.
+
+He must knock on his door, and give them time to slip back into their
+disguise of hypocrisy. It meant that, in the principal feature, his
+whole carefully laid plan had failed, but at least now he knew the truth
+and was ready to let the avenging bolt fall. They would meet him with
+smiles of innocence: they with sinful kisses yet warm on their lips.
+They, fresh from their interrupted love, would talk casually. Very
+well, for a little while yet he could smile and be casual, too, meeting
+their guile with counter dissembling--until he was ready.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If Stuart Farquaharson had been sitting most of that evening in a
+darkened room, it was because his misery was so great that the light
+seemed to make clearer the wretchedness of his future. For a time he had
+tried to read; even to write, but that was before Eben had come. In all
+those efforts he had failed and now for more than an hour he had been
+gazing dejectedly out of the window, listening to the wind as it
+buffeted itself out and died in an exhausted moaning among the pines. He
+had heard the wailing of the harbor sirens but his eyes had been
+unseeing--at least unrecognizing.
+
+And Conscience had been writing the letter which she meant to leave
+under the door of Stuart's room. He would find it there in the morning,
+and when he said good-by, he would understand the things which she had
+left unsaid before they parted in the hall.
+
+She _had_ gone and left the letter at the door: had even listened there
+a moment, unknown to the room's occupant, and it was that crossing of
+her threshold which her husband saw.
+
+Then Stuart had switched on his light, and thrown off his clothes. If he
+seemed calm as he lighted his pipe, it was a calm of spent emotion, and
+not the complacency of a man who awaits a tryst.
+
+Through the stillness of the house the hammering of the brass knocker
+sounded loudly. Stuart Farquaharson in his room and Conscience in hers,
+both heard it, with a sense of astonishment. The man opened his door and
+hurried to the stairhead, where he found Conscience, arrived in advance
+of him.
+
+But as he had crossed his threshold Farquaharson had seen an envelope
+lying in the light that flooded through, and he recognized Conscience's
+hand in the address as he picked it up. Remembering what she had said
+about writing to him he was not surprised, and wishing to save the
+missive until he should be alone again, he thrust it into the pocket of
+his bath robe.
+
+"I wonder who it can be--on such a night?" murmured the woman, and the
+man suggested:
+
+"Perhaps you had better let me investigate. I imagine some motorist has
+come to grief in the storm."
+
+When he threw open the door, Eben Tollman stepped in.
+
+The elder man stood for a moment glancing from his guest to his wife,
+and in that instant of scrutiny whatever of the inquisitorial might have
+lurked in his eyes left them for a bland suavity. Conscience had
+hastened forward and her lips were smiling. Farquaharson's eyes dared to
+meet his own with a level straightforwardness.
+
+But Tollman read into both the smile and the straight-gazing eyes a
+hypocrisy which superlatively embittered the blood in his veins.
+
+Conscience was standing before him with the exquisite clarity of her
+complexion unclouded; with the dark pools of her eyes unvexed by the
+weight of hideous perfidy that should be stifling her heart.
+
+This capping off of infamy with an angelic pretext of innocence was the
+supreme insult not only to Eben Tollman, outraged husband and man, but
+to the Righteousness he served, the Righteousness which he now seemed to
+hear calling trumpet-tongued for the reprisal which was at hand.
+
+"What in the world has happened to you?" he heard his wife exclaiming in
+an astonished voice, and he laughed as he responded:
+
+"I came back. Haven't you a kiss for me, my dear?" Then when she raised
+her lips to his an inner voice, which spoke only madness, whispered
+viciously, "The Judas woman! The unspeakable infamy!"
+
+He explained that he had missed his train, and that when he telephoned
+to Boston, he learned that the matter could after all be deferred. A man
+from Chicago had also failed to arrive.
+
+"But the train has been in for hours," Farquaharson reminded him with a
+puzzled tinge in his voice. "It can't have taken you this long to drive
+from Tanner."
+
+"No, I didn't drive. The idea struck me of getting off at West Tanner
+and walking over. The old mare went lame and I didn't want to give her
+any more work to-night.... Then the storm broke and I took refuge in an
+empty ice-house."
+
+Conscience said suddenly: "But, Eben, you are soaked--and if you've been
+wandering about like that, you can't have had any supper."
+
+"No," he shook his head. "I haven't and I'm starving."
+
+Including them both, he suggested with a frank seeming of pleasure.
+"However, I'm glad to be back. Did I wake you both up? You seem to have
+made a short evening of it."
+
+"I haven't been asleep," answered Stuart, and Conscience added: "Nor I."
+
+"I noticed," went on the husband evenly, "that the lower floor was dark,
+as I came up ... your window, too, Stuart, when I first saw it."
+
+"You must have come very slowly," replied the younger man with a
+calmness that struck the other as the acme of effrontery. "My light has
+been burning for ten minutes ... but I don't make out how you saw my
+window if you came from the front of the house."
+
+Eben winced a little, but his smile only became more urbane.
+
+"Quite true, my boy. You see I tried my latch key first, and finding the
+house dark, I sought to avoid disturbing the sleepers. I went to the
+back door and the side door. Finally I knocked. Since neither of you was
+asleep it's all right."
+
+"Perhaps after being in the fog so long," Conscience suggested, "a
+little brandy might be advisable," but Eben Tollman laughed.
+
+"My dear, for some unaccountable reason, I feel as if I'd been away from
+home as long as Enoch Arden--and I'm much happier to be back. I am in
+the mood for celebration. There's a bottle of old Madeira in the pantry.
+I don't think a little of it will harm any of us ... and I'm going to
+dissipate even farther. I'm going to smoke a cigar." Smoking a cigar was
+with Eben a rite which occurred with the frequency of a Christmas or a
+Thanksgiving dinner.
+
+Something youthful had come into his manner, and Farquaharson, in spite
+of his misery, laughed.
+
+"I'm afraid I'm hardly dressed for a party," he demurred, but Eben
+answered in a tone of aggrieved hospitality.
+
+"My dear fellow, you are much more fully dressed than when you go
+bathing; both of you--and how can I celebrate alone?" So Stuart
+smilingly asserted:
+
+"All right. We'll have a toast in your excellent Madeira to the return
+of Enoch Arden."
+
+Possibly his voice held a meaning less light than his words. Perhaps he
+was thinking of it as a toast to his own departure into exile, but to
+Eben it had the ring of a sneer, as though the words "too late" had been
+added.
+
+Conscience disappeared to return shortly with a tray containing cold
+meat and bread, and to her husband she said: "Eben, I can't find the
+famous Madeira. Where is it?"
+
+He rose, and announced that he would bring it at once, disappearing
+beyond the swinging door of the pantry.
+
+While he was absent, Conscience turned to the man in the bath robe. A
+smile half of amusement and half of self-accusation tilted the corners
+of her lips.
+
+"You see," she said thoughtfully, "I've just let myself think of him as
+elderly until, to me, he's become elderly. Yet to-night he's younger
+than either of us, isn't he?"
+
+"To-night neither one of us is very young, dear," he replied with a wry
+smile.
+
+In the pantry Eben Tollman poured three glasses of Madeira, and placed
+them on a tray carefully noting their relative positions. With fingers
+that trembled violently for a moment Eben grew as abruptly steady; he
+drew from his waistcoat pocket a small envelope such as druggists use,
+and into two of the glasses he divided its supply of small tablets.
+
+"Ebbett said they were tasteless and readily soluble," he reminded
+himself. "And that the amount should be enough for a dog or a man."
+
+Then he patted his breast pocket, where lay an envelope yellowed with
+age, bearing the legend "S. F. & C. W."
+
+Of that he meant also to make use later.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+The living-room held a glow of mellow light, but as Eben returned with
+the three brimming glasses, Conscience touched a button which darkened
+the wall sconces and left only the large lamp on the table, where she
+had placed her tray.
+
+"Inasmuch as two members of this party are more or less gauzily
+appareled," she suggested, "it doesn't seem to be necessary to make an
+illumination of it."
+
+Tollman, with a seeming of absent-mindedness set down his light burden
+on a small side table, somewhat remote, but it was with no want of
+certainty that he marked the relative positions of its contents. One
+glass was alone at the edge of the silver platter. Two others were
+closer together at the center.
+
+Now he came over, empty-handed, and as he regarded the larger tray of
+food, he rubbed his palms appreciatively with a convincing relish.
+
+"You have prepared a feast for the traveler on very short notice," he
+smilingly attested while inwardly and more grimly he added in
+apposition--"'a table in the presence of mine enemies!'"
+
+His wife modestly disclaimed credit. "You are easy to please, Eben.
+There's only beef sandwiches and fruit and a little cake. Would you like
+me to make you some coffee?"
+
+Eben raised his hand with a gesture of refusal. "No, indeed, I am more
+than satisfied--unless you want it yourself."
+
+But she shook her head, "It would keep me awake. I haven't been sleeping
+well of late." This announcement of insomnia--twin sister to a troubled
+conscience, he thought--was a somewhat bold skirting of admission, but
+his words were reassuring.
+
+"The Madeira is well timed then. A glass before bedtime should be
+soothing." Still standing, he bit into one of the beef sandwiches, and
+observed with an approach to the whimsy of gayety: "I've never been
+quite clear in my own mind as to what was meant by the stalled ox of
+scriptural fame and I've always subscribed to the text 'better a dinner
+of herbs where love is'--but I'm bound to say, it's very gratifying to
+have the stalled ox and the love as well."
+
+For Farquaharson his air of celebration held an irony which accentuated
+his own exclusion and made participation difficult. He was the exile at
+the feast.
+
+Eben who, alone of the three, had not seated himself wandered about with
+the restless volubility of a peripatetic philosopher, though his humor
+was genial beyond its custom. At last with the air of one too engaged
+with his own conversation to heed details of courtesy he took up his
+glass and sipped from it thoughtfully.
+
+"Even if this is my own wine," he commented, "I can't withhold
+commendation. I sometimes think that only the very abstemious man can
+truly appreciate a good vintage. For him it is an undulled pleasure of
+the palate."
+
+Stuart Farquaharson at last found it possible to laugh.
+
+"I for one can't dispute the statement," he confessed. "I haven't tasted
+it yet--though I understood that both Conscience and I were invited."
+
+"A thousand pardons!" exclaimed the host, shamefacedly. "I am a poor
+sort of Ganymede--drinking alone and leaving my guests unserved!"
+
+He set down his own glass, and with tardy solicitude proffered to them
+the remaining two.
+
+"Here's to the homecoming," he proposed with a jauntiness which sat upon
+him like foreign raiment as he took up his own wine again and Stuart,
+with a dolorous smile, suggested: "Why not include me in the toast,
+Eben? The arrival--and the departure."
+
+"Ah," demurred the elder man easily. "But that's not to be celebrated,
+my boy. For us that is a misfortune."
+
+The two men emptied and put down their glasses--and lighted cigars while
+Conscience sat thoughtfully, making slower work of her Madeira.
+
+"And now shall we have a little music?" inquired the husband, while the
+younger man's face darkened, and Conscience said rather hastily:
+
+"Not this evening, please, Eben. We've rather overworked the phonograph
+of late."
+
+"Not even 'The Beautiful Night of Love'?" The inquiry held an insistent
+shade of regret.
+
+But Eben, as his glance went shiftily to the face of the clock, was as
+steady and as cool as one may become under the temporary keying of a
+repressed and brain-wrecking excitement. To this inflexible composure he
+must hold until a certain moment arrived, and he must time himself to
+its coming with a perfection of nicety.
+
+"At last, Eben," Farquaharson testified when a brief silence had fallen
+on the trio, "I am ready to praise your wine. I feel the glow in my
+veins and the glow is insidiously grateful."
+
+"I was just thinking so, too," agreed Conscience. "It takes only a taste
+to go to my head." She was still holding between her fingers the stem of
+a glass half-full. "I was very tired and already I feel wonderfully
+restored."
+
+Indeed the shadow had left her eyes and in them was a quiet glow as she
+smiled upon her husband whose nerves were as tautly strung as those of a
+sprinter crouched upon his mark and straining to be away at the pistol's
+crack. "The traitoress has the infamy to smile at me--whom she has
+betrayed," was the thought in his heart. "It will soon be time!"
+
+These final minutes of necessary waiting and dissembling were the most
+unendurable of all--this damming back of a madman's thirst for
+vengeance. Ebbett had said that there is a prefatory period of
+excitation followed shortly by languor. They must realize their fate,
+otherwise punishment would be empty, but when he should launch his bolt,
+the power of the drug must have laid upon them both the beginnings of
+helplessness: the weight of its inertia. Now he said, acknowledging the
+praise of his wine:
+
+"The glow comes first, and then the sedative influence--like the touch
+of velvet."
+
+"You are almost poetic to-night, Eben," smiled Conscience, and he
+laughed. But abruptly he shivered, and became prosaic again.
+
+"It seems chilly to me here--Perhaps I've taken cold. The day was hot
+enough, heaven knows, but the night has turned raw--Do you mind if I
+light the fire?"
+
+Receiving permission, Eben turned his back and stooped to touch a match
+to the logs on the hearth. In a moment the flames were leaping and the
+man who had straightened up stood for a brief space watching them spread
+and broaden.
+
+It was while he was so engaged that Conscience raised her hand and held
+out her glass, still not quite emptied, for Stuart to set down. She did
+so silently and the man rose from his chair and took it from her, but in
+the simple operation their fingers met and a sudden surging of emotions
+came to each in the moment of contact.
+
+Without a word, save as his lips formed mutely the two syllables--"To
+you"--Stuart lifted the glass toward her and then drained it.
+
+Then as he replaced it together with his own on the table Eben Tollman
+turned, and noted, with satisfaction, the emptiness of the miniature
+goblets.
+
+The light of animation had died slowly from the dark eyes of the woman,
+until to the watching husband they seemed inky pools of languor. The
+leaping flames held her attention and her lips were parted in an
+inscrutable half-smile. Already her thoughts were becoming pleasantly
+languid, dwelling on such inconsequential things as how blue the water
+had been--and that after all to-morrow does not come--until to-morrow.
+
+Shadows leaped and danced fantastically against the color of the
+crackling logs and in her hair shimmered a glow that ranged between the
+glint of darkened mahogany and jet. It was of this that Stuart thought,
+as, for a half hour, they listened to Tollman's talk, content with brief
+replies or none at all. Some magic had lulled him, too, into a quietened
+mood from which had been smoothed the saw-edged raggedness of despair.
+With a vague wonderment he recognized this metamorphosis. No such
+soothing potency lay in any wine ever pressed from the grapes of
+Funchal; but it was inexplicably pleasant, and surrender grew beyond any
+power of its questioning or combatting. Gradually, agreeably the two of
+them were sinking below the surface of consciousness. Soon they would be
+submerged.
+
+Then in a moment of partial realization, Conscience said: "I think I had
+better go upstairs. I was almost napping in my chair." But she made no
+actual effort to move and her husband raised a smiling demurrer to the
+suggestion.
+
+"It would be a pity to go just now. The fire has only begun to be
+cheerful and as for myself I am still chilly."
+
+It was unaccountably pleasant there, with this strange, almost magical
+blurring of realities into a velvety ease ... with visions of blue water
+and contented thoughts hovering near in a waking and seductive sort of
+sleep.
+
+A long silence fell upon the three--realized by only one.
+
+The point where they drifted into the nebulous territory of dreams was
+undefined. The actual was dropping away into an impalpable mistiness as
+the earth drops from under a rising aeroplane.
+
+Both Conscience and Stuart sought futilely to rouse themselves because
+the dream had now ceased to be pleasant, and yet it was only an ugly
+picture projected against a beautiful background deepening into a purple
+velvet stupor.
+
+They knew the picture itself was not real because, in it, Eben's usually
+calm face was distorted into a demoniac frenzy and his voice quavered
+and ranted into a high-pitched incoherence.
+
+The dream in spite of its fantastic wildness must have held some
+attribute of the comic for they smiled as if in confidential
+understanding. Eben seemed to be waving before their eyes an envelope
+and to be talking about intercepted letters which was all absurdly,
+impalpably funny.
+
+There was also some grotesque eloquence about the vengeance of a Most
+High God, visited upon adulterers.
+
+But the voice dropped sometimes to an inaudible pitch and rose sometimes
+like a scream because it came from an incalculable distance and the
+figure, distorted with meaningless gyrations of gesture, appeared and
+disappeared like a shade in a farce.
+
+Eben Tollman stood declaiming on his hearth with his clenched hands
+stretched high above his head while his victims drowsed peacefully.
+
+Mania raced and burned through him as a current travels through wire.
+The dam of repression which had only collected and stored up the
+elements of flood had burst into torrents and chaos. The wreck of his
+brain swirled furiously in a single whirlpool of idea, the monomania
+that he was called to be God's avenger.
+
+But he had lost his audience and his victims had escaped him. Upon the
+lips of the two unspeakable malefactors dwelt a smile of obtuse
+tranquillity.
+
+He raised his eyes, as if to heaven, and his voice in fulminating
+anathema.
+
+"'Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner,
+giving themselves over to fornication and going after strange flesh ...
+are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal
+fire.... Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh ...
+despise dominion and speak evil of dignities.'"
+
+The madman paused, but only for a moment, then again he thundered out
+his rabid and distorted prayer. "'Their throat is an open sepulcher:
+they flatter with their tongue.... Destroy them, O God: let them perish
+through their own imaginations.'"...
+
+When Tollman's delirium had burned him into a temporary exhaustion he
+collapsed into a chair and at his feet, forgotten now, fell the envelope
+which he had flaunted vainly before the eyes of the transgressors. They
+had escaped, not scourged or harrowed according to their deserts, but
+smiling like sleepy children, through the door of unconsciousness and
+oblivion. Gropingly his fingers went again into his pocket and came out
+holding the envelope out of which he had taken the death tablets. They,
+too, had betrayed him. Instead of torture they had brought the peace of
+Nirvana.
+
+From the limp fingers of the demented creature who sat gazing at his two
+victims, the envelope fluttered down. Except for the mad embers of the
+eyes, one might have said that the room held three dead bodies.
+
+At least he had sent them on to a judgment from which they could not
+escape with iniquitous smiles.
+
+Then a sudden doubt assailed him. Were they, after all, dead?
+
+He came to his foot, moving with the spasmodic jerkiness of his
+condition, but with all the augmented strength of a madman's power.
+
+To his crazed investigation their wrists betrayed no pulse and their
+lips, no breath. Then they were dead!
+
+With an inarticulate exclamation, like the oath of a man devoid of
+speech, he ripped the sheer and ribboned silk from his wife's breast, as
+savagely as though he were tearing the flesh itself, and laid his hand
+upon the bared bosom. There, too, was the unfluttering stillness of a
+lifeless heart.
+
+Then straightening up, he gazed down on her, loathing all the beauty
+which had once allured him and which now dedicated itself, in death, to
+the benediction of a smile turned toward her lover.
+
+Already mad, his lunacy became a perversion of deviltry. He lifted the
+unstirring body and posed it in a relaxed attitude of ease upon the
+broad couch that stood at one side of the hearth. Back of the bared
+shoulders, he heaped cushions, so that she seemed the voluptuous figure
+of a woman who abandons herself to as irresponsible a gratification of
+sense as a purring tigress. The fire, playing on the ivory of her cheeks
+and the bosom more softly white than the checks, seemed to awaken a
+ghost of flickering mockery about her smiling lips.
+
+Then, drawing upon his unwonted strength of the hour, Eben Tollman moved
+the other figure until what had been Stuart Farquaharson sat beside what
+had been Conscience Tollman in lover-like proximity.
+
+As he staged this ghastly pantomime, he gloated wildly. That was the
+scene which a bolted door had prevented him from surprising! That was
+the inexpressible and iniquitous devotion which they had hidden in
+innocent smiles! Their eyes were closed, but each face was turned
+toward the other, and in death the woman's seemed to take on a deeper
+tenderness.
+
+Tollman lifted one of her arms, from which the drapery fell back, and
+laid it across the shoulder of the man at her side, and about him the
+world rocked in the quake of mania.
+
+He stood off and contemplated them from a greater distance--and having,
+in his madman's saturnalia, burned out even the augmented forces of his
+fever, a feeling of weakness overcame him. Then it was that his eyes
+caught the corner of an envelope protruding from the pocket of Stuart
+Farquaharson's bath robe. Hurriedly he tore it out and ripped off the
+end. It was in Conscience's hand--doubtless another proof of iniquity.
+
+But as he read, the fires of his brain were swept back, under the
+quenching force of undeniable conviction. This letter had not been meant
+for his eyes. It could hold no motive of deceiving him.
+
+Only treatment in confinement could ever again set up the fallen and
+shattered sanity of this man, but like rents in a curtain there came to
+him flashes of the rational. They came fitfully under the tremendously
+sobering effect of what he read. What Stuart Farquaharson had never
+read.
+
+"It was my fault.... I have been absolutely true to him in act ... but
+perhaps ... I could ... have been true in a larger sense. I have been
+thinking of his great generosity and of what unfaltering trust he has in
+me ... he has always been above jealousy. We know that there has been no
+taint of guilt. Even now I think I have a fighting chance of winning. If
+I have I owe it to you...." These words spelled out a document which
+could not be doubted, which even the perversion of a jealousy gone mad
+could no longer doubt.
+
+He, Eben Tollman, the righteous, had built the whole horrible structure
+of abomination--out of jealous fabrications! He had made the hideous
+mistake and capped it with murder!
+
+A nausea of brain and soul swept him. Then again the half-sane interval
+darkened luridly into hallucination, but now it was a new hallucination.
+
+The figure of the woman on the couch seemed to move. Instead of the
+filmy draperies torn by his own hand, she wore the habiliments of
+poverty and looked at him out of a face of plebeian prettiness; a face
+of dimly confused features. The apparition rose and stood waveringly
+upright. "You murdered me, too!" it said in a voice of vague simplicity.
+Eben Tollman tried to scream and could not.
+
+He covered his eyes with his palms, but failed to shut out the image
+because it lay deeper than the retina's curtain.
+
+"I'm one of the others you murdered," went on the voice. "I'm Minnie
+Ray."
+
+Tollman straightened suddenly up. The vagary had passed--but on the
+couch the two immovable figures remained.
+
+Tollman had never been a handsome man, but his face and carriage had
+held a certain stiff semblance of dignity. Now his cheeks flamed with
+the temperature which must, without the immediate administration of a
+powerful sedative, burn out his life with its crisping and charring
+virulence. His eyes were no longer human, but transformed into that
+kinship with those of wild beasts or red embers that comes with acute
+mania.
+
+As the shadows wavered in the room which he had made a place of murder,
+there rose out of them taunting, accusing figures. He seemed to see
+Hagan, the detective, grotesquely converted into an executioner clad in
+red and Sam Haymond launching against him the anathema of the Church.
+There were shapes of strange things neither human, animal nor
+reptile--but wholly monstrous--emerging greedily from filthy lairs and
+creeping toward him with sinuous movements through a sea of slime.
+
+For the furies that haunted Orestes, because of his classic crime, had
+come back to pursue Eben Tollman.
+
+He laughed as maniacs laugh and screamed as maniacs scream, until the
+strange medley of insensate sounds went rocketing and skittering through
+the house and came back in echo, as the retort of the furies.
+
+One human sense was left: the sense of flight: the impulse to leave the
+place where Death held dominion and Death's avengers came in unclean and
+rapacious hordes.
+
+Turning, he fled with a speed born of his dementia, hurling himself
+through the door with a crash of shattered glass and a trail of
+incoherent ravings.
+
+Without sense of direction or objective he raced here and there,
+doubling like a frightened rabbit, taking no account of paths or
+obstructions, seeing nothing but hordes of pursuing furies urged on by a
+parson and a hangman who led the chase.
+
+The storm had begun anew, and out here in the darkness the cannonading
+of thunder and wind swelled the chorus of pursuit. When the refugee
+fell, he clawed and bit at the vines which had tripped him, in a fancied
+battle of Laocooen, until at last he saw the coolness of water ahead of
+him, and, dashing down the slope, hurled himself, shrieking, into its
+stillness.
+
+There his outcry ended. His spread fingers clutched at a liquid
+emptiness and his fevered eyes showed once or twice briefly--and were
+quenched.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+
+The logs on the hearth leaped and crackled, spurting tongues of blue
+flame, and after they had roared up to their fullest they slowly
+subsided, until the shadows about the walls spread and encroached from
+their corners toward the center of the room. The polish of furniture and
+the bright angles of silver and bric-a-brac stood out with diminishing
+high-lights. Hour by hour and minute by minute the faces of two unmoving
+figures seated on a low and heavily cushioned couch grew less clear and
+merged into the growing darkness.
+
+Then the logs glowed only as embers against their bed of white ashes and
+the table lamp burned on in single steadfastness.
+
+Silence held the place, abandoned now by the furies, to the smile on two
+unstirring faces. The gray of the east had begun to brighten into the
+rose that comes ahead of the sun, when slowly, as if struggling under a
+weight of pyramids the heavy lids of one of the faces fluttered. They
+fluttered with no recognition as yet of the difference between death and
+life, realizing only the burden of an immeasurable inertia.
+
+Almost imperceptibly the currents of submerged vitality began to steal
+back into the veins of Conscience Tollman.
+
+For ages she seemed struggling through the heavy shades of coma, and
+even after she was able to see her surroundings, it was without a
+realization of their significance.
+
+She sat studying with an impersonal gaze the quiet figure at her side,
+looking even at her own hand resting upon its shoulder with the same
+absence of interest that she might have felt for another hand and
+another shoulder.
+
+But about the time that the sun came over the eastern skyline,
+dissipating the mistiness of dawn into the birth of a new day, she
+crossed the line between the palpable and impalpable, and her brain
+began to awaken to the need of battle with this lethargy.
+
+The unmoving figure at her side was no longer simply an object upon
+which her eyes dwelt without recognition, but the man she loved and was
+sending away, and the hand which rested on his shoulder must no longer
+lie there idle.
+
+Then with all its complicated features of phenomena, the bewilderment of
+the situation burst on her, and she struggled to her feet, reeling under
+the assaults of dizziness and weakness and wonderment.
+
+How had they come to be sitting there in that unaccountable fashion
+together and alone, while the first brightness of morning stole in at
+the French windows and the lamp burned on with its sickly mingling of
+day and night and the fresh breeze swept in through a broken and
+flapping door?
+
+Where was Eben?
+
+Conscience raised her voice--still weak from the drug--and called
+wildly, but there was little sound and no answer. Undefined but strong,
+the realization struck in upon her that tragedy in some monstrous shape
+had entered the place and left its impress.
+
+She stood, still groping with amazement, and her hands rose with a
+fumbling uncertainty until the touch of their fingers fell upon the
+bosom from which the drapery had been torn, and instinctively gathered
+it again over her breast and throat.
+
+But whatever the riddle might portend it could await construction. One
+primary fact proclaimed itself in terms so clear and unmistakable that
+all else was lost.
+
+Stuart seemed lifeless. She herself had the feeling of one who had been
+tangled in the fringes of death: who had struggled out of the meshes of
+a fatal web.
+
+He had saved her, when she was too weak to fight--it all seemed very
+long ago.... She loved him.... She must save him now.
+
+She knelt at his side, chafing his wrists and trying his heart with ear
+and touch--her eyes wide with almost hopeless forebodings.
+
+At last she rose and pressed her hands tight to her throbbing temples.
+
+"Thank God," she whispered, for a faint flutter of life had rewarded her
+investigation. In a bewildered voice she murmured: "I must think. I must
+remember! We were all sitting here--we were talking."
+
+Again she called, feebly at first, then with a growing strength, for her
+husband, and when no answer came except the echo of her own voice, she
+left the room and went gropingly, supporting herself against furniture
+and wall, to the telephone--but the telephone, too, was dead. The storm
+had done that.
+
+Confused now with a torrent of alarms and a sense of futility, she came
+back to the man whose life seemed so tenuously suspended, having no plan
+beyond a Valkyrie passion of resolution to bring him back from the
+border of death by the sheer force of invincible will. She succeeded,
+after many attempts, in shifting him from his sitting posture to a
+greater ease. Between his still lips she forced brandy.
+
+After ages of suspense and vigil, with his head on her lap and her
+fingers wildly working at his wrists, she vacillated terribly between
+the hope that life was returning and the fear that it was waning. After
+other ages she saw his lids flicker almost imperceptibly and then, when
+anxiety had taken a heavy toll, his eyes looked up in uncomprehending
+life. Conscience bent her face close to his and there was breath on his
+lips and nostrils. Eben had been a Machiavelli in spirit only. In
+effect he had bungled.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mystery still hung over the house of Eben Tollman an hour or two later,
+but the two figures that had sat with the quietness of unaccomplished
+death were again sensate and restored to full consciousness.
+
+Conscience had been able to go to her own room, and Stuart, now dressed,
+came slowly and as yet somewhat haltingly down the stairs, holding
+carefully to the rail. He was setting out to search for Eben Tollman,
+and to call in medical help. But in the hall he paused, and then,
+turning on impulse, went slowly into the living-room.
+
+There he stood looking about as a man who has dropped from his own
+planet to one wholly unfamiliar may seek to take his bearings.
+
+His eyes fell as he paused on two patches of white which showed against
+the dark richness of the rugs and laboriously he picked them up. One was
+a yellow envelope inscribed "S. F. & C. W."
+
+As a sudden blow may bring back a lost identity to the victim of amnesia
+the discovery electrified the man and he straightened into an abrupt
+erectness. His features lost their sleep-walking indefiniteness and his
+jaw stiffened.
+
+As the significance of his discovery dawned on him, a pallor quite
+separate from that of his condition came over his face and a murder
+light broke in his eyes. He would go on with his search for Eben, but
+when he found him now--! He wheeled suddenly and began looking at the
+table, and across the confused screen of his brain flashed a complete
+picture and an understanding.
+
+Then he studied the other and smaller envelope--and recognized it as the
+one which Dr. Ebbett had given Eben Tollman when they talked of a
+merciful release for the dog that had outlived his enjoyment of life.
+
+"I don't believe I'll ever find him--alive," he said very slowly, under
+his breath; "I think I understand."
+
+Then after a moment of grave reflection he added:
+
+"I don't see why she need know it all," and he dropped the two letters
+and the small envelope upon the dead logs and touched a match to their
+edges. Then he carried three wine glasses out to the pantry, and
+carefully washed them, pouring again a few drops of clear wine, like
+residue, into their bottoms. "Coroners are inquisitive," he told himself
+musingly.
+
+After that he opened the door and went out into the morning, which,
+succeeding the storm, was a morning of sunlight.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Tyranny of Weakness, by Charles Neville Buck
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