"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.