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."