"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.