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?"