"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.