account for his trust to Isom
with unclouded heart.

CHAPTER V

THE SECRET OF THE CLOVER

Until the time he had entered Isom Chase's house, temptation never had
come near Joe Newbolt. He never had kissed a maiden; he never had felt
the quickening elixir of a soft breast pressed against his own. And so
it fell that the sudden conception of what he had unwittingly come to,
bore on him with a weight which his sensitive and upright mind magnified
into an enormous and crushing shame. While his intention could bear
arraignment and come away with acquittal, the fact that he had been
perverted enough in the grain, as he looked at it, to drift unknowingly
into love with another man's wife, galled him until his spirit groaned.

Isom did not return that evening; the conclusion of his household was
that he had been chosen on a jury. They discussed it at supper, Ollie
nervously gay, Morgan full of raucous laughter, Joe sober and grudging
of his words.

Joe never had borne much of a hand at the table-talk since Morgan came,
and before his advent there was none to speak of, so his taciturnity
that evening passed without a second thought in the minds of Ollie and
her guest. They had words enough for a house full of people, thought
Joe, as he saw that for every word from the lips they sent two speeding
from their eyes. That had become a language to which he had found the
Rosetta Stone; it was as plain to him now as Roman text.

Perhaps Morgan regarded her with an affection as sincere as his own. He
did not know; but he felt that it could not be as blameless, for if Joe
had desired her in the uninterpreted passion of his full young heart, he
had brought himself up to sudden judgment before the tribunal of his
conscience. It would go no farther. He had put his moral foot down and
smothered his unholy desire, as he would have stamped out a flame.

It seemed to Joe that there was something in Morgan's eyes which
betrayed his heart. Little gleams of his underlying purpose which his
levity masked, struck Joe from time to time, setting his wits on guard.
Morgan must be watched, like a cat within leaping distance of an
unfledged bird. Joe set himself the task of watching, determined then
and there that Morgan should not have one dangerous hour alone with
Ollie again until Isom came back and lifted the responsibility of his
wife's safety from his shoulders.

For a while after supper that night Joe sat on the bench beside the
k