h a puckered brow, striving for exactness. "One of the servants
handed it to me just as we started down the steps--of course, I couldn't
give it to you then."

"No," Conscience spoke as if her words came from a long distance and
again she caught her lower lip between her teeth. She had to do that to
keep from screaming or breaking into a bitter laugh. "No, of course, you
couldn't give it to me then, and yet--" She broke off and Eleanor
Kent's arms encircled her.

"Conscience, dear," she demanded, "was it anything you should have
known?"

Conscience straightened slowly and shook her head. She even forced a
stiff smile. "No," she lied with an effort of fulfilment for her first
wifely duty. "It was just what Mary thought. A message about my
marriage. I must write an answer."

Farquaharson, sitting in his stateroom, unfolded his cablegram with the
feeling of a defendant who sees the door of the jury-room swing open.

With a stunned sense of despair he read:

"Don't hurry home to explain. It's too late for that. We will be
glad to see you when your trip ends.
"CONSCIENCE TOLLMAN."

Conscience Tollman! There was no longer a Conscience Williams then. He
could only realize that some hideous mistake had made absolute a
life-wrecking edict which--had he only known before--might, perhaps have
been set aside. Now it was irrevocable and his own blindness and a
stubbornness masquerading as pride were to blame.

Now she was the wife of Eben Tollman, the bigot whose narrowness would
cramp her life into a dreary torture. His imagination eddied in
bewildered wretchedness about that whirlpool of thought, bringing
transient impulses of madness and self-destruction.

The thought of her as the wife of any man except himself must have meant
to him a withering agony--but the idea of marital intimacy between
Conscience and Eben Tollman, seemed an unthinkable desecration at which
his flesh crawled. He vainly argued with himself that this was no sudden
loss which had struck his life barren, but one to which he had already
shaped his resignation. All that self-schooling had been swept away as
fiercely as fragments of drift in the freshet of news that came with
her letter. She had not exiled him but had asked him to return. She had
spoken of a bitterness born of disappointment, which she had conquered:
a bitterness for which he was responsible. Stark pictures shaped
themselves across his brooding: