shared. Have I failed to share anything except the business part
of your life--which you closed to me?"

Eben Tollman did not wish to pursue that topic.

"I was only expressing general views," he hurriedly assured her, and
again under her level scrutiny, he felt the contrast between her vibrant
vitality and his own autumnal maturity. But Conscience went steadily on
in the unmistakable manner of one who has no intention of being
misunderstood.

"But I won't share any cramped delusion that things are good merely
because they are dusty and immobile. I won't share the fallacy that to
call a thing conservative sanctifies it. There is more virtue in a tiled
bathroom than in a cob-webbed chapel. If we change this house at all we
will do it thoroughly."

Eben Tollman rose and pushed back his chair. Conscience's face had taken
on the glow of something like Amazonian defiance. To her beauty had come
a new quality which stirred the senses of her husband like a roll of
drums. It was an emotion which he believed to be love and coming around
he caught her rather pantingly in his arms.

It was an intolerably wretched misfit, this union of Conscience and Eben
Tollman, but so bent was the woman upon redeeming the hopeless
experiment that she sought to brace the doomed and tottering structure
with fictitious props. To be an "unimpeachable" wife was not to her
thinking a sufficient meeting of her problem. Her own fastidiousness and
cleanness of character would have made that less a duty to her husband
than to herself. The more difficult requirement was to close, and keep
closed the port of her thoughts against those dreams and yearnings that
stole in like blockade-runners, but these buccaneer thoughts came
insistently and impertinently invested with a colorful challenge to the
imagination.

From every dream-ship that sailed in, looked out the face of Stuart
Farquaharson.

This, she told herself, was a pure perversity. All memories should fade
as distance widens, yet of late the banishment of Stuart had been less
complete than heretofore.

Slowly she prosecuted Stuart Farquaharson in the court of her own
judgment and condemned him to mental exile. The steps of his
deteriorating course were clear enough. He had loved her sufficiently to
do everything but stand firm in stress. When he thought her lost he had
consoled himself with another woman. When the second lady, too, had come
to grief through his devotion, he had withdrawn. The