Stuart Farquaharson. He is a common friend of ours, I believe."

A pale flush rose to Mrs. Tollman's cheeks and she volunteered no reply.

The two women, each unusual in her beauty and each the other's opposite
of type, stood with the quiet repression of their breeding, yet with an
impalpable spirit of enmity between them: the enmity of two women who at
heart love one man. Mrs. Holbury spoke first.

"You are thinking that my coming here is an unwarrantable impertinence,
Mrs. Tollman. Perhaps that's true, but I think my reason is strong
enough to justify it. At all events I'm not doing this because it's
easy for me, or because I have anything to gain. Do you think you can
spare me ten minutes and reserve hostility of judgment until you hear
what I came to say?"

Conscience was somewhat bewildered, but she answered quietly, "Of
course, Mrs. Holbury. You must forgive me if I seemed discourteous.... I
was so surprised. Won't you be seated?"

"Thank you." The visitor took a chair and for a moment sat gazing across
the coloring hills where the maples were flaring with yellow and the
oaks were russet-brown. "Stuart Farquaharson has been a friend ... more
than a casual friend ... to both of us."

"Stuart Farquaharson," said Conscience quickly, "was one of my best
friends. I hope he is still, but for a long while I haven't seen him. He
drifted into another world ... a world of travel and writing ... and so
I think of him as belonging to the past--a sort of non-resident friend."

Marian Holbury's face flushed. "My interest, on the contrary," she made
candid declaration, "is not the sort that will ever be of the past,
though I doubt if I shall see him again, either."

Even now under their composure they had the masked feeling of fencers
and antagonists.

"I saw him last years ago," said Conscience, and Marion answered at
once, "I have just returned from the Orient. Mr. Farquaharson was a
fellow passenger."

"I had happened to hear of it." Eben Tollman's wife spoke casually and
Marion countered with an equal urbanity.

"Yes, one does happen to hear of these things, doesn't one? He called
the meeting a coincidence and was surprised."

"And you?"

"I could hardly be astonished because you see I had, without his
knowledge, waylaid him."

The hostess may have indicated the astonishment she sought to conceal,
for Mrs. Holbury laughed and again her eyes had that unmasked frankness
which made surprisingly unconventional