e wife, believing the husband
to be totally deluded. The unwelcome discovery that instead of a
tete-a-tete there was to be a censored meeting would in itself sadly
alter matters, but what other construction would Stuart put upon the
development? Would he assume that Conscience, fearing discovery, had
sought to cover their plans under this excusing subterfuge? Would he
imagine that the husband had possessed himself of the guilty secret and
meant to confront him with an accusation? At whatever conclusion the
lover arrived, Eben imagined Stuart pacing his room in a confused and
thwarted anxiety. That was in itself a pleasurable reflection--but it
was only the beginning. When the young Lothario met him he would find a
man--to all seeming--childishly innocent of the facts and fondly
incapable of suspicion. He, Eben Tollman, would lead them both slowly
into self-conviction by as deliberate a campaign as that which had won
him his wife in the first instance.

* * * * *

Stuart Farquaharson came into the hotel breakfast-room that Monday
morning with dark rings under his eyes and an unaccustomed throb of pain
in his temples. He wore the haggard aspect of one wrestling with a deep
anxiety. Already about the tables were gathered a dozen or more men and
women in whose faces one might have observed the same traces of fatigue.
To Stuart Farquaharson they nodded with unanimous irritability, as
though they held him responsible for their condition of unstrung
exhaustion.

When the Virginian had ordered he sat gazing ahead of him with such
troubled eyes that had he still been under the surveillance of the
Searchlight Investigation Bureau, those keenly zestful observers would
doubtless have reported the harrowed emotions of a guilty conscience.
Soon, however, Stuart drew from his pocket a blue-bound and much-thumbed
manuscript and fell to scribbling upon it with a stubby pencil. Into
this preoccupied trance broke a somewhat heavy framed man whose
smoothly-shaved face bore, despite traces of equal stress, certain
remnants of an inexhaustible humor.

"Did you rewrite that scene in the third act?" he demanded briskly as he
dropped into a vacant chair across the table and, with a side glance
over his shoulder, added in the same breath, "Waiter, a baked apple and
two eggs boiled three minutes--and don't take over two minutes on the
job, see?"

As the servitor departed, grinning over the difficulties of his