n. He had
always known Conscience Williams and this was Conscience Tollman. He had
told himself through years that he had succeeded ill in his determined
effort of forgetting her; yet now he found her as truly a revelation in
the vividness of her charm and the radiance of her beauty as though he
had brought faint memories--or none--to the meeting. His blood was
tingling in his arteries with a rediscovery which substituted for the
old sense of loss a new and more poignant realization. It would have
been better had he been brusque, even discourteous, replying to the
morning's invitation that he was too busy to accept. But he had come and
except for that first moment of astonishment Conscience had been gay and
untroubled. She at least was safe from the perils which this reunion
held for him. So, as he chatted, he kept before his thoughts like a
standard seen fitfully through the smoke of battle the reminder, "She
must feel, as she wishes to feel, that it has left me unscathed."

"But, Stuart," exclaimed Conscience suddenly, "all these night-long
rehearsals and frantic sessions of rewriting must be positive deadly.
You look completely fagged out."

Farquaharson nodded. His weariness, which excitement had momentarily
mitigated had returned with a heavy sense of dreariness. He was being
called upon now not to rehearse a company in the interpreting of his
three-act comedy, but to act himself, without rehearsal, in a drama to
which no last act could bring a happy ending.

"I _am_ tired," he admitted. "But to-night tells the story. Whichever
way it goes I'll have done all I can do about it. Then I mean to run
away somewhere and rest. After all fatigue is not fatal."

But Mrs. Tollman was looking at the ringed and shadowed eyes and they
challenged her ready sympathy. This was not the splendidly fit physical
specimen she had known.

"Yes, you must do that," she commanded gravely, then added in a lighter
voice: "I'd always thought of the first night of a new play as a time of
keen exhilaration and promise for both author and star."

"Our star is probably indulging in plain and fancy hysterics at this
moment," he said with a memory of the last glimpse he had had of that
illustrious lady's face. "And as for the author, he is dreaming chiefly
of some quiet spot where one can lie stretched on the beach whenever he
isn't lying in his bed." He paused, then added irrelevently, "I was
thinking this morning of the way the breakers rol