e of his wish to do so. Moments like this were
unsettling--and to be guarded against.

Then she had come down to the hall and he was on his knees, as he had
been on that other day at Chatham, tying the ribbons of her bathing
slippers with fingers that were none too steady.

But while they dived in water which was almost unbelievably blue and
clear, they might have been two children as irresponsibly full of sheer
zest and sparkle as the bubbles that leaped brightly up from their
out-thrust and dripping arms. Forty minutes later Stuart was following
her up the twisting path between pines and bayberry bushes while the
salt water streamed from them.

Eben Tollman had not after all found time to join them at the float, and
glancing up from his chair on the terrace where he sat almost completely
surrounded by a disarray of daily papers, he was now somewhat
disconcerted at their early return.

He had been inwardly writhing in a tortured frame of mind which their
arrival brought a necessity for masking and the things which had made
him so writhe had been the reviews in these papers of "The Longest Way
Round."

Eben was not an habitual reader of dramatic comment. The theater itself
he regarded as an amusement designed for minds more tinctured with
childish frivolity than his own.

Yet since Conscience and Stuart had left the house he had been mulling
over, with the fascination of a rising gorge and a bitter resentment,
paragraphs of encomium upon his hated guest. Had he ever indulged
himself in the luxury of profanity it would have gushed now in torrents
of curses over Stuart Farquaharson, upon whom life seemed to lavish her
gifts with as reckless a prodigality as that of a licentious monarch for
an unworthy favorite.

"Nothing but applause!" exclaimed Eben to himself, with a quiet madness
of vituperation--entirely unconscious of any taint of falsity or
injustice. "He makes no effort beyond the easy things of
self-indulgence, yet because he has a supercilious charm, he parades
through life seizing its prizes! Women love him--men praise him--and
every step is a forward step!"

He had, indeed, been reading no ordinary words of praise, bestowed with
the critic's usual guardedness. In Providence last night the unusual had
occurred and the reviewers had found themselves acclaiming a new
luminary in the firmament of present-day playwrights. Later the men with
New York reputations would be claiming Stuart Farquaharson's disco