ow
why I listen to him, Stuart. You know that I didn't listen ... before
his stroke. I didn't listen when I told him that if you went, I went,
too, did I?"

That was long ago. Now she was studying him with a grave scrutiny as she
inquired, "I've been wondering, Stuart, why you have never married. You
ought to have a home."

The man averted his face quickly and pretended to be interested in the
vague shape of a steamer almost lost in the mists that lay along the
horizon. Those sweetly curved lips had been torturing him with their
allurement. From them he wanted kisses--not dispassionate counsel--but
he replied abstractedly:

"I'm a writer of fiction, Conscience. Such persons are under suspicion
of being unstable--and temperamental. Matrimonially they are considered
bad risks."

Her laughter rang with a teasing mockery, but, had he known it, she had
caught and been startled by that absorption which had not been wholly
banished from his eyes. It was not yet quite a discovery, but still it
was something more than a suspicion--that he still loved her. In its
breaking upon her was a strange blending of fright and elation and it
directed her subsequent questions into channels that might bring
revelations to her intuition.

"I've known you for some time, Stuart," she announced with a whimsical
smile which made her lips the more kissable. "Much too long for you to
attempt the pose of a Don Juan. I hate to shatter a romance, but the
fact is, you are perfectly sane--and you could be reliably constant."

This constancy, he reflected, had already cost him the restlessness of a
Salathiel, but his response was more non-committal than his thought.

"If my first reason is rejected," he said patiently, "I suppose I must
give another. A writer must be absolutely unhampered--at least until his
storehouse is well stocked with experience."

"Being unattached isn't being unhampered," she persisted with a spirited
flash in her eyes. "It's just being--incomplete."

"Possibly I'm like Ira's one-armed man," he hazarded. "Maybe 'in a
manner of speakin' I wouldn't be half as smart as what I am' if I didn't
have to face that affliction."

But with her next question Conscience forced him from his defense of
jocular evasiveness.

"Did you know, Stuart, that--that Mrs. Holbury came to see me?"

He feared that she had caught his flinch of surprise at that
announcement but he replied evenly:

"Marian wrote to me that she had seen you. Ho