the wish for some stimulating fillip he stripped and
plunged into the sobering coolness of the water. Even after that he did
not return to the house, but struck out aimlessly across the hills with
little realization of direction and small selection of course. Once or
twice a blackberry trailer caught his foot and he lurched heavily,
recovering himself with difficulty.

Led by the fox-fire of restlessness, he must have tramped far, for the
moon went down and curtains of fog began to draw in, obscuring hills and
woods in a wet and blinding thickness. From the saturated foliage came a
steady dripping as though there had been heavy rain, and far away, from
the life-saving station, wailed the hoarse, Cassandra voices of the
sirens. At last physical fatigue began to assert itself with a clearing
of the brain and he turned his steps back toward his starting point. He
was trusting now to his instinctive sense of direction, because the
woods and thickets were fog-choked and his course was groping and
uncertain. A half mile from the house he set his foot on a treacherously
shelving rock, and found himself rolling down a sharp embankment, with
briars tearing his face and hands. Throwing out his right arm, in
defense of his eyes, he felt his hand bend back at the wrist with so
violent a pain that a wave of nausea swept over him and for a moment he
was content to lie where he had fallen, listening to the sobbing drip of
the pines. When he rose and started on again his right hand hung with
fingers that he could not move and the fever of swollen pain in its
wrist. But when he drew near the house he saw that there was still a
light in the window of Conscience's room and that she herself sat,
framed against, the yellow candle glow, in an almost trance-like
attitude of stress. She was silhouetted there, no longer self-confident
and defiant but a figure of wistful unhappiness. From the raw wetness,
her bare shoulders and arms were unprotected. Her hair fell in heavy
braids over the sheer silk of her night dress and her bosom was
undefended against the bite of the fog's chill.

At breakfast the next morning Eben Tollman, who was usually the least
talkative at table, found that the burden of conversation fell chiefly
upon himself.

Conscience was pale and under her eyes were dark smudges of
sleeplessness while Farquaharson kept his right hand in his lap and
developed an unaccustomed taciturnity. But Eben appeared to notice
nothing and s