r glasses--and lighted cigars while
Conscience sat thoughtfully, making slower work of her Madeira.

"And now shall we have a little music?" inquired the husband, while the
younger man's face darkened, and Conscience said rather hastily:

"Not this evening, please, Eben. We've rather overworked the phonograph
of late."

"Not even 'The Beautiful Night of Love'?" The inquiry held an insistent
shade of regret.

But Eben, as his glance went shiftily to the face of the clock, was as
steady and as cool as one may become under the temporary keying of a
repressed and brain-wrecking excitement. To this inflexible composure he
must hold until a certain moment arrived, and he must time himself to
its coming with a perfection of nicety.

"At last, Eben," Farquaharson testified when a brief silence had fallen
on the trio, "I am ready to praise your wine. I feel the glow in my
veins and the glow is insidiously grateful."

"I was just thinking so, too," agreed Conscience. "It takes only a taste
to go to my head." She was still holding between her fingers the stem of
a glass half-full. "I was very tired and already I feel wonderfully
restored."

Indeed the shadow had left her eyes and in them was a quiet glow as she
smiled upon her husband whose nerves were as tautly strung as those of a
sprinter crouched upon his mark and straining to be away at the pistol's
crack. "The traitoress has the infamy to smile at me--whom she has
betrayed," was the thought in his heart. "It will soon be time!"

These final minutes of necessary waiting and dissembling were the most
unendurable of all--this damming back of a madman's thirst for
vengeance. Ebbett had said that there is a prefatory period of
excitation followed shortly by languor. They must realize their fate,
otherwise punishment would be empty, but when he should launch his bolt,
the power of the drug must have laid upon them both the beginnings of
helplessness: the weight of its inertia. Now he said, acknowledging the
praise of his wine:

"The glow comes first, and then the sedative influence--like the touch
of velvet."

"You are almost poetic to-night, Eben," smiled Conscience, and he
laughed. But abruptly he shivered, and became prosaic again.

"It seems chilly to me here--Perhaps I've taken cold. The day was hot
enough, heaven knows, but the night has turned raw--Do you mind if I
light the fire?"

Receiving permission, Eben turned his back and stooped to touch a match
to t