her key fitted in the door, Conscience turned and held out both
hands.

"You've been wonderful, Stuart," she said, with tears in her voice.
"You've understood everything and I want to thank you while we're here
alone. You'll come in, of course? I'm afraid it will be dismal, but the
hotel is worse."

The man shook his head. "No," he answered, as he pressed her hands in
his own, "I'll go back to the village and rouse up the hostelry, but I'm
coming to-morrow--to inquire."

Many dogs were aroused to a noisy chorus before his hammering on the
door of the old house which passed for a hotel received official
response, and the east was breaking into a pallid rosiness before his
thoughts permitted him to leave his seat by the window and stretch
himself wearily on his uninviting bed.

But when the sun had waked him at eight o'clock the landscape framed by
his window was a smiling one to which the youth in him responded and he
dressed clear-eyed and ready for a new day. In the hope that Conscience
had been able to sleep late, he meant to defer his visit of inquiry, and
in the meantime he breakfasted at leisure and went out to search for a
barber. The quest was not difficult, and while he awaited his turn he
sat against the wall, mildly amused at the scraps of local gossip that
came to his ears couched in homely vernacular.

"I heard that Eben Tollman cal'lates to jam Lige Heman with a
foreclosure on his mortgage. It's move out and trust in Providence for
Lige and Lige's." This comment came in piping falsetto from a thin youth
who had just been shaven raw, but still lingered in the shop, and it met
prompt reply from a grizzled old fellow with a wooden leg.

"Pshaw, Seth, that ain't no news. You can't scace'ly get folks excited
by a yarn about a shark's bitin' a cripple--but if you was to give in a
yarn about a cripple bitin' a shark--well, there'd be some point to
that. If you told where somebody had got a dollar away from Eben, now,
we'd call you a liar, I s'pose--and be right at that--but we'd listen."

"If you got a nickel from Tollman," retorted the first speaker, "you
couldn't put it in a slot machine. It would be squeezed till it was bent
double. Well, you can't blame him, I s'pose. He ain't got more'n a
million."

Just at that moment the door was opened by a gentleman entering from the
street, and Farquaharson was immensely diverted at the sudden hush in
which that particular vein of conversation died. It was an e