asy guess
that this was Eben Tollman himself.

The newcomer bore himself with a cold reserve of conscious superiority.
He might have been forty, though the humorless immobility of his face
gave him a seeming of greater age. In stature he was above the average
height and his eyes were shrewd and piercing. To the salutations of
those present, he responded with a slight, stiff inclining of his
head--and appeared to withdraw into the shell of self-sufficiency.

When Stuart, later, presented himself at the old manse, he found it a
venerable place, whose shingled roof was moss-green and whose gables
were honorably gray with age and service. An elderly servant directed
him to the garden, and elated at the prospect of a tete-a-tete among the
hedge rows, he went with a light step along the mossy path, noting with
what a golden light the sun filtered through the fine old trees and
flecked the sod. But inside the garden he halted among the flower
borders, for a glance told him that Conscience was not alone. She sat
leaning toward a wheel-chair, reading aloud from a book which he
divined, rather than recognized, to be a Bible. As he hurried forward
the girl looked up and rose to meet him with a swift eagerness of
welcome.

Because Stuart had catalogued Conscience's father, who was old enough to
be her grandfather, as a bigot and an obstructionist standing between
her and the sun, he was prepared to dislike him. Yet when he came up he
confessed to a sort of astonished admiration. He stood looking at a head
which suggested the head of a lion, full maned and white as a snow-cap,
shaggy and beetling of brow, and indomitable of eye. Such a man, had he
lived in another day, would have gone uncomplaining to the agonies of
the Inquisition--or as readily have participated in visiting
Inquisitional tortures on another. Yet it was a face capable of
kindliness, too, since its wrath was only for sin--or what it regarded
as sin.

He held out a hand in greeting.

"Conscience has told me how you rushed her home to me. It was very kind
of you. I was hungry to see her, but I hadn't dared to hope for her so
soon."

The old man spoke with a smile, but it was unconsciously pathetic.
Stuart could see that he was stricken not only in his useless legs but
also in his heart, though his eagle-like eyes were steady.

Conscience had been crying, but now she smiled and the two chatted with
a forced vivacity, pretending to ignore the thing of which eac