door.

"The patient will pull through this attack," he said briskly. "It's a
leaky valve. There is only one rule that I have to lay upon you. It is
absolutely vital that he shall not be excited. A blow with an ax would
be no more fatal than another such stroke."

Conscience looked desperately about her, as Stuart with the doctor
beside him started the car again down the drive. In a front window her
eyes lighted on a flaming branch of maple leaves. Only two hours ago she
and her lover had been watching the sunlight spill through the gorgeous
filter of the painted foliage. They had carried in their hearts the
spirit of carnival. Now the storm had broken and swept them.

She walked unsteadily to the veranda of the house and dropped down on
the steps. Her head was swimming and her life was in a vortex.

CHAPTER VIII

The days that followed were troubled days and they brought to
Conscience's cheeks an accentuated pallor. Under her eyes were smudges
that made them seem very large and wistful. The minister was once more
in his arm chair, a little more broken, a little more fiercely
uncompromising of aspect, but the one normal solution of such a spent
and burdensome life: the solution of death, stood off from him. Upon his
daughter, whose lips were sealed against any protest by the belief that
even a small excitement might kill him, he vented long and bigoted
sermons of anathema. In these sermons, possibly, he was guilty of the
very heresy of which his daughter had said he was so intolerant. He
seemed to doubt himself, these days, that Satan wore a spiked tail and a
pair of cloven hoofs. Of late he rather leaned to the belief that the
Arch-tempter had returned to walk the earth in the guise of a young
Virginian and that he had assumed the incognito of Stuart Farquaharson.

One refrain ran through every waking hour and troubled his sleep with
fantastic dreams. God commanded him to strip this tempter of his
habiliments of pretense and show the naked wickedness of his soul to the
girl's deluded eye. To that fancied command he dedicated himself as
whole-heartedly as a bloodhound gives itself to the man hunt.

To Stuart one day, as they walked together in the woods, Conscience
confessed her fear that this constant hammering of persecution would
eventually batter down her capacity for sane judgment and she ended with
a sweeping denunciation of every form of bigotry.

"Dear," he answered with the gravity of deep appreh