t the injustice of the father, he fought
hotly, and his denunciations of various influences were burning and
scornful. So slowly but dangerously there crept into their arguments the
element of contention. Hitherto Stuart had made no tactical mistakes. He
had endured greatly and in patience, but now he was unconsciously
yielding to the temptation of assailing an abstract code in a fashion
which her troubled judgment might translate into attacks upon her
father. Out of that attitude was born for her a hard dilemma of
conflicting loyalties. It was all a fabric woven of gossamer threads,
but Gulliver was bound into helplessness by just such Lilliputian
fetters.

Late one night, when the moon was at two-thirds of fullness and the air
touched with frost, Stuart abandoned the bed upon which he had been
restlessly tossing for hours. He kindled a pipe and sat meditating, none
too cheerfully, by the frail light of a bayberry candle. Through the
narrow corridors and boxed-in stair wells of a ramshackle hotel, came no
sounds except the minors of the night. Somewhere far off a dog barked
and somewhere near at hand a traveling salesman snored. In the flare and
sputter of the charring wick and melting wax shadows lengthened and
shortened like flapping flags of darkness.

Then the jangle of the telephone bell in the office ripped the stillness
with a discordant suddenness which Farquaharson thought must arouse the
household, but the snoring beyond the wall went on, unbroken, and there
was no sound of a footfall on the creaking stair. At last Stuart,
himself, irritated by the strident urgency of its repetitions, reached
for his bath robe and went down. The clapper still trembled with the
echo of its last vibrations as he put the receiver to his ear and
answered.

Then he started and his muscles grew taut, for the other voice was that
of Conscience and it shook with terrified unevenness and a tremulous
faintness like the leaping and weakening of a fevered pulse. He could
tell that she was talking guardedly with her lips close to the
transmitter.

"I had to speak to you without waiting for morning," she told him,
recognizing his voice, "and yet--yet I don't know what to say."

Recognizing from the wild note that she was laboring under some
unnatural strain, he answered soothingly, "I'm glad you called me,
dear."

"What time is it?" she demanded next and when he told her it was well
after midnight she gave a low half-hysterical lau