r of squalls at sea and the lashing of the
woods inland. For some weeks Conscience followed the colorless monotony
of her life with a stunned and bruised deadness about her heart. She had
shed no tears and the feeling was always with her that soon she must
awaken to a poignant agony and that then her mind would collapse.
Mechanically she read to her father and supervised the duties of the
attendant who had been brought on from Boston, but often when he spoke
to her he had to repeat his question, and then she would come back to
the present with a start.

The invalid had learned from Tollman that Farquaharson had gone away
after a quarrel, and he piously told himself that his prayers were
answered and his daughter had been snatched as a brand from the burning.
But for once an instinct of mercy tinged his dealings with the
frailities of humanity. He refrained from talking of Stuart and from the
pointing of morals. That would come later.

CHAPTER XI

Thinking through days when a cold and tortured moisture would burst out
on her temples and through nights when she lay wide-eyed and sleepless,
only one answer seemed to come to Conscience. All Stuart's love must
have curled in that swift transition into indifference and contempt.

Admitting that conclusion, she knew that her pride should make her hate
him, too, but her pride was dead. Everything in her was dead but the
love she could not kill and that remained only to torture her.

The most paradoxical thing of all was that in these troubled days she
thought of only one person as a dependable friend. Eben Tollman had
evinced a spirit for which she had not given him credit. It seemed that
she had been all wrong in her estimates of human character. Stuart, with
his almost brilliant vitality of charm, had after a quarrel turned his
back on her. Eben Tollman, who masked a diffident nature behind a
semblance of cold reserve, was unendingly considerate and no more asked
reward than a faithful mastiff might have asked it. It contented him to
anticipate all her wishes and to invent small ways of easing her misery.
He did not even seek to force his society and satisfied himself with
such crumbs of conversation as she chose to drop his way in passing. If
ever she should come out of this period of torpid wretchedness, she
would owe Tollman a heavy debt of gratitude.

Three months after the day when Mr. Hagan returned from Cape Cod, that
gentleman called into his private off