master treated as such a cur deserves."

A moment later the two servants were assisting Holbury to his motor, one
of them nursing a closed and blackened eye on his own account as a badge
of over-impetuous loyalty; and most of that night, while Marian Holbury
lay groaning on the couch, Stuart Farquaharson sat before his empty
hearth with eyes which did not close.

The Holbury divorce suit, after filling advance columns of spicy print,
was awarded with a sealed record and Farquaharson was given no
opportunity to tell his story to the public. He saw nothing more of
Marian and was widely accused of having compromised and then abandoned
her. So Stuart closed the house on the Hudson, as he had closed the
house in Virginia, and with a very bitter spirit went to Europe.

It was some time before this, perhaps several months, that Eben Tollman,
the indispensable friend--serving hitherto without reward or the seeking
of reward--ventured to aspire openly to more personal recognition. He
had been building slowly, and if perseverance is a merit, he deserved
success. Perhaps Conscience had changed. There had been many things to
change her. She had lived long without a break in an atmosphere which
she had dreaded and her father had not grown sunnier. A life of dogma
had acidulated into so impossible a fanaticism that in contrast Tollman
seemed to assume something like breadth of gauge.

The heart attacks which had been painted as such sure death had been a
greater threat to the girl than to the man whose heart was physically
involved. There had been two of them and both had been survived. William
Williams was a man who was always dying, but who never died. Yet these
seizures served their purpose since they kept the daughter freshly
reminded that a sword of Damocles hung over her--and that her father
must not be crossed. It became a thought with which she lived, with
which she slept, until it carried her to more and more absurd lengths of
self-effacement and ate out the heart of her independence. Of Eben
Tollman she no longer thought as a man old enough to be her father and
as impersonal as the Sphinx.

If he lacked the fire and buoyancy which had made association with
Stuart Farquaharson a thing of light and color and sparkle, so did her
whole life lack that fire in these gray days. So did she herself lack
it, she told herself wistfully. At all events he came nearer being
_fides Achates_ than any one else. Stuart was a memory and