ulder.

"I beg pardon, sir," he said, "but are you ill? Can't I get a nip of
brandy?"

Stuart turned his head stupidly and looked up. Then slowly he pulled
himself together, with a shamed realization that the eyes of a hundred
pleasure-seekers had witnessed his collapse. He straightened and set his
jaw. "No, thank you. I'm all right," he declared. "I've been in the
desert, you see, and--" But the Englishman had nodded and gone back to
his table.

Ten minutes later, scornful of over-sea tolls, Farquaharson was filing a
cablegram. The letter had said she would be married "some time in the
winter." It was now past mid-winter. Would there be time? His hand
trembled with his haste as if the saving of a few seconds could avail.

"Received no note from you. Wrote to you that night begging a
chance," he scribbled, as his head swam with the effort and frenzy
of his suspense. "Horrible mistake has occurred. Matter of life and
death and thousand times more than that that you take no step till
I see you. Am sailing by first boat. Wait."

That afternoon he dashed across the gangplank of a P. and O. steamer at
Alexandria just as the last whistle blew. While the propellers churned
the Mediterranean waters into a restless wake at the stern, Stuart
walked the decks like a man demented. Would there be time? His fingers
itched for his watch, because his obsession was the flight of hours. But
on the second day out a wireless message came, relaying from Cairo. The
man did not dare open it on deck. He took it to his cabin and there with
the slowness of deep fear, he unfolded the paper.

CHAPTER XIII

Against the stupor of Stuart Farquaharson's brain, as he sat in the
small stateroom of the P. and O. steamer, beat the fear of what he might
read.

Subconsciously his senses recorded small and actual things as the vessel
lurched through a heavy sea: the monotonous rat-tat of the brass
door-hook against the woodwork, and the alternating scraps of sky and
water as the circle of his port hole rose and fell across the line of
the horizon.

He was thinking of the letter that had come to Cairo--and lain there so
long unopened, but he was spared a knowledge of the suspense with which
Conscience had awaited an answer.

She had written it early in the fall and had mailed it endorsed "please
forward" in the care of his New York publishers, so that it had played
tag with him, never catching him, over the le