"I don't know anything about your financial rating," went on his wife.
"I've never asked any questions about that and I don't care so far as
the mere figures go. But I believe you have a gift of business
generalship which, in fields of wider opportunity, might have made you a
millionaire."

Tollman broke unexpectedly into a peal of laughter. He complacently
accepted the tribute to his powers, but would have preferred it laid on
with greater lavishness. Quite casually he remarked:

"When I said slight caliber, I spoke comparatively. If the occasion
arose, I fancy I could sign a check now--not only for a million but for
several."

Conscience's dark eyes must have mirrored their amazement: an amazement
which was entirely natural, and which concerned not only the revelation
of wealth in itself, but more complex things as well.

The disturbing thought intruded itself that in a land of such sparse
opportunities these returns could be wrung out only by a policy so
tight-fisted as to be merciless. It must mean draining resources to
their dregs. That was an unpleasant suspicion which she instantly
expelled with the reminder that her husband had inherited wealth and
that in supplementing it he had not been limited to a local field of
operation.

The next unwelcome thought suggested that if Eben were so rich as that
his generosity to her father and herself was discounted. Out of
abundance he had given a moiety and because of it she had put her life
into a yoke. But that idea, too, she met with the answer that his
conduct must not be measured by a given cost but by its spirit and
willingness.

"You are surprised?" His smiling inquiry called her back from her
disturbing reverie with a sense of guilty criticism.

"Only at the degree of your success, Eben," she told him gravely; "I had
not supposed it so large."

But as time went on, an intelligence less keenly edged than hers would
have recognized that it was only to the anterooms of his financial
interests that he admitted her.

This was inevitable, and obviously he could not explain what she felt to
be a rebuff. To make full disclosure of certain transactions would have
stripped Eben Tollman of disguise and brought results as parlous as
those he had feared on the afternoon when he left his strong box
unlocked. Structures of self-delusion might have fallen into shapeless
debris under the batteries of her frank questioning. Eben Tollman could
dismiss from thought the