n with the reception
of Conscience's letter at Cairo, the past had risen with Phoenix
upblazing and he had recklessly cabled her to halt at the step of the
altar. She confessed with deep humiliation that had the message come in
time, she might have obeyed. But that, too, had failed--and now with his
versatile capacity for the expedient, he was dallying again with the
affections of Marian Holbury. It was, she admitted, not a pretty record.
She told herself almost savagely that she hated Stuart Farquaharson as
one can hate only where contempt succeeds love.

This was the bulwark of fallacy with which Conscience Tollman sought to
safeguard her dwindling confidence in the ultimate success of her
wifehood and she clung to it with a bitter determination.

* * * * *

Where the old iron urns, painted a poison green, had stood in the front
yard of Tollman's house there was no longer any offense to the eye.
Where an unsightly fence had confined a somewhat ragged yard, low stone
walls, flower bordered, went around a lawn as trim as plush. The house
presented to the eye of the visitor that dignity which should invest the
home of a gentleman whose purse is not restricted. The spirit of the
colonial had been preserved and amplified, and from the terrace one
looked out on a landscape of hill view and water glimpse, as from a
fitting and harmonious place.

One afternoon Conscience Tollman was walking among her flowers. They
would be gone before long, for already the woods were beginning to burn
with the colors of autumn and the bogs where cranberry-pickers worked
were blazing into orange and claret. The road that came out of the
pines, formerly deeply rutted and sandy, was now metaled and approached
the house in a graded curve.

Looking off down the hill to where it turned from the highway into the
farm, she saw a motor which she did not recognize and which even at the
distance showed, dust-whitened, as from a long journey. It had entered
between the stone gate pillars, and Conscience, with a glance at her
garden apron, muddied from kneeling at the flower beds, turned and went
hastily into the house. The car evidently brought visitors and as, from
her bed-room window, she watched it round the nearer curve and draw up
at the yard entrance, her perplexity grew.

It was a large machine of foreign make and, when the liveried chauffeur
opened the tonneau door, a woman stepped out whose face was obscured