had bestowed upon her, too, beauty of body and face, which might
have been gifts for the glorification of love.

It was one of those midsummer nights when the air, no longer void,
teems with an indefinable influence of restlessness. Like prisoners
beating on their iron doors at night, the repressed longings were all
awake, too--and clamorous. A sense of fear obsessed her, almost of panic
gaining force of volume like an inrunning tide.

Eben, she knew, was slowly but very certainly reading an aversion to
himself into every small manifestation of personal independence.

Suddenly her eyes grew wide and terrified. Was not her feeling, after
all, if only she had the courage to admit it, one of aversion for him?
Vehement denial rose at the thought, prompted by the discipline of fixed
ideas.

"But why," whispered a small voice of inner mockery, "did you just now
turn the key in your door? What was _that_ but an impulse of
withdrawal--a barrier?"

There had been another night when she had felt such a nameless and
restless fear. Then she had dreaded being left alone. Now she was afraid
she might not be. Then a man had come to her and soothed her, but it had
been another man.

Why should these thoughts of Stuart Farquaharson always obtrude
themselves on every revery?... Was there no key she could turn against
him, whom it was her duty to shut out?

If he were ever to return to her and find her in such a mood as
possessed her now, she feared that she would throw herself into his
arms. Thank God he would never come!

Something of the same restlessness that obsessed her was at work with
her husband, too, that night, though it led him less into panic and
self-questioning than into a brooding conviction of life's injustice.

Above the mantel of his study hung a portrait of an ancestor garbed in
the blue and buff of the army of Independence. Until quite recently this
portrait's features had been well-nigh extinguished under the
accumulated soot and tarnish of many decades, but Eben had revered them
with that veneration of ancestor-worship which is an egoism overflowing
the boundaries of a single generation. Lately Conscience had had the
picture restored and now the renovated forebear, almost jaunty in his
refurbishing, looked down on his descendant and the descendant's pride
was quickened.

To-night, however, the eyes of the portrait seemed full of grim
accusation. In their cold depths Eben could fancy the question sternly