put, "Where are your sons? Are you going to let the flame of our
honorable line flicker out with your own death?"

Perhaps the root of ancestor-worship, in all forms, lies deep in the
wish of the devotee to be, in his own turn, honored. Perhaps, too, the
obsession of self-perpetuation grows rather than wanes as the line
becomes less worth perpetuating.

At all events Eben Tollman had no children and his thoughts fell into
brooding and bitterness. His present attitude needed only a spark, such
as jealousy or suspicion might supply, to fire it into some quirk of mad
and bitter resentment.

He turned out the lamp and went slowly up the stairs. Outside his wife's
door he paused, and, without knocking, tried the knob--to find the door
locked against him. A deep flush of resentment spread over his cheeks.
He drew back his hand, being minded to rap peremptorily--then he
refrained and went on to his own room.

CHAPTER XXI

Conscience was sitting on the terrace one day with a book, which she
smilingly laid down as her husband joined her. Eben took up the small
volume of Browning's verse and idly turned its pages, his eyes falling
almost immediately on the old inscription, "Stuart to Conscience." His
unfixed jealousy seized upon a frail mooring but he stifled the scowl
that instinct prompted and turned the pages to the point where a narrow
ribbon marked "The Statue and the Bust."

He had often wondered what people found to admire in Browning, but now
he read with an unflagging interest. Here was a document in evidence:
the narrative of a wife who dissembled her love and the ungodly moral of
the thing was that the culpability of the lovers lay--not in their
clandestine devotion but in their temporizing postponement of a guilty
love:

"And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost ...
Is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin...."

Before Eben Tollman's eyes swam spots of red and in his heart leaped a
withering flame of betrayed wrath.

Had Conscience, after all, through these months and years, deceived him?
Had she surreptitiously kept in touch with the erstwhile lover who had
already wrecked one home? Had she been letting memories kindle fires in
her which all his faithful love had left unquickened?

The long incubating dourness had hatched from its egg and, like the
young quail which runs while the shell still clings to its pin feathers,
it was alive and seeking nourishment.

If such guilt existe