ed, as it had happened once before, that the
stars seemed exaggerated in size and multiplied in number. On the breeze
came riding the distant voice of the surf with its call to staring
wakefulness and restlessness of spirit.

Conscience went early to her room, feeling that unless her taut nerves
could have the relaxation of solitude, she must scream out. To-day's
discovery had kindled anew all the fires of insurgency that burned in
her, inflaming her heart to demand the mating joy which could make of
marriage not a formula of duty and hard allegiance, but a splendid and
rightful fulfillment.

As she sat by the window of her unlighted room, her eyes were staring
tensely into the night and the pink ovals of her nails were pressed into
the palms of her hands. Her gaze, as if under a spell of hypnosis, was
following the glow of a cigar among the pines, where Stuart was seeking
to walk off the similar unrest which made sleep impossible. "He still
loves me," she kept repeating to herself with a stunned realization, "he
still loves me!"

She hoped fervently that Eben was asleep. To have to talk to him while
her strained mood was so full of rebellion would be hard; to have to
submit to his autumnal kiss, would make that mood blaze into revulsion.

But at last she heard a footfall on the stair and in the hall and held
her breath in a sort of terror as they ended just outside her threshold.
She knew that Eben was trying her door--trying it first without knocking
after his churlish custom. She hoped that he would pass on when
darkness and silence were his answers, but after a moment came a rap and
when it met with no reply it was repeated with a peremptory insistence.
Conscience drew a long breath, and, shivering with distaste, she slowly
lighted a candle. Then she went shudderingly to the door and opened it.

In the stress of the moment, as she shot back the bolt, she surrendered
for just an instant to her feelings; feelings which she had never before
allowed expression even in the confessional of her thoughts. She knew
now how Heloise had felt when she wildly told herself that she would
rather be mistress of Abelarde than wife to the King.

Eben standing in the doorway, smiling, seemed to her disordered mood the
figure of a Satyr.

* * * * *

"I've had a letter from Ebbett," Tollman commented one day at luncheon.
"Like Stuart here, he's been working too hard and he wants to know if he
can