and nine
o'clock in the evening.

The household duties were finished before that and the three were
sitting on the terrace with a world of silver light and cobalt shadows
about them. That is to say, two of them sat there in silence while the
third came and went about his duties of changing records and needles and
the winding of the machine--for he still dedicated himself to
minstrelsy.

And in Conscience the germ of an idea which seemed trivial and foolish
was beginning to grow into a sort of obsession. Her nerves like those of
the dog in the story tightened into such rebellion under this music,
singing always of love, that she, too, wanted to cry out. Her head was
swimming with the untrustworthy sense of some cord of control snapped;
of a power or reason become unfocused; of a hitherto staunch morale
breaking.

At last, with the feeling that she could sit there no longer, she rose
abruptly from her chair. "I'm going down to get the mail," she
announced.

Both men rose, offering her escort, but she shook her head in determined
negation.

"No, thank you both, I don't need either of you."

Stuart watched her figure following the twisting thread of the path
among the apple trees, whose gnarled trunks made fantastic shapes in the
moonlight. Then he glanced at the stolid and seated figure of her
husband and his face darkened. When Eben essayed comment his visitor
vouchsafed replies in monosyllables so that conversation languished. At
last the younger man rose from his chair.

"I think, after all, I'll go down and walk back with her," he said and
Eben Tollman only nodded.

Leaving the house behind him, Stuart had silence except for the
occasional call of a whippoorwill, and as he drew nearer to the sleepy
darkness at the pines a clear and fragrant scent of honeysuckle came to
his nostrils.

He guessed that in this sudden withdrawal to the isolation of the firs,
Conscience had followed the same instinct that takes a wounded animal
off, to be alone with its pain. So he approached with a noiseless
caution abetted by the sound-deadening carpet of pine needles, searching
the shadows for her unannounced and at first vainly.

In the sea of moonlit brightness this strip of trees afforded a margin
of soft, almost sooty obscurity, save where here and there darts of
light fell through the raggedness of the foliage.

Finally he saw her. She was seated on a rounded bowlder and both her
hands were pressed tightly against h