came to him at first vaguely, then persistently, that
she herself was seeking to avoid anything savoring of the quality of a
tete-a-tete.

The realization haunted and troubled him because even in this general
association, her personality had flashed varyingly and amazingly from
many facets. The dream which had meant so much to his boyhood was
swiftly ripening also into the dream of his manhood, or, as he would
have expressed it, a fulfillment. His heart had been fallow when he had
first known her. It had not been subjected to subsequent conquest and
now its predisposed allegiance was ready to grow with tropical swiftness
into a purposeful and fiery ardor.

CHAPTER IV

Stuart Farquaharson had that habit of self-analysis which often
compelled him to take his own life into the laboratory of reflection and
study its reactions with an almost impersonal directness. That analysis
told him that Conscience Williams, had she chosen to do so, might have
imposed upon him the thrall of infatuation, even had there been no
powerful appeal to his mentality. Every fiery element that had lain
dormant in his nature was ready to leap into action, in response to a
challenge of which she was herself unconscious--a challenge to the
senses. And yet he recognized with an almost prayerful gratitude that it
was something paramount to physical lure, which beckoned him along the
path of love. Into the more genuine and intimate recesses of her life,
where the soul keeps its aloofness, she had given him only keyhole
glimpses, but they had been such glimpses as kindled his eagerness and
awakened his hunger for exploration. There had been candid indications
reenforced by a dozen subtler things that her liking for him was more
than casual, and yet she denied him any chance to avow himself, and
sometimes, when he came suddenly upon her, he discovered a troubled
wistfulness in her face which clouded her eyes and brought a droop to
the corners of her lips.

On one such occasion as he was passing an old house with a yard in which
the grass was tall and ragged and the fruit trees as unkempt and
overgrown as a hermit's beard he saw her standing alone by one of the
tilting veranda posts. The sunshine was gone from her dark eyes, so that
they seemed darker than ever--and haunted with an almost tragic
wistfulness. She had the manner of one facing a ghost which she had
vainly sought to lay. He came so close before he spoke her name that she
turned to