a hand, very wearily to stop her.

"I've complained that when the crisis comes we react to the undertow. If
you are the exponent of your code, that code is good enough for me. I
bow to a thing bigger than myself.... Your God shall be mine, too ...
to-morrow I leave, and I won't come back."

"Now, Stuart, my love," she declared, "you can say it truly: 'The idols
are broken in the Temple of Baal.'"

But the renewed life of her voice faltered with the sudden realization
of the other thing: of the bleakness of her future when he had gone, and
suddenly she broke out in undisguised terror.

"But even until you go, Stuart ... even until to-morrow, protect me
against myself, because ... I am totally helpless, and I love you rather
madly."

Instinctively her arms came out and her eyes burst once more into the
fires of passion, but she made an effort and drew back, and as she did
so the stress of the fight prevailed and, had he not caught her, she
would have fallen. She had fainted.

Farquaharson picked her up in his arms, and, distrusting himself to
remain there, started to the house, carrying her like a sleeping child.

The sight of the man going up the path with the woman in his arms was
the only portion of the entire interview which Eben Tollman saw, but it
served his imagination adequately as an index to the rest. He had,
after a long wait on the terrace, followed them to the pines, but had
not announced himself. His arrival had been too tardy to give him a view
of their first--and only--embrace, and his distance had been too great
to let him hear any of their words. When, after a circuitous return, he
reached the terrace, his wife was sitting, pale, but with recovered
consciousness, in a chair, and he himself went direct to his study.

CHAPTER XXX

It was a sleepless night for every one in the house of Eben Tollman.
Conscience still felt that her long fight had ended in a total defeat
and that she had been saved from worse than defeat only because her
victor had risen to her plea for magnanimity. Now she lay staring at the
ceiling with eyes that burned in their sockets. Self-pity warred with
self-accusation.

She could not forget that moment of ecstasy in her lover's arms nor
banish her wish for its repetition. With him the home of her dreams
might have been a reality where men and women who made splendid
successes and splendid failures came and talked of their deeds and their
frustrations, and where ch