h was
thinking and, though vivacity was foreign to his nature, the sufferer
joined in their conversation with a grim sort of self-effacement. Soon
they saw another figure approaching by the flagged path. It was the
figure of Eben Tollman and his manner was full of solicitude--but as he
talked with the father, Farquaharson saw him more than once steal covert
glances at the daughter. Obviously he bore, here, the relationship of
family friend, and though Conscience seemed to regard him as a member
of an older generation, he seemed to regard her as a contemporary.

In the days that followed Stuart Farquaharson's car standing at the
front of the old manse became a fixture in the landscape. The invalid
minister, seeking to accustom himself stoically to a pitiful anticlimax
of life, found in the buoyant vitality of this newcomer--of whom he
thought rather as a boy than a man--a sort of activity by proxy. He,
himself, moved only in a wheel chair, but Stuart could laughingly
override his protests and lift him with an easy strength into the seat
of the roadster to spin out across the countryside which he had told
himself he should hardly see again.

Even the spinster aunt, who had begun by regarding him with suspicion,
decided first that he was harmless, then that he was useful and finally
that he was charming.

Yet the young Virginian was not altogether beguiled into the hope that
this enviable status would be permanent. The talks and drives brought
incidental glimpses into the thoughts that had habitation under the
white mane and that came militantly out through the unyielding eyes even
in silence. Stuart winced often under the sting and irritation of a
bigotry which could, without question or doubt, undertake to rule
offhand and with absolutism on every question of right or wrong.

He was keeping and meant to keep a constant rein on his speech and
conduct, but he foresaw that, with all his restraint, a day might come
when the old puritan would divine the wide divergence of their thought
and have out upon him for one of the ungodly. Once he voiced something
of this to Conscience herself in the question, "How long do you think
your father will continue to welcome me here?"

Her eyes widened. "Welcome you? Why shouldn't he? He's leaning on you
as if you were a son. He declared his liking for you from the first
day."

Stuart shook his head in doubt and his eyes darkened with gravity. "It
never pays to blind one's eyes to th