ance. Stuart
told himself that to attribute this service of friendship to a selfish
motive was a meanness unworthy of entertainment, yet the suspicion
lingered. When they met, Tollman was always courteous and if this
courtesy never warmed into actual cordiality neither was it ever
tinctured with any seeming of dislike.

The summer had spent its heat and already there was a hint of autumn in
the air, but Stuart had kept his promise. There had been no lovemaking.

He and Conscience walked together one afternoon to a hill where they sat
with a vista of green country spread before them, just beginning to
kindle under the splendid torch of an incendiary autumn. Off beyond was
the sea, gorgeously blue in its main scheme, yet varying into subtle
transitions of mood from rich purple to a pale and tender green. The sky
was cloudless but there was that smoky, misty, impalpable thing like a
dust of dreams on the distance. The girl stood with one hand resting on
the gnarled bole of a pine. She wore a blue sweater, and her carmine
lips were more vivid because these months of anxiety had given to her
checks a creamy pallor. The man, standing at her elbow, was devouring
her with his eyes. She was gorgeous and wholly desirable and his heart
was flaming with emotions that ran the whole gamut of love's
completeness from clean passion to worship.

Yet he held his truce of silence and it was she herself who spoke at
last.

"The girls are all meeting on the campus--under the big trees about
now," she said, and her eyes held a far-away wistfulness. "They are
chattering foolishly and delightfully about their summer adventures ...
and the dormitories are being allotted. There'll be several new English
readers, I guess."

"Does it hurt as badly as that?" he asked, and her answer was a low,
rather hysterical little laugh, coming nearer bitterness than anything
he had ever heard from her lips before.

"You've been here. You've seen it all. Haven't you stopped instinctively
often when you broke into a sudden laugh with a moldy feeling around
your heart as if you'd shouted out in church? Haven't you watched
yourself and stultified yourself in every conversation, except when we
were alone, to keep from treading on the toes of some inch-wide
prejudice?"

"I've felt those things, of course--all of them." His reply was grave.
"But then, you see, you've been here, and that made the whole thing
lyric. The rest was just a somber background. It on