ithout speaking. Her cousin
looked up in some surprise.

"You goin'?" he asked.

"Let me know before you start East," she called back to him. "Perhaps I
could do something to help you on your trip."

"Sure I'll let you know," came up heartily from the bottom of the wall
where the mason had gone for a tool.

* * * * *

If Archie realized Tom Clark's return to Highcourt, he was wise enough
to make nothing of it. He was in a poor way nervously at this time,
playing bad polo and drinking altogether too much. He stayed away from
the city, which was a nuisance to Adelle, but he spent most of his time
at the country club. Adelle meanwhile was wrestling with herself; with
what people have the habit of calling the "conscience," but what had
better be called the "consciousness," endeavoring to realize more fully
the position in which she found herself. The idea within, like most
ideas hotly nursed in a troubled brain, was growing all the time, until
it filled all her waking moments and most of her dreams. She had to will
deliberately not to take the little path up the hill to the mason's
shack. Once she yielded, and when she arrived breathless, her heart
thumping, she found the door safely padlocked. The mason had gone to the
town for supplies. She sneaked back to Highcourt by a roundabout course
through the eucalyptus wood, to avoid meeting her cousin on the path.
Thus day by day she lived in an agony of preoccupation, so that even
Archie began to notice how thin and pale she was, and attributed her
distress to all sorts of reasons except the right one, of which he knew
nothing. Her friends said that she was "trying to do too much," needed
distraction, and recommended a trip somewhere, though what she did,
except to dine and lunch out a few times each week or trail about the
unfinished estate and play with her child, would be hard to say. Adelle,
in truth, was thinking, thinking harder than ever before in her life.
Her new secret was the most stimulating influence, next to her child,
that she had known in all her life. Her brain once started led her into
all sorts of mad by-paths, ramifications of perception that she and the
reader, too, might not suspect lay within her powers. She asked herself
what the mason, with his ideas about the injustice of property, would do
with her money? She began even to question the meaning of life! Its
queer treatment of her, in jerking her up to a high plane of