It was one of those midsummer nights when the air, no longer void, teems with an indefinable influence of restlessness. Like prisoners beating on their iron doors at night, the repressed longings were all awake, too--and clamorous. A sense of fear obsessed her, almost of panic gaining force of volume like an inrunning tide. Eben, she knew, was slowly but very certainly reading an aversion to himself into every small manifestation of personal independence. Suddenly her eyes grew wide and terrified. Was not her feeling, after all, if only she had the courage to admit it, one of aversion for him? Vehement denial rose at the thought, prompted by the discipline of fixed ideas. "But why," whispered a small voice of inner mockery, "did you just now turn the key in your door? What was _that_ but an impulse of withdrawal--a barrier?" There had been another night when she had felt such a nameless and restless fear. Then she had dreaded being left alone. Now she was afraid she might not be. Then a man had come to her and soothed her, but it had been another man. Why should these thoughts of Stuart Farquaharson always obtrude themselves on every revery?... Was there no key she could turn against him, whom it was her duty to shut out? If he were ever to return to her and find her in such a mood as possessed her now, she feared that she would throw herself into his arms. Thank God he would never come! Something of the same restlessness that obsessed her was at work with her husband, too, that night, though it led him less into panic and self-questioning than into a brooding conviction of life's injustice. Above the mantel of his study hung a portrait of an ancestor garbed in the blue and buff of the army of Independence. Until quite recently this portrait's features had been well-nigh extinguished under the accumulated soot and tarnish of many decades, but Eben had revered them with that veneration of ancestor-worship which is an egoism overflowing the boundaries of a single generation. Lately Conscience had had the picture restored and now the renovated forebear, almost jaunty in his refurbishing, looked down on his descendant and the descendant's pride was quickened. To-night, however, the eyes of the portrait seemed full of grim accusation. In their cold depths Eben could fancy the question sternly put, "Where are your sons? Are you going to let the flame of our honorable line flicker out with your own death?" Perhaps the root of ancestor-worship, in all forms, lies deep in the wish of the devotee to be, in his own turn, honored. Perhaps, too, the obsession of self-perpetuation grows rather than wanes as the line becomes less worth perpetuating. At all events Eben Tollman had no children and his thoughts fell into brooding and bitterness. His present attitude needed only a spark, such as jealousy or suspicion might supply, to fire it into some quirk of mad and bitter resentment.