Their prefatory talk ran along those lines of commonplace question and answer in which the wide gap between their last meeting and the present was bridged. This, reflected Eben, was a part of the play designed to create and foster the impression that they had really been as completely out of touch as they pretended. "And so you left us, an unknown, and return a celebrity!" Conscience's voice and eyes held a hint of raillery which made Stuart say to himself: "Thank God she has not let the fog make her colorless."--"When I saw you last you were starting up the ladder of the law toward the Supreme Court--and now you reappear, crowned with literary distinction." A thought of those days when he had closed his law books and his house in Virginia to begin looking out on the roofs and chimney pots of old Greenwich village, rose to the Virginian's mind. It had all been an effort to forget. But he smiled as he answered. "I'm afraid it's a little early to claim celebrity. To-morrow morning I may read in the Providence papers that I'm only notorious." "You must tell me all about the play. You feel confident, of course?" she eagerly demanded. "It seems incredible that you were having your premiere here to-night and that I knew nothing of it--until now." It not only seemed incredible, mused Eben: It _was_ incredible. He was speculating upon what would have happened had he really been as blind as he was choosing to appear. "They say," smiled Stuart, "that every playwright is confident at his first opening--and never afterwards." It was hard for him to carry on a censored conversation, sitting here at the table with his thoughts falling into an insistent refrain. He had always known Conscience Williams and this was Conscience Tollman. He had told himself through years that he had succeeded ill in his determined effort of forgetting her; yet now he found her as truly a revelation in the vividness of her charm and the radiance of her beauty as though he had brought faint memories--or none--to the meeting. His blood was tingling in his arteries with a rediscovery which substituted for the old sense of loss a new and more poignant realization. It would have been better had he been brusque, even discourteous, replying to the morning's invitation that he was too busy to accept. But he had come and except for that first moment of astonishment Conscience had been gay and untroubled. She at least was safe from the perils which this reunion held for him. So, as he chatted, he kept before his thoughts like a standard seen fitfully through the smoke of battle the reminder, "She must feel, as she wishes to feel, that it has left me unscathed." "But, Stuart," exclaimed Conscience suddenly, "all these night-long rehearsals and frantic sessions of rewriting must be positive deadly. You look completely fagged out."