"I say that he has had his chance in all fairness and has failed. I say that during the years of this ill-starred experiment you have fought valiantly to make him win. I have, at least, not interfered by act or a word. If he had not arranged this meeting I should never have done so--and since he is responsible for our being brought together now he must face the consequences." "Then your attitude of last night was not just moon madness, after all?" "I mean to penetrate your life as far as I can and to recognize no inner sanctum from which I am barred. He is the usurper and my love is not tame enough to submit. I am your lover because, though your words deny me, your heart invites me. I'm coming to stay." This time the woman's eyes did not kindle into furious or contemptuous fires, but her voice was so calmly resolute that Stuart felt his own had been a blustering thing. "Then, Stuart, I'm still the puritan woman. I'm asking no quarter--and I have no fears. Attack as soon and as often and as furiously as you wish. I'm ready." * * * * * Eben Tollman noted that under the steady normality and evenness of his wife's demeanor there stirred an indefinable current of nervousness, since the evening of the tryst at the float and that the whole manner of the visitor toward himself was tinctured with a new brusqueness, as though the requirement of maintaining a cordial pretense were becoming over tedious. These were mere bits of chaff in a light breeze and he flattered himself that it had taken his own perspicacity to detect them. A less capable diagnostician might have passed them by unobserved. But to him they marked a boundary. Alone in his study, the husband ruminated upon these topics. Here he had sanctuary and the necessity of a hateful dissimulation was relaxed. He could then throw aside that mantle of urbanity which he must yet endure for a while before other eyes. He formed the habit of gazing up at the portrait of the ancestor who had died in the revolution and almost fancied that between his own eyes and those painted on the canvas there was an interchange of understanding. He was in truth a man who had already parted company with reason while still invested in its perfect masquerade. His bitter and unfounded suspicions, denied all outer expression, had undermined his sanity--and any one who had seen him in these moments of sequestered brooding would have recognized the mad glitter in his eyes. "The pair of them are as guilty as perdition," he murmured to himself, "and I am God's instrument to punish." Punish--but how? That was a detail which he had never quite thought out, but at the proper time the Providence which commanded him would also show him a way. But before punishment there must be an overt act--an episode which clinched, beyond peradventure, the sin of these two hypocrites before his hand could fall in vengeance.