The days that followed were troubled days and they brought to Conscience's cheeks an accentuated pallor. Under her eyes were smudges that made them seem very large and wistful. The minister was once more in his arm chair, a little more broken, a little more fiercely uncompromising of aspect, but the one normal solution of such a spent and burdensome life: the solution of death, stood off from him. Upon his daughter, whose lips were sealed against any protest by the belief that even a small excitement might kill him, he vented long and bigoted sermons of anathema. In these sermons, possibly, he was guilty of the very heresy of which his daughter had said he was so intolerant. He seemed to doubt himself, these days, that Satan wore a spiked tail and a pair of cloven hoofs. Of late he rather leaned to the belief that the Arch-tempter had returned to walk the earth in the guise of a young Virginian and that he had assumed the incognito of Stuart Farquaharson. One refrain ran through every waking hour and troubled his sleep with fantastic dreams. God commanded him to strip this tempter of his habiliments of pretense and show the naked wickedness of his soul to the girl's deluded eye. To that fancied command he dedicated himself as whole-heartedly as a bloodhound gives itself to the man hunt. To Stuart one day, as they walked together in the woods, Conscience confessed her fear that this constant hammering of persecution would eventually batter down her capacity for sane judgment and she ended with a sweeping denunciation of every form of bigotry. "Dear," he answered with the gravity of deep apprehension, "you say that and you believe it and yet this same instinct of self-martyrdom is the undertow of your life flood. If your given name didn't happen to be Conscience your middle name would be just that." "I suppose I have a conscience of a sort--but a different, sort, I hope. Is that such a serious fault?" she asked, and because the strain of these days had tired and rubbed her nerves into the sensitiveness of exhaustion, she asked it in a hurt and wounded tone. "It's an indispensable virtue," he declared. "Your father's conscience was a virtue, too, until it ran amuck and became a savage menace. When you were a child," he went on, speaking so earnestly that his brow was drawn into an expression which she mistook for a frown of disapproval, "your most characteristic quality was an irrepressible sense of humor. It gave both sparkle and sanity to your outlook. It held you immune to all bitterness." "And now?" She put the query somewhat faintly. "Now, more than ever, because the life around you is grayer, it's vital that you cling to your golden talisman. To let it go means to be lost in the fog." They were strolling along a woodland path and she was a few steps in advance of him. He saw her shoulders stiffen, but it was not until he overtook her that he discovered her eyes to be sparkling with tears.