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Updated: June 19, 2025
The exquisite curve of her cheek and throat; the play of an escaped curl over her pale temple and the sweet wistfulness of her lips: none of these things escaped him. "It's not necessary, after all, that you should go away, Stuart," she announced with a calm abruptness to Farquaharson's complete mystification. "Last night I was in the grip of something like hysteria, I think.
They had lifted Stuart out of his place in the past and drawn him into the present. He had not been guilty of desertion, but was, like herself, the victim of a hideous and inexplicable mistake. It had hurt when Tollman referred to Farquaharson's unfavorable record, even with the consideration of tone he had employed.
In the days that followed Stuart Farquaharson's car standing at the front of the old manse became a fixture in the landscape. The invalid minister, seeking to accustom himself stoically to a pitiful anticlimax of life, found in the buoyant vitality of this newcomer of whom he thought rather as a boy than a man a sort of activity by proxy.
With a sudden break in her voice she wheeled on him. "Please, Stuart," she begged, "don't try to make jokes about it. It's ghastly." Early in the evening Farquaharson's prophecy fulfilled itself and the storm broke with a premature ferocity of shrieking winds, and endless play of lightning and torrents of rain.
"I will never leave you again." Farquaharson's voice leaped suddenly with the elation of certain triumph. "Because you are mine and I am yours. I said once with a boy's assurance that they might surround you with regiments of soldiers but that I would come and claim you. Now I've come. There is no more doubt. Husband or lover you may decide but you are mine."
"If you thought," she went on, and in the starlight, he could not see how the color had left even her lips, "if you thought that even in those circumstances even driven by terror of my life I would have fled to any other man in the world " Abruptly she broke off. Stuart Farquaharson's forgotten pipe had died to ashes. Now it fell with a tiny crash to the deck.
The event which had spelled tragedy for him; robbed him of sleep and withered his robust appetite had not even lingered overnight in her memory. The dirk was in Stuart Farquaharson's breast, but it was yet to be twisted. Pride forbade his shaking Johnny Reb into a wild pace until he was out of sight.
The window of Stuart Farquaharson's room was no longer black but a frame of light. Eben stood for a space with breath that came in hurried and panting excitement while the madness mounted in his veins and burned fiercely in his eyes. Then, against the illuminated background he saw Stuart, the man whom God meant him to kill.
Stuart was thinking of himself as a woman-hater, these days, and he held a normal dislike for wagging tongues. Holbury, too, who was reputed to be of jealous tendency, seemed to regard him unfavorably and took no great pains to affect cordiality. One day Wayne dropped, coatless, into Farquaharson's room and grinned as he tossed a magazine down on the table.
Then it was that his eyes caught the corner of an envelope protruding from the pocket of Stuart Farquaharson's bath robe. Hurriedly he tore it out and ripped off the end. It was in Conscience's hand doubtless another proof of iniquity. But as he read, the fires of his brain were swept back, under the quenching force of undeniable conviction. This letter had not been meant for his eyes.
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