"Perfectly. I said I had never forgotten to mail a letter."
"Still, he never received it—and he wrote one to me—at the same time which I didn't get, either."
Eben Tollman licked his lips. It seemed useless to carry the fight further. He stood with one foot over the brink and momentum at his back. Then when another moment would have ended his campaign of dissimulation his wife spoke again, and the man's brain reeled—but this time with an incredulous reversal of emotion. Some miracle had saved him!
"I've just had a note from him. He's in India."
Eben Tollman straightened up, and shook from his shoulders the weight of a decade or two.
He had been dying the multiple deaths of the coward because he had let his imagination bolt and run away. The menace had passed, and straightway came a transformation. Once more he was full-panoplied in his assurance of self-righteousness. His voice was unctuously calculated, persuasively considerate.
"That is a very extraordinary story, but you aren't letting things that happened so long ago trouble you, are you, my dear?"
"A thing—which has caused bitterness between friends—even long ago, must trouble one."
"Yes, I quite concur in that sentiment." He nodded understandingly. It was the same gentleness of manner to which he had owed so much in the past. "And yet—I don't like to speak critically of a man who was once a rival—yet unhappily there are other things to be remembered. His experiences in New York seemed to prove him wanting of much that your friendship must demand."
Conscience did not answer, but she felt the justice of the criticism.