CHAPTER XXI
Conscience was sitting on the terrace one day with a book, which she smilingly laid down as her husband joined her. Eben took up the small volume of Browning's verse and idly turned its pages, his eyes falling almost immediately on the old inscription, "Stuart to Conscience." His unfixed jealousy seized upon a frail mooring but he stifled the scowl that instinct prompted and turned the pages to the point where a narrow ribbon marked "The Statue and the Bust."
He had often wondered what people found to admire in Browning, but now he read with an unflagging interest. Here was a document in evidence: the narrative of a wife who dissembled her love and the ungodly moral of the thing was that the culpability of the lovers lay—not in their clandestine devotion but in their temporizing postponement of a guilty love:
"And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost ...
Is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin...."
Before Eben Tollman's eyes swam spots of red and in his heart leaped a withering flame of betrayed wrath.
Had Conscience, after all, through these months and years, deceived him? Had she surreptitiously kept in touch with the erstwhile lover who had already wrecked one home? Had she been letting memories kindle fires in her which all his faithful love had left unquickened?
The long incubating dourness had hatched from its egg and, like the young quail which runs while the shell still clings to its pin feathers, it was alive and seeking nourishment.