His car had been standing just at that visible stretch of road on the afternoon when Conscience had begged him not to criticize her father and he had retorted bitterly. He could see again the way in which she had flinched and hear again the voice in which she had replied, "You know why I listen to him, Stuart. You know that I didn't listen ... before his stroke. I didn't listen when I told him that if you went, I went, too, did I?"
That was long ago. Now she was studying him with a grave scrutiny as she inquired, "I've been wondering, Stuart, why you have never married. You ought to have a home."
The man averted his face quickly and pretended to be interested in the vague shape of a steamer almost lost in the mists that lay along the horizon. Those sweetly curved lips had been torturing him with their allurement. From them he wanted kisses—not dispassionate counsel—but he replied abstractedly:
"I'm a writer of fiction, Conscience. Such persons are under suspicion of being unstable—and temperamental. Matrimonially they are considered bad risks."
Her laughter rang with a teasing mockery, but, had he known it, she had caught and been startled by that absorption which had not been wholly banished from his eyes. It was not yet quite a discovery, but still it was something more than a suspicion—that he still loved her. In its breaking upon her was a strange blending of fright and elation and it directed her subsequent questions into channels that might bring revelations to her intuition.
"I've known you for some time, Stuart," she announced with a whimsical smile which made her lips the more kissable. "Much too long for you to attempt the pose of a Don Juan. I hate to shatter a romance, but the fact is, you are perfectly sane—and you could be reliably constant."
This constancy, he reflected, had already cost him the restlessness of a Salathiel, but his response was more non-committal than his thought.
"If my first reason is rejected," he said patiently, "I suppose I must give another. A writer must be absolutely unhampered—at least until his storehouse is well stocked with experience."
"Being unattached isn't being unhampered," she persisted with a spirited flash in her eyes. "It's just being—incomplete."
"Possibly I'm like Ira's one-armed man," he hazarded. "Maybe 'in a manner of speakin' I wouldn't be half as smart as what I am' if I didn't have to face that affliction."