But that night it happened, as it had happened once before, that the stars seemed exaggerated in size and multiplied in number. On the breeze came riding the distant voice of the surf with its call to staring wakefulness and restlessness of spirit.
Conscience went early to her room, feeling that unless her taut nerves could have the relaxation of solitude, she must scream out. To-day's discovery had kindled anew all the fires of insurgency that burned in her, inflaming her heart to demand the mating joy which could make of marriage not a formula of duty and hard allegiance, but a splendid and rightful fulfillment.
As she sat by the window of her unlighted room, her eyes were staring tensely into the night and the pink ovals of her nails were pressed into the palms of her hands. Her gaze, as if under a spell of hypnosis, was following the glow of a cigar among the pines, where Stuart was seeking to walk off the similar unrest which made sleep impossible. "He still loves me," she kept repeating to herself with a stunned realization, "he still loves me!"
She hoped fervently that Eben was asleep. To have to talk to him while her strained mood was so full of rebellion would be hard; to have to submit to his autumnal kiss, would make that mood blaze into revulsion.
But at last she heard a footfall on the stair and in the hall and held her breath in a sort of terror as they ended just outside her threshold. She knew that Eben was trying her door—trying it first without knocking after his churlish custom. She hoped that he would pass on when darkness and silence were his answers, but after a moment came a rap and when it met with no reply it was repeated with a peremptory insistence. Conscience drew a long breath, and, shivering with distaste, she slowly lighted a candle. Then she went shudderingly to the door and opened it.
In the stress of the moment, as she shot back the bolt, she surrendered for just an instant to her feelings; feelings which she had never before allowed expression even in the confessional of her thoughts. She knew now how Heloise had felt when she wildly told herself that she would rather be mistress of Abelarde than wife to the King.
Eben standing in the doorway, smiling, seemed to her disordered mood the figure of a Satyr.
"I've had a letter from Ebbett," Tollman commented one day at luncheon. "Like Stuart here, he's been working too hard and he wants to know if he can run down for the week-end."
When Conscience had declared her approval the host turned to Farquaharson. "I shouldn't wonder if you'd like Ebbett. We were classmates at college, and he was my best man. Aside from that, he's one of the leading exponents, in this country, of the newer psychology—a disciple of Freud and Jung, and while many of his ideas strike me as extreme they are often interesting."