In the older man himself the currents of hatred and jealousy were rising to a danger line of unbalanced deviltry and as for the two who still responded to the nameless yet invincible clarion of youth, the elements of passion and insurgency were awake, ready for an August twister and an August tide.
Then there befell the household a series of coincidental labor problems that left them all at once without servants. The chauffeur, who hated his employer, was summarily discharged for drunken insolence. The cook was taken dangerously ill and her sister, the housemaid, went with her to her home at Provincetown. The gardener and outside man alone remained on duty and since both of these came and went from a distance, Conscience and Stuart found themselves promoted to kitchen and pantry.
A day of bluster and storm had ended in a sunset of brilliant color, which dyed the cloud-ramparted west with a victorious pageantry of crimson and gold. The night would be different, for in the east the moon, just climbing over the horizon, was a disc of pale tranquillity dominating a symphony of blue and silver.
In the pantry, with windows giving to the east and west, Conscience was washing dishes and Stuart, whose right hand was once more usable, stood nearby drying them. Pausing, with her eyes first on the changing fires of the west and then on the soft nocturne of the east, the woman spoke softly:
"The sun and the moon are the same size, and the same distance above the horizon. How differently they paint their pictures of the world."
Her companion only nodded.
While Eben Tollman contributed his part to the program of housekeeping without servants, by manipulating the phonograph from the living-room, Stuart had been studying the aproned figure at the sink.
Her face, in repose, held a pallid unrest of tried endurance, and occasionally she paused in her task to listen, with unexpressed nervousness, to the voluptuous swell of the music.
As he reached out for a rinsed plate their hands touched and she started.