Marian's scream interrupted his sentence, and the scream itself died away in a quaver, as she faded into insensibility, and Farquaharson lifted her clear of the floor and carried her to the lounge.
After that he turned to face Holbury and addressed him with a quietness which the glitter in his eye contradicted. "This is a pity, Holbury. It seems that you frightened her with some brutality. She lost her head and came here. I was trying to persuade her to go back."
"Yes," Holbury's laugh rang with the uncontrolled quality of a maniac's. "Yes, I know. You tore the clothes off of her trying to persuade her to come back to me! Well, you needn't trouble about sending her back now—the door's locked. She's yours. Do what you like with her. Of course I ought to kill you, but I won't. I brought these men to establish beyond doubt the identity of the co-respondent. It's a gentle riddance—a crooked wife and a crooked paramour."
One of the men advanced into the room and ostentatiously gathered in a couple of hairpins and a bit of torn lace, while Farquaharson crossed and stood face to face with the irate husband.
"Do you mean that you believe that?" The question came with a deadly softness.
"I don't have to believe. I have seen."
"Then," Stuart's words ripped themselves out like the tearing of cloth, "send your damned jackals outside, unless you want them to see their master treated as such a cur deserves."
A moment later the two servants were assisting Holbury to his motor, one of them nursing a closed and blackened eye on his own account as a badge of over-impetuous loyalty; and most of that night, while Marian Holbury lay groaning on the couch, Stuart Farquaharson sat before his empty hearth with eyes which did not close.
The Holbury divorce suit, after filling advance columns of spicy print, was awarded with a sealed record and Farquaharson was given no opportunity to tell his story to the public. He saw nothing more of Marian and was widely accused of having compromised and then abandoned her. So Stuart closed the house on the Hudson, as he had closed the house in Virginia, and with a very bitter spirit went to Europe.
It was some time before this, perhaps several months, that Eben Tollman, the indispensable friend—serving hitherto without reward or the seeking of reward—ventured to aspire openly to more personal recognition. He had been building slowly, and if perseverance is a merit, he deserved success. Perhaps Conscience had changed. There had been many things to change her. She had lived long without a break in an atmosphere which she had dreaded and her father had not grown sunnier. A life of dogma had acidulated into so impossible a fanaticism that in contrast Tollman seemed to assume something like breadth of gauge.