Ten minutes later, scornful of over-sea tolls, Farquaharson was filing a cablegram. The letter had said she would be married "some time in the winter." It was now past mid-winter. Would there be time? His hand trembled with his haste as if the saving of a few seconds could avail.
"Received no note from you. Wrote to you that night begging a chance," he scribbled, as his head swam with the effort and frenzy of his suspense. "Horrible mistake has occurred. Matter of life and death and thousand times more than that that you take no step till I see you. Am sailing by first boat. Wait."
That afternoon he dashed across the gangplank of a P. and O. steamer at Alexandria just as the last whistle blew. While the propellers churned the Mediterranean waters into a restless wake at the stern, Stuart walked the decks like a man demented. Would there be time? His fingers itched for his watch, because his obsession was the flight of hours. But on the second day out a wireless message came, relaying from Cairo. The man did not dare open it on deck. He took it to his cabin and there with the slowness of deep fear, he unfolded the paper.
CHAPTER XIII
Against the stupor of Stuart Farquaharson's brain, as he sat in the small stateroom of the P. and O. steamer, beat the fear of what he might read.
Subconsciously his senses recorded small and actual things as the vessel lurched through a heavy sea: the monotonous rat-tat of the brass door-hook against the woodwork, and the alternating scraps of sky and water as the circle of his port hole rose and fell across the line of the horizon.
He was thinking of the letter that had come to Cairo—and lain there so long unopened, but he was spared a knowledge of the suspense with which Conscience had awaited an answer.
She had written it early in the fall and had mailed it endorsed "please forward" in the care of his New York publishers, so that it had played tag with him, never catching him, over the length of Europe and, after that, had zig-zagged along the cities of the Levant and the fringes of Africa.