Meanwhile, the man to whom it was addressed was wandering from the upper Nile to Victoria Nyanza and beyond—where mail routes run out and end. Acknowledging in her thoughts, from the first frost on Cape Cod to the middle of winter, that temporizing only spelled weakness, Conscience had none the less temporized. She said to herself: "Nothing he wrote now would alter matters." Still with a somewhat leaky logic she added: "But I'll give him a month to answer before I fix the date." When the month had passed without result she granted herself other continuances, facing alike, with a gentle obduracy, the pleas of her elderly lover and the importunities of a father who threatened to murder himself with the self-inflicted tortures of impatience.
At length she capitulated to the combined forces of entreaty, cajolery and insistence. The fight was lost.
Through the preparations for that wedding she went without even the simulation of joy or glamour. At least she would be honest of attitude, but days which filled the house with wedding guests brought to her manner a transformation. Her decision was made and if she was to do the thing at all she meant to do it gallantly and with at least the outward seeming of full confidence. She meant to betray to these visitors no lurking misery of spirit; no note of struggle; no vestige of doubt. The eyes which burned apprehensive and terror-stricken, throughout the darkness of interminable nights, were none the less serene and regally assured by day. The groom, too, seemed rejuvenated by such a spirit as sometimes brings to autumn a summer quality more ardent than summer's own. At the end of his fiancée's doubtings, he fatuously told himself, had come conviction. She knew at last how much stauncher a thing was his own dependable strength and ripened manhood than the frothy charm of a half-fledged gallant who had crumpled under the test.
Among the guests who for several days filled both the manse and Tollman's house, were two who were not entirely beguiled by Conscience's gracious and buoyant demeanor. One pair of these observant eyes was violet blue and full of starry freshness. Intimate letters from Conscience, in the old days, had invested Stuart Farquaharson with a romantic guise for their possessor and Eben Tollman scarcely measured up to that standard.
The other pair of eyes was neither young nor feminine, but elderly and penetrating. Though Doctor Ebbett's temples were whitely frosted, he and Eben Tollman had been classmates at Harvard. Now he was to be best man at his friend's belated marriage. The work in which he had made his name distinguished had to do with the human brain—its vagaries as well as its normalities—and his thought was enough in advance of the general to be frequently misunderstood and sometimes a target for lay ridicule.
On the evening after his arrival he sat in Eben Tollman's study with two other men who were also classmates. Tollman himself was still at the manse, and his guests were beguiling themselves with cigars which he had furnished, and whiskey which he had not—and upon which he would have frowned.
Over his glass Carton, the corporation lawyer, irrelevantly suggested:
"Eben seems a boy again. It makes us chaps whose children are almost grown, feel relegated to an elder generation."
"Miss Williams," observed Henry Standing, "has a pretty wit and a prettier face. I wanted to say to her: 'Now, my dear child, if I were twenty years younger—' and then I caught myself up short. I chanced to remember that Eben isn't twenty years younger himself."
Carton nodded thoughtfully. "I can't help feeling that a thing like that is always a bit chancy. Eben was a sober-sided kid in his cradle and the girl is all fire and bloom. Fortunately it doesn't seem to have occurred to her that there's any disparity." He paused, then demanded: "Ebbett, you're a psychologist. What do you think?"