There was a moment’s dead silence. There was that passing between Clemence and Julian which no words could have touched--the final struggle towards dominion of a man’s better nature. Falconer had fallen back. All that was narrow and conventional about his morality had shrivelled into nothingness, and stood confessed to his own consciousness for what it was. He knew that the great question now at issue was beyond the reach of his man’s practicality, and that he could only stand aside. Mrs. Romayne was gripping heavily at the chair by which she stood; impotent, frozen despair paralysing her from head to foot, leaving alive and sentient only her eyes. “You must go back, dear.” The words fell from Clemence’s lips tender, distinct, immutable as the laws of right and wrong. “You must take the consequences of what you’ve done, and through that pain and shame you’ll get above it to begin again.” Julian’s lips, white now as ashes, moved stiffly. “The consequences?” he whispered. “The consequences, Clemmie?” “The consequences,” she replied, and in the ring of her voice, in the clasp with which her hands closed over his, was all the courage and conviction with which she sought to nerve him. “Ah, I don’t know--I don’t understand--but are there no innocent people who may suffer for your fault unless you are there to take it on yourself? Besides, how else, dear? How can you begin again without having made amends? How can you free yourself of the past without acknowledging what’s black and bad in it? And if you acknowledge what’s black and bad, how can you hesitate to take its punishment?” And as if that struggling life in him were growing and stirring under her influence, a strange flickering light crept into Julian’s face and the struggle in his eyes grew into a faint suggestion of victory. He paused a moment, his breath coming thick and fast. “But suppose--suppose it isn’t any good?” His voice, tense, hardly audible, seemed to catch and strain like that of a man at the very crisis of his life. “Suppose it’s in me and I must----” “It isn’t so!” she cried, and as she spoke she drew away from him as though carried beyond herself, beyond her womanly love for him, in that supreme declaration of the truth that was her very being. “You know it isn’t so! There is no ‘must’ except God’s ‘must’ to us that we should follow Him. There is no power can tear us from His hand unless we throw ourselves away by saying that His hand is without strength to save us. Good and evil lie before every one of us, and we must all choose. And nothing else is real and living in this life except that choice and the end to which it leads us!”