"No, you don't understand yet ... must you still have the whole truth ... even if I tell you that you can serve me best by not asking it?" "I must have it, because I am honest in believing that I can serve you best by knowing it all." "Very well." She raised her hands in a half-despairing gesture and into her eyes welled a flood of passion as if a dam had broken and made concealment futile. Her words came with a low thrill, and the man's brain swam with an ecstatic sense of discovery which for the moment obscured all other thought. "You must go, Stuart, because the basis we met on has been destroyed. You must go because--because it isn't just that you love me, but that we love each other." "Conscience!" The name broke from his lips with the ringing triumph of a bugle-call, and he had almost seized her in instinctive embrace, but she put out her own hands and pressed them, at arms length, against his breast as though to hold him off. Her eyes met the burning eagerness of his gaze with a resolved and unshakable steadiness. "Please--" she said very quietly. "Please don't make me fight you, too--just now." Slowly with the dying of his momentary elation into misery Farquaharson stepped back and his arms fell at his sides. "Forgive me," he murmured. "I can't touch you--here--now--with that look in your eyes. You are right." "I must send you away," she continued, "because I want you to stay so terribly much--because it's all a false position for us both.... Do you remember what Ira said about losing something that was pulled out ... 'by the roots, like'?... The time has come for that Stuart, dear ... the roots are taking too strong a hold ... they must be torn out." "Do I mean as much as that to you?" "You mean so much--that everything else in life means nothing.... You mean so much that I compare all others with you to their injustice ... so much that I follow the glow of your cigar at night when you are walking ... that I watch the light in your window before I go to bed ... that I wake up with the thought that you are in the house ... that I think of you ... want you ... in a way I have no right to think and want." "Conscience," he began, gripping his hands at his back and schooling his syllables so sternly that, in what seemed to him his hour of Gethsemane, he spoke with a sort of unedged flatness, "your semblance of success has been splendid, magnificent. Until to-night I believed absolutely that you no longer cared for me--and that you were happy. "From the first I had seen in this marriage a certainty of disaster ... but when I came here I found a succession of bewildering surprises. These surprises entirely blinded me to the truth. Your serene bearing had every mark of genuineness, but there were other things, too--things beyond your control. The very place was transformed. Eben Tollman himself was really another man. His manner was no longer that of the bigot. He had learned the art of smiling." Conscience shook her head.