"I have made allowances," she assured him steadily. "I've made so many--that I'm no longer angry with you. You see I spent most of last night thinking of it. We were both moon mad. Only now--we can't go on pretending to be Platonic friends any more. When war has been declared comradeships between enemies have to end." "You are both very fair and very unfair, Conscience," suggested Stuart Farquaharson thoughtfully. "I said some wild things--out there in the moonlight--with my senses all electrified by the discovery of your love--and yet--" He broke off, and Conscience, rising from her finished task, stood gazing out with musing eyes over the slopes of the hills. Suddenly she said: "I realize now that if you'd gone away just because I asked it, we would always have felt that nothing was settled; that instead of winning my battle I'd just begged off from facing it." "Among all the unconsidered things I said last night, Conscience," Stuart began again, "there were some that I must still say. It was like the illogical thread of a dream which is only the distortion of a waking thought-flow. The essence of my contention was sound." "A soundness which advises me to divorce my husband and marry you," she demurred with no more anger than she might have felt for a misguided child, "though he and I both made vows--and he has broken none of them." "You made those vows," he reminded her, "under the coercion of fears for your father. You distorted your life under what you yourself once called a tyranny of weakness." "And to remedy all that you counsel an anarchy of passion." She seemed to be speaking from a distance and to be looking through rather than at the horizon. "I believe that even now my father knows--and that he's no more willing to have me surrender my convictions--than when he was on earth." "And I believe," the response came reverently but promptly, "that where he is now his eyes are no longer blinded by any scales of mistake. If he looks down on us from the Beyond, he must see life with a universal breadth of wisdom." For an instant tears misted her eyes and then she asked in a rather bewildered voice, "Stuart, stripped of all its casuistry, what is your argument except a plea for infidelity?" "Revolt against that most powerful and vicious of all autocracies," he confidently declared, "the tyranny of weakness over strength!" But Conscience Tollman only shook her head and smiled her unconverted scepticism. "Was it being true to such an ideal as that which made a certain king in Israel send a certain captain into the front of the battle, because he loved that captain's wife? I have listened to all this argument, because I wanted you to feel sure that I wasn't afraid to hear it. But it can never persuade me. And what have you to say of the trust of a husband who accepts you in his house as a member of his family--without suspicion?"