When they had talked for ten minutes Stuart abruptly exclaimed, "Dearest, it was not far from this spot that you once told me you loved me in every way you knew how to love: that you wanted to be, to me, all that a woman could be to a man. Have you forgotten? I told you that my love was always yours ... have you forgotten that?" Her hands went spasmodically to her breast and her eyes glowed with the fire of struggle. Suddenly the physical impulses, which she could not control, deserted the rallying strength of her mind, and she trembled visibly. "The two men who say they love me," she broke out vehemently, "are succeeding between them in driving me mad." "Because," he as emphatically answered, "you are trying to reconcile a true and a false allegiance--because--" "This isn't a time," she broke in on him desperately, "for preaching theories to me. I'm hardly sane enough just now to stand that." "I'm not preaching," he protested. "I'm asserting that no amount of bigotry can white-wash a living sepulcher." "I told you I wanted to be alone.... I told you--" Her voice broke. "I told you that I _must_ be alone." "You defied me to attack when and where and how I chose," came his instant rejoinder. "I'm fighting for your salvation from the undertow." His eyes met hers and held them under a spell like hypnosis, and hers were wide and futile of concealment so that her heart and its secrets were at last defenseless. "I--I will go back to the house," she said, and for the first time her voice openly betrayed her broken self-confidence. "_Can_ you go?" he challenged with a new and fiery assurance of tone. "Don't you know that I can hold you here, without a word, without a touch? Don't you realize that I can stretch out my arms and force you, of your own accord, to come into them?" She seemed striving to break some spell of lethargy, but she only succeeded in swaying a little as she stood pallid and wraith-like in the moonlight. Her lips moved, but she failed to speak. "I will never leave you again." Farquaharson's voice leaped suddenly with the elation of certain triumph. "Because you are mine and I am yours. I said once with a boy's assurance that they might surround you with regiments of soldiers but that I would come and claim you. Now I've come. There is no more doubt. Husband or lover--you may decide--but you are mine." Her knees weakened and as she tried to retreat before his advance she tottered, reaching out her hands with a groping uncertainty. It was then that he caught her in his arms and crushed her close to him, conscious of the wild flutter that went through her soft body; intoxicated by the fragrant softness of the dark hair which he was kissing--and at first oblivious to her struggle for freedom from his embrace. "Stuart ... Stuart...!" she pleaded in the wildly agitated whisper of a half-recovered voice. "Don't--for God's sake, don't!"