"Because he wants you himself, because, with me disposed of, he believes he can get what his unclean and avaricious heart covets as a snake charms a bird, because--" Conscience rose with an effort to her feet. Her knees were trembling under her and her heart seemed to close into a painful strangulation. "Stuart," she faltered, "if you think that my love can only be held against any outsider by your being at hand to watch it, you don't trust it as it _must_ be trusted--and it isn't worth offering you at all." "You've fallen under the spell of these Mad Mullah prophets," he retorted hotly, "until you can't trust yourself any longer. You've been inflamed into the Mohammedan's spirit of a holy war and you're ready to make a burnt offering of me and my love." "Now," she said with a faintness that was almost a whisper, "you _must_ go, whether you agree or not. You distrust me and insult me ... and I don't think ... I can stand many ... interviews like this." But Farquaharson's curb had slipped. His anger was a frenzied runaway which he, like a madman, was riding in utter recklessness. "If I go now," he violently protested, "if I am sent into exile at the behest of Tollman, my enemy, I go for all time, knowing that the woman I leave behind is not the woman I thought I knew or the woman I have worshiped." Their eyes met and engaged in a challenge of wills in which neither would surrender; a challenge which had built an issue out of nothing. His burned with the moment's madness. Hers were clear and unflinching. "If you _can_ go like that," she said, and the tremor left her voice as she said it, "the man who goes isn't the man to whom I gave all my love and to whom I was ready to give my life." She straightened, sustained by a temporary strength, and stood clothed in a beauty above any which even he had before acknowledged; a beauty fired with the war spirit of a Valkyrie and of eyes regal in their affronted dignity. "If you can feel about me as your words indicate, we could never know happiness. The man whose love can make such accusations isn't the Stuart Farquaharson that made me willing to die for him. Perhaps after all I only _dreamed_ that man. It was a wonderful dream." She carried the fingers of one hand to her temple in a bewildered gesture, then shook back her head as one rousing oneself with an effort from sleep. "If it was a dream," she went on with a forced courage, "it's just as well to find it out in time." "Then--" he made several attempts before he could speak--"then you are sending me away. If that's true--as there's a God in Heaven, I'll never come back until you send for me." "As there's a God in Heaven," she answered steadily, almost contemptuously, "I'll never send for you. You'll never come back unless you come yourself--and come with a more absolute trust in your heart."