Farquaharson could see only the light of victorious surrender in the eyes of the woman he loved, declaring her love for him. Now she was in the arms of another man--a man who had cunningly and patiently subordinated every lesser thing to his determination of possessing her. The voice of impulse pleaded with him fiercely to go back and tax that man, panoplied though he was in the sanction of society and the church, with having won foully. Tollman would never kindle the fire that burned deep and blue-flamed in his wife's nature. Her life with him would be thirst and hunger. But Stuart's fever turned to chill again as he remembered. He had forfeited his rights and stood foresworn. His vows had been brave and his performance craven. He acknowledged with self-scorn that his eagerness to break through Tollman's force of possession went back to a motive more selfish than exalted. He was driven by a personal craving to hold another man's wife in his arms. He was tempted by the sense of insurmountable power which he knew he held upon her thoughts, her love and her imagination. This must be the persuasiveness of some devil's advocate which whispered to him: "Go now! Despite all her stern allegiance to duty you can make her come into your arms. This marriage is all a hideous mistake. The bigots have trapped her with a bait of false martyrdom. Go while she is still sickened with the first bitterness of this profanation of youth in the custody of age." Then into this hot-blooded counsel crept the old, cold voice of logic, like a calm speaker quieting the incendiary passion of a mob. It was her right to make the test unhampered, since--through his own delinquency--it was too late to avoid the test. Two courses lay open to him now that the past was sealed. He might return to his own country, excusing himself on the shallow pretense that he meant only to "stand by" in case she needed rescue from the unendurable, or he might turn his face east and put between himself and temptation as much of space as lies between Cape Cod and the Ganges. The two alternatives were, roughly, those of passion and reason, yet each was led by so many tributary problems that it was not easy to disentangle the threads of their elements. Stuart Farquaharson's inheritance of fighting blood brought a red blindness which at times made the voice of reason seem contemptible and pallid with cowardice. Could Eben Tollman, whom he had always distrusted, have engineered the thing? Stuart, pacing the deck, halted at the thought and his fevered temples turned abruptly cold. His face set itself into malignant lines of vengeance. If such a thing could be proven--as there was a God in Heaven--Tollman was his to kill and he should die! He stood for a while, his chest heaving with the agitation of his resolve--and then he smiled grimly to himself. The calmer voice denounced him for a fool running amuck with passion. These were thoughts suited to a homicidal half-wit.