"

The dark head nodded and the fingers of the hands about his neck
tightened. "Of course," she said. "But there you have the tyranny of
weakness again. I must make the fight to keep him alive. He would
regard it as going righteously to death for his beliefs. That's just
the goodness-gone-wrongness of it all."

"Blessed are the self-righteous," mused Farquaharson half aloud, "for
they shall supply their own absolution." To himself he was saying, "The
wretched old hellion!"

"And then you see, after all," she added with the martyr's sophistry,
"in the fight for you, I'm only fighting for myself and in doing what I
can for him I'm trying to be unselfish."

"Listen," the man spoke carefully, "that, too, is the
goodness-gone-wrongness as you call it; the sheer perversion of a duty
sense. If it were just myself to be thought of, perhaps I couldn't fight
you on a point of conscience. But it isn't just me--not if you love me."

"Love you!" He felt the thrilled tremor that ran through her from head
to foot, and that made her bosom heave stormily. The moon had sunk a
little and the shadow in which they were standing had crawled onward so
that on her head fell a gleam of pale light, kindling her eyes and
touching her temples under the sooty shadows of her hair. Her lips were
parted and her voice trembled with the solemnity of a vow, too sacred to
be uttered without the fullest frankness. "In every way that I know how
to love, I love you! Everything that a woman can be to a man I want to
be to you and all that a woman can give to a man, I want to give to
you."

It was he who trembled then and became unsteady with the intoxication of
triumph.

"Then I'll fight for you, while I have breath, even if it means fighting
with you."

Suddenly she caught at his arm with a spasmodic alarm, and he turned his
head as the screeching whine of a window sounded in the stillness. The
effort to raise it cautiously was indicated not by any noiselessness
but by the long duration of the sound. Then a woman's head with hair in
tight pigtails stood out against the pallid light of a bedroom lamp,
turned low, and the whispered challenge came out to them. "Who's out
there?"

"Ssh!" cautioned the girl, tensely. "It's I, Auntie. Don't wake Father."

Grudgingly the window creaked down and for seconds which lengthened
themselves interminably to the anxious ears of the pair in the shadows,
they waited with bated breath. Then Stuart whispered, "You