understand. Now that you've discovered the truth ... I must go
because you could entertain the friend ... but not the lover.... Even if
the lover could maintain his attitude in everything but thought."

But Conscience shook her head.

"No, you don't understand yet ... must you still have the whole truth
... even if I tell you that you can serve me best by not asking it?"

"I must have it, because I am honest in believing that I can serve you
best by knowing it all."

"Very well." She raised her hands in a half-despairing gesture and into
her eyes welled a flood of passion as if a dam had broken and made
concealment futile. Her words came with a low thrill, and the man's
brain swam with an ecstatic sense of discovery which for the moment
obscured all other thought.

"You must go, Stuart, because the basis we met on has been destroyed.
You must go because--because it isn't just that you love me, but that we
love each other."

"Conscience!" The name broke from his lips with the ringing triumph of a
bugle-call, and he had almost seized her in instinctive embrace, but she
put out her own hands and pressed them, at arms length, against his
breast as though to hold him off. Her eyes met the burning eagerness of
his gaze with a resolved and unshakable steadiness.

"Please--" she said very quietly. "Please don't make me fight you,
too--just now."

Slowly with the dying of his momentary elation into misery Farquaharson
stepped back and his arms fell at his sides.

"Forgive me," he murmured. "I can't touch you--here--now--with that
look in your eyes. You are right."

"I must send you away," she continued, "because I want you to stay so
terribly much--because it's all a false position for us both.... Do you
remember what Ira said about losing something that was pulled out ...
'by the roots, like'?... The time has come for that Stuart, dear ... the
roots are taking too strong a hold ... they must be torn out."

"Do I mean as much as that to you?"

"You mean so much--that everything else in life means nothing.... You
mean so much that I compare all others with you to their injustice ...
so much that I follow the glow of your cigar at night when you are
walking ... that I watch the light in your window before I go to bed ...
that I wake up with the thought that you are in the house ... that I
think of you ... want you ... in a way I have no right to think and
want."

"Conscience," he began, gripping his hands at his b