w Tollman had expressed the unbiased view of one
whose personal desires were not blinding his judgment. She moved over to
the side of the road and leaned heavily against a tree. She felt as if
she were standing unprotected under the chilling beat of a cold and
driving rain, and her lips moved without sound, shaping again the three
words "send him away!"

She had been holding her lover at her side until she could see his
nerves growing raw under the stress of his worry about herself and the
temper which nature had made chivalric giving way to acerbity. Yes,
Tollman was right--it required a sacrifice to save a wreck--and because
he was right the sun grew dark and the future as black as the floor of
the sea.

But the next time she saw Stuart she did not broach the suggestion, nor
yet the next time after that. The man gave her no opportunity, so
indomitably was he waging his campaign to have her go. And as her
equally inflexible refusal stood impregnable against his assaults, he
grew desperate and reenforced his arguments with the accusation of
indifference to his wishes. In each succeeding discussion, his
infectious smile grew rarer and the drawn brow, that bore close kinship
to a frown, more habitual. His own talisman of humor was going from him,
and two unyielding determinations settled more and more directly at
cross odds.

When the breach came it was almost entirely the Virginian's fault, or
the fault of the unsuspected Hyde who lurked behind his Jekyll.

"Conscience," he pleaded desperately on the afternoon which neither of
them could ever remember afterwards without a sickness of the soul,
"you're simply building a funeral pyre for yourself. You're wrecking
your life and my life because of an insane idea. You're letting the
pettiest and unworthiest thing in you--a twisted instinct--consume all
that's vital and fine. You're worshiping the morbid."

"If I'm guilty of all that" she answered with a haunted misery in her
eyes which she averted her face to hide, "I'm hardly worth fighting for.
The only answer I have is that I'm doing what seems right to me."

"Can't you admit that for the moment your sense of right may be clouded?
All I ask is that you go for a while to the home of some friend, where
they don't rebuff the sunlight when it comes in at the window."

"Stuart," she told him gently but with conviction, "you have changed,
too. Once I could have taken your advice as almost infallible, but I
can't now."