om all moorings of control. "You love me
enough to give me up--on the advice of my enemies! You are deaf to all
my pleadings, but to the casual suggestion of this damned pharisee you
yield instant obedience. And what he suggests is that I be sent away."

Her twisted fingers clenched themselves more tautly and had passion not
enveloped Stuart in a red wreath of fog he must have refrained from
adding to the acuteness of her torture just then.

"Why," she asked faintly, "should he be your enemy?"

"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.