ded love, I learned suddenly that you loved me, too. The
summed-up spell of all those hungry times was on me last night. Can't
you make allowances for me?"

"I have made allowances," she assured him steadily. "I've made so
many--that I'm no longer angry with you. You see I spent most of last
night thinking of it. We were both moon mad. Only now--we can't go on
pretending to be Platonic friends any more. When war has been declared
comradeships between enemies have to end."

"You are both very fair and very unfair, Conscience," suggested Stuart
Farquaharson thoughtfully. "I said some wild things--out there in the
moonlight--with my senses all electrified by the discovery of your
love--and yet--"

He broke off, and Conscience, rising from her finished task, stood
gazing out with musing eyes over the slopes of the hills. Suddenly she
said:

"I realize now that if you'd gone away just because I asked it, we would
always have felt that nothing was settled; that instead of winning my
battle I'd just begged off from facing it."

"Among all the unconsidered things I said last night, Conscience,"
Stuart began again, "there were some that I must still say. It was like
the illogical thread of a dream which is only the distortion of a waking
thought-flow. The essence of my contention was sound."

"A soundness which advises me to divorce my husband and marry you," she
demurred with no more anger than she might have felt for a misguided
child, "though he and I both made vows--and he has broken none of
them."

"You made those vows," he reminded her, "under the coercion of fears for
your father. You distorted your life under what you yourself once called
a tyranny of weakness."

"And to remedy all that you counsel an anarchy of passion." She seemed
to be speaking from a distance and to be looking through rather than at
the horizon.

"I believe that even now my father knows--and that he's no more
willing to have me surrender my convictions--than when he was on earth."

"And I believe," the response came reverently but promptly, "that where
he is now his eyes are no longer blinded by any scales of mistake. If he
looks down on us from the Beyond, he must see life with a universal
breadth of wisdom."

For an instant tears misted her eyes and then she asked in a rather
bewildered voice, "Stuart, stripped of all its casuistry, what is your
argument except a plea for infidelity?"

"Revolt against that most powerful and vicious