He remained looking across the water for a while before he replied, in a hurt tone.
"I 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.