"This is good of you," she said, extending her hand cordially, and as he took it he suggested, "Meanwhile an old man is not speedily weaned from an idea which has taken deep root, and that brings me to another suggestion." Once more he paused deferentially as if awaiting permission, "if I may make it."
"I wish you would."
"It is the idea of Mr. Farquaharson's constant proximity and influence which keeps your father's animosity stirred to combat. With a temporary absence it would relax. I think it might even come to an automatic end.... When Farquaharson returned Mr. Williams's mind might have lost its inflammation."
He smiled and shook the reins over the back of the old horse and when he drove away he left Conscience standing with her lips parted and her gaze set.
Send Stuart away for a time! She had told that she could not stand it without him, and now 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 reënforced 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."