"Don't!" she cried, and the tears in her voice cut him to the heart—"don't make it harder for me than it has to be. I have told you only what I've heard my father say, time and again: that there is no gold in the Niquoia River. And you mustn't ask me to despise my brother. He fights his way to his ends without caring much for the consequences to others; but tell me—haven't you been doing the same thing?"
"I have," he confessed stubbornly. "My love isn't measured by a fear of consequences—to myself or others."
"That is the hopeless part of it," she returned drearily.
"Yet you condone in your brother what you condemn in me," he complained.
"My brother is my brother; and you are—Let me tell you something, Victor: God helping me, I shall be no man's evil genius, and yours least of all. You broke down the barriers a few minutes ago and you know what is in my heart. But I can take it out of my heart if the man who put it there is not true to himself."
Brouillard was silent for a little space, and when he spoke again it was as one awaking from a troubled dream.
"I know what you would do and say; you would take me by the hand and tell me to come up higher.... There was a time, Amy, when you wouldn't have had to say it twice—a time when the best there was in me would have leaped to climb to any height you pointed to. The time is past, and I can't recall it, try as I may; there is a change; it goes back to that day when I first saw you—down at the lower ford in the desert's edge. I loved you then, though I wouldn't admit it even to myself. But that wasn't the change; it was something different. Do you believe in Freiborg's theory of the multiple personality? I saw his book in your hammock one day when I was up here."
"No," she said quite definitely. "I am I, and I am always I. For the purposes of the comedy we call life, we play many parts, perhaps; but back of the part-playing there is always the same soul person, I think—and believe."
"I know; that is common sense and sanity. And yet Freiborg's speculations are most plausible. He merely carries the idea of the dual personality—the Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde notion—a step farther along. You may remember how he compares the human being to a ship changing commanders at every port. One captain makes her a merchantman; another makes her a tramp; a third turns her into a slaver or a pirate; under a fourth she becomes a derelict."
"That is a terribly dangerous theory, if you take it seriously," was her comment.