"The two men who say they love me," she broke out vehemently, "are succeeding between them in driving me mad."

"Because," he as emphatically answered, "you are trying to reconcile a true and a false allegiance--because--"

"This isn't a time," she broke in on him desperately, "for preaching theories to me. I'm hardly sane enough just now to stand that."

"I'm not preaching," he protested. "I'm asserting that no amount of bigotry can white-wash a living sepulcher."

"I told you I wanted to be alone.... I told you--" Her voice broke. "I told you that I _must_ be alone."

"You defied me to attack when and where and how I chose," came his instant rejoinder. "I'm fighting for your salvation from the undertow."

His eyes met hers and held them under a spell like hypnosis, and hers were wide and futile of concealment so that her heart and its secrets were at last defenseless.

"I--I will go back to the house," she said, and for the first time her voice openly betrayed her broken self-confidence.

"_Can_ you go?" he challenged with a new and fiery assurance of tone.

"Don't you know that I can hold you here, without a word, without a touch? Don't you realize that I can stretch out my arms and force you, of your own accord, to come into them?"

She seemed striving to break some spell of lethargy, but she only succeeded in swaying a little as she stood pallid and wraith-like in the moonlight. Her lips moved, but she failed to speak.

"I will never leave you again." Farquaharson's voice leaped suddenly with the elation of certain triumph. "Because you are mine and I am yours. I said once with a boy's assurance that they might surround you with regiments of soldiers but that I would come and claim you. Now I've come. There is no more doubt. Husband or lover--you may decide--but you are mine."

Her knees weakened and as she tried to retreat before his advance she tottered, reaching out her hands with a groping uncertainty. It was then that he caught her in his arms and crushed her close to him, conscious of the wild flutter that went through her soft body; intoxicated by the fragrant softness of the dark hair which he was kissing--and at first oblivious to her struggle for freedom from his embrace.

"Stuart ... Stuart...!" she pleaded in the wildly agitated whisper of a half-recovered voice. "Don't--for God's sake, don't!"

But as she turned up her face to make her final plea, he smothered the words with his own lips upon hers.

For years she had dwelt for him on the most remote borderland of unattainable dreams. Now her heart was throbbing against his own and he knew exultantly that whatever her mind might say in protest, her heart was at home there. In his brain pealed a crescendo of passion that drowned out whispers of remonstrance as pounding surf drowns the cry of a gull.

But at last her lips were free again and her panting protests came to him, low but insistent. "Let me go--don't you see?... It's my last chance.... The tide is taking me." Then feebly and in postscript, "I'll call for help." But the man laughed. "Call, dearest," he dared her.

"Then I can break silence and be honest again. Do you think I'm not willing to fight for you?"

The moment had come which she had faithfully and long sought to avoid: the moment which nature must dominate. Even as she struggled, with an ebbing strength of body and will she realized that in the wild moment of his triumph she was a sharer. If he were to release her now she would crumple down inertly at his feet. Almost fainting under the sweep of emotion, her muscles grew inert, her struggles ended. The tide had taken her.

Slowly, as if in obedience to a command from beyond her own initiative, she reached up the arms that had failed to hold him off and clasped her hands behind his head and when again their lips met hers were no longer unresponsive. Slowly she said in a voice of complete surrender, "Take me--my last gun is fired. I tried--but I lost--Now I can't even make terms."

"You have won," he contradicted joyously. "You've conquered the undertow. 'The idols are broken in the Temple of Baal.'"

She was still dependent upon the support of his arms: still too storm-tossed and unnerved to stand alone and her words came faintly.

"I surrender. I am at your mercy.... There is in all the world nothing you can ask that I can refuse you."

"You have chosen--finally?" he demanded and he spoke gravely, unwilling that she should fail to understand. "There will be no turning back?"

"You have chosen--not I," she replied, her eyes looking up into his.

"But I accept ... your choice ... there will be no turning back."

"You are ready to repudiate, for all time this life ... Eben Tollman ...

the undertow? You will be big enough and strong enough to break these shackles?"

"I am ready--" she said falteringly.

"And you will not feel that you have proven a traitor--to the memory of your father?"

That was a hard question to ask, but it must be asked. He felt a shiver run through her body and _he_ saw in her eyes a fleeting expression of torture.

"I am ready," she repeated dully. Somehow he remembered with a shudder hearing a newspaper acquaintance describe an execution. The poor wretch who was the law's victim went to the chair echoing in a colorless monotony words prompted into his ear by the priest at his side. Then he heard her voice again.

"Are you through questioning me, Stuart? Because if you are ... I have something to say."

"I am listening, dearest."

"You see you must understand. You have conquered. I have surrendered--unconditionally. But it's not a victory to be very proud of or a surrender to be proud of. Once I could have given you everything--with a glory of pride--but not now." He had to bend his ear to catch her words so faintly were they breathed. "I'm overwhelmed, but not convinced. I'm ready to choose because your will has proven the stronger--but I know that it's only a triumph of passion over right.

Some day we may both realize that--and hate each other."

"But you have chosen! You've risen above the bigotry of your blood!"

"No. I'm just conquered--whipped into submission. I told you you might attack when you liked.... I thought I was strong ... and I wasn't. It isn't a victory over my strength--but over my weakness. To-night I was utterly helpless."

She seemed stronger now, and in a sudden bewilderment the man released her and she stood before him pale but no longer inert.

"Then--then," he spoke with a new note of misgiving, "your decision is not final after all?"

That word "helpless" was ringing like a knell over his late triumph. It tinged victory with a hideous color of rapacity and brutality.

"Yes--it's final." She spoke slowly and laboriously. "It's final because I've confessed my helplessness. If I rallied and resisted you to-night ... I know now ... that I'd surrender again to-morrow. There's only one way I can be saved now."

"Saved--but you've saved yourself. What do you mean?"

"No, I've lost myself. You've won me ... but that's over. I can't fight any more.... I tell you I'm helpless." After a moment she added with a ghost of new-born hopefulness: "unless you can do my fighting for me."

"What would you have me do?" His words came flatly and with no trace of their recent elation.

"It is for you to say, Stuart. I'm yours.... I have no right to ask mercy ... when I lost ... when I love you so that ... that I can't resist you."

"So, the code of your fathers still holds you," he said miserably. "The undertow."

"I believe in what I've always believed," she told him. "Only I can't go on fighting for it any longer. It's for you to decide now ... but you inherited a code, too ... a code that has honor for its cornerstone, and that might be able to put generosity above victory.... I wonder if it could ... or if I'm worth the effort."

"Honor!" he exclaimed with deep bitterness. "A word with a thousand meanings and no single meaning! A tyrant that smugly rides down thought and tramps on happiness!"

"Honor has a single meaning for a woman." She laid both hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes. Her own held a mute appeal stronger than words, and her voice was infinitely tender.

"Stuart, whatever you do, I love you. I love you in every way that I know how to love ... but in the name of my God and yours and of my love for you and your love for me ... I ask you--if you can--take me back to the house--and don't enforce your victory."

The man straightened up and stood for a while, very drawn of feature and pallid. He lifted a hand vaguely and the arm dropped again like dead weight at his side. Without seeing them, he looked at the mirrored stars in the fresh-water lake across the way and twice his lips moved, but succeeded in forming no words.