Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/309

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name and business ability of George Judson. I can't go back on them. My life is not my own exactly. I can't leave, don't you see—in honor, in justice, I can't. Fay knows that—if she hasn't forgotten. I've explained it to her times enough."

"I see you can't," admitted the doctor quickly—"Not the kind of man you are." He had liked George Judson from the first, and pitied him; now he began to have a large respect for him.

"What shall I do, then?" the man appealed.

"Let her go!" answered the doctor incisively.

"Let her go?" George sprang up in protest.

"Yes. She has contemplated going. Her dream showed that."

"Not in a million years!"

"You don't want to condemn a woman to wifehood after she has ceased to love you, do you? Go and tell her she is free. Acknowledge your failure. Since you have lost her love, give up trying to hold her body with a bond that is legal and conventional, but hellish for all that and that she can snap at any time."

George Judson backed away, a horror in his eye and shaking his head stubbornly.

"Sit down. Think!" commanded the doctor, asserting autocratically the moral dominance he had gained, and Judson obeyed as a patient should obey his physician. "Be fair to her! She