“T HEN that telegram—that telegram from Judy—I suppose that was all part of the plan?”

Jean felt the futility of the question even while she asked it. The answer was so inevitable.

“Yes”—briefly. “I knew that Judy meant staying the night with her friends before she went away. She sent the wire—because I asked her to.”

“Judy did that?”

There was such an immeasurable anguish of reproach in the low, quick-spoken whisper that Burke felt glad Judith was not there to hear it. Had it been otherwise, she might have regretted the share she had taken in the proceedings, small as it had been. She was not a man, half-crazed by love, in whose passion-blurred vision nothing counted save the winning of the one woman, nor had she known Burke’s plan in its entirety.

“Yes, Judy sent the wire,” he said.. “But give her so much credit, she didn’t know that I intended—this. She only knew that I wanted another chance of seeing you alone—of asking you to be my wife, and I told her that you wouldn’t come up to the bungalow unless you believed that she would be there too. I didn’t think you’d trust yourself alone with me again—after that afternoon at the inn”—with blunt candour.

“No. I shouldn’t have done.”

“So you see I had to think of something—some way. And it was you yourself who suggested this method.”

“I?”—incredulously.

“Yes. Don’t you remember what you told me that day I drove you hack from Dartmoor ‘A woman’s happiness depends upon her reputation.’”

She looked at him quickly, recalling the scattered details of that afternoon—Burke’s gibes at what he believed to be her fear of gossiping tongues and her own answer to his taunts: “No woman can afford to ignore scandal.” And then, following upon that, his sudden, curious absorption in his own thoughts.

The remembrance of it all was like a torchlight flashed into a dark place, illuminating what had been hidden and inscrutable. She spoke swiftly.

“And it was then—that afternoon—you thought of this?”

He bent his head.

“Yes,” he acknowledged.

Jean was silent. It was all clear now—penetratingly so.

“And the Holfords? Are there any such people?” she asked drearily.

She scarcely knew what prompted her to put so purposeless and unimportant a question. Actually, she felt no interest at all in the answer. It could not make the least difference to her present circumstances.

Perhaps it was a little the feeling that this trumpery process of question and answer served to postpone the inevitable moment when she must face the situation in which she found herself—face it in its simple crudeness, denuded of unessential whys and wherefores.

“Oh, yes, the Holfords are quite real,” answered Burke. “And so is the plan for an expedition to one of the tors by moonlight. Only it will be carried out to-morrow night instead of to-night. To-night is for the settlement between you and me.”

The strained expression of utter, shocked incredulity was gradually leaving Jean’s face. The unreal was becoming real, and she knew now what she was up against; the hard, reckless quality of Burke’s voice left her no illusions.

“Geoffrey,” she said quietly, “you won’t really do this thing?”

If she had hoped to move him by a simple, straightforward appeal to the best that might be in him, she failed completely. For the moment, all that was good in him, anything chivalrous which the helplessness of her womanhood might have invoked, was in abeyance. He was mere primitive man, who had succeeded in carrying off the woman he meant to mate and was prepared to hold her at all costs.

“I told you I would compel you,” he said doggedly. “That I would let nothing in the world stand between you and me. And I meant every word I said. You’ve no way out now—except marriage with me.”

The imperious decision of his tone roused her fighting spirit.

“Do you imagine,” she broke out scornfully, “that—after this—I would ever marry you?... I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth! I’d die sooner!”

“I daresay you would,” he returned composedly. “You’ve too much grit to be afraid of death. Only, you see, that doesn’t happen to be the alternative. The alternative is a smirched reputation. Tarnished a little—after to-night—even if you marry me; dragged utterly in the mire if you refuse. I’m putting it before you with brutal frankness, I know. But I want you to realise just what it means and to promise that you’ll be my wife before it’s too late—while I can still get you back to Staple during the hours of propriety”—smiling grimly.

She looked at him with a slow, measured glance of bitter contempt.

“Even a tarnished reputation might be preferable to marriage with you—more endurable,” she added, with the sudden tormented impulse of a trapped thing to hurt back.

“You don’t really believe that”—impetuously—“I know I know I could make you happy! You’d be the one woman in the world to me. And I don’t think”—more quietly—“that you could endure a slurred name, Jean.”

She made no answer. Every word he spoke only made it more saliently clear to her that she was caught—bound hand and foot in a web from which there was no escape. Yet, little as Burke guessed it, the actual question of “what people might say” did not trouble her to any great extent. She was too much her father’s own daughter to permit a mere matter of reputation to force her into a distasteful marriage.

Not that she minimised the value of good repute. She was perfectly aware that if she refused to marry Burke, and he carried out his threat of detaining her at the bungalow until the following morning, she would have a heavy penalty to pay—the utmost penalty which a suspicious world exacts from a woman, even though she may be essentially innocent, in whose past there lurks a questionable episode.

But she had courage enough to face the consequences of that refusal, to stand up to the clatter of poisonous tongues that must ensue; and trust enough to bank on the loyalty of her real friends, knowing it would be the same splendid loyalty that she herself would have given to any one of them in like circumstances. For Jean was a woman who won more than mere lip-service from those who called themselves her friends.

Burke had never been more mistaken in his calculations than when he counted upon forcing her hand by the mere fear of scandal. But none the less he held her—and held her in the meshes of a far stronger and more binding net, had he but realised it.

Looking back upon the episode from which her present predicament had actually sprung, Jean could almost have found it in her heart to smile at the relative importance which, at the time, that same incident had assumed in her eyes.

It had seemed to her, then, that for Blaise ever to hear that she had been locked in a room with Burke, had spent an uncounted, hour or so with him at the “honeymooners’ inn” would be the uttermost calamity that could befall her.

He would never believe that it had been by no will of hers—so she had thought at the time—and that fierce lover’s jealousy which had been the origin of their quarrel, and of all the subsequent mutual misunderstandings and aloofness, would be roused to fresh life, and his distrust of her become something infinitely more difficult to combat.

But compared with the present situation which confronted her, the happenings of that past day faded into insignificance. She stood, now, face to face with a choice such as surely few women had been forced to make.

Whichever way she decided, whichever of the two alternatives she accepted, her happiness must pay the price. Nothing she could ever say or do, afterwards, would set her right in the eyes of the man whose belief in her meant everything. Whether she agreed to marry Burke, returning home in the odour of sanctity within the next hour or two, or whether she refused and returned the next morning—free, but with the incontrovertible fact of a night spent at Burke’s bungalow, alone with him, behind her, Blaise would never trust or believe in her love for him again.

And if she promised to marry Burke and so save her reputation, it must automatically mean the end of everything between herself and the man she loved—the dropping of an iron curtain compared with which the wall built up out of their frequent misunderstandings in the past seemed something as trifling and as easily demolished as a card house.

On the other hand, if she risked her good name and kept her freedom, she would be equally as cut off from him. Not that she feared Blaise would take the blackest view of the affair—she was sure that he believed in her enough not to misjudge her as the world might do—but he would inevitably think that she had deliberately chosen to spend an afternoon on the Moor alone with Burke—“playing with fire” exactly as he had warned her not to, and getting her fingers burnt in consequence—and he would accept it as a sheer denial of the silent pledge of love understood which bound them together.

He would never trust her again—nor forgive her. No man could. Love’s loyalty, rocked by the swift currents of jealousy and passion, is not of the same quality as the steady loyalty of friendship—that calm, unshakable confidence which may exist between man and man or woman and woman.

Moreover—and here alone was where the fear of gossip troubled her—even if the inconceivable happened and Blaise forgave and trusted her again, she could not go to him with a slurred name, give him herself—when the gift was outwardly tarnished. The Tormarin pride was unyielding as a rock—and Tormarin women had always been above suspicion. She could not break the tradition of an old name—do that disservice to the man she loved! No, if she could find no way out of the web in which she had been caught she was set as far apart from Blaise as though they had never met. Only the agony of meeting and remembrance would be with her for the rest of life!

Jean envisaged very clearly the possibilities that lay ahead—envisaged them with a breathless, torturing perception of their imminence. It was to be a fight—here and now—for the whole happiness that life might hold.

She turned to Burke, breaking at last the long silence which had descended between them.

“And what do you suppose I feel towards you, Geoffrey? Will you be content to have your wife think of you—as I must think?”

A faint shadow flitted across his face. The quiet scorn of her words—their underlying significance—flicked him on the raw.

“I’ll be content to have you as my wife—at any price,” he said stubbornly. “Jean”—a sudden urgency in his tones—“try to believe I hate all this as much as you do. When you’re my wife, I’ll spend my life in teaching you to forget it—in—wiping the very memory of to-day out of your mind.”

“I shall never forgot it,” she said slowly. Then, bitterly: “I wonder why you even offer me a choice—when you know; that it is really no choice.”

“Why? Because I swore to you that you should give me what I want—that I wouldn’t take even a kiss from you again by force. But”—unevenly—“I didn’t know what it meant—the waiting!”

Outside, the mist had thickened into fog, curtaining the windows. The light had dimmed to a queer, glimmering dusk, changing the values of things, and out of the shifting shadows her white face, with its scarlet line of scornful mouth, gleamed at him—elusive, tantalising as a flower that sways out of reach. In the uncertain half-light which struggled in through the dulled window-panes there was something provocative, maddening—a kind of etherealised lure of the senses in the wavering, shadowed loveliness of her. The man’s pulses leaped; something within him slipped its leash.

“Kiss me!” he demanded hoarsely. “Don’t keep me waiting any longer. Give me your lips... now... now...”

She sprang aside from him, warding him off. Her eyes stormed at him out of her white face.

“You promised!” she cried, her voice sharp with fear. “You promised!”

The tension of the next moment strained her nerves to breaking-point.

Then he fell back. Slowly his arms dropped to his sides without touching her, his hands clenching with the effort that it cost him.

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