He was standing close to her now, staring down at her with sombre, passion-lit eyes, and instinctively she made a movement as though to elude him and slip back again into the room. In the same instant his arms went round her and she was prisoned in a grip from which she was powerless to escape. “Don’t struggle,” he said, as she strove impotently to release herself. “I could hold you from now till doomsday without an effort.” There was a curious thrill in his voice, the triumphant, arrogant leap of possession. He held her pressed against him, and she could feel his chest heave with his labouring breath. “You’re mine--mine! My woman--meant for me from the beginning of the world--and do you think I’ll give you up?... Give you up? I tell you, if you were another man’s wife I’d take you away from him! You’re mine--every inch of you, body and soul. And I want you. Oh, my God, how I want you!” “Let me go... Geoffrey...” The words struggled from her lips. For answer his arms tightened round her, crushing her savagely, and she felt his kisses burning, scorching her face, his mouth on hers till it seemed as though he were draining her very soul. When at last he released her, she leant helplessly against the woodwork of the window, panting and shaken. Her face was white as a magnolia petal and her eyes dark-rimmed with purple shadow. A faint expression of compunction crossed Burke’s face. “I suppose--I shall never be forgiven now,” he muttered roughly. With an effort Jean forced her tongue to answer him. “No,” she said in a voice out of which every particle of feeling seemed to have departed. “You will never be forgiven.” A look of deviltry came into his eyes. He crossed the room and, locking the door, dropped the key into his pocket. “I think,” he remarked coolly, “in that case, I’d better keep you a prisoner here till you have promised to marry me. It’s you I want. Your forgiveness can come after. I’ll see to that.” The result of his action was unexpected. Jean turned to the window, unlatched it, and flung open the casement. “If you don’t unlock that door at once, Geoffrey,” she said quietly, “I shall leave the room--this way”--with a gesture that sufficiently explained her meaning. Her voice was very steady. Burke looked at her curiously. “Do you mean--you’d jump out?” he asked, openly incredulous. Her eyes answered him. They were feverishly bright, with an almost fanatical light in them, and suddenly Burke realised that she was at the end of her tether, that the emotional stress of the last quarter of an hour had taken its toll of her high-strung temperament and that she might even do what she had threatened. He had no conception of the motive behind the threat--of the imperative determination which had leaped to life within her to endure or suffer anything rather than stay locked in this room with Burke, rather than give Blaise, the man who held her heart between his two hands, ground for misunderstanding or mistrusting her anew.