“Yes. Don’t you understand the position? It’s clear enough, I should think!” He laughed a little recklessly. “Either you promise to marry me, in which case I’ll take you home at once--the car’s not damaged beyond repair--or you stay here, here at the bungalow with me, until tomorrow morning.” With a sharp cry she retreated from him, her face ash-white. “No--no! Not that!” The poignancy of that caught-back cry wrenched the words from his lips in hurrying, vehement disclaimer. “You’ll be perfectly safe--as safe as though you were my sister. Don’t look like that.... Jean! Jean! Could you imagine that I would hurt you--you when I worship--my little white love?” The words rushed out in a torrent, hoarse and shaken and passionately tender. “Before God, no! You’ll be utterly safe, Jean, sweetest, beloved--I swear it!” His voice steadied and deepened. “Sacred as the purest love in the whole world could hold you.” He was silent a moment; then, as the tension in her face gradually relaxed, he went on: “But the world won’t know that!” The note of tenderness was gone now, swept away by the resurgence of a fierce relentlessness--triumphant, implacable--that meant winning at all costs. “The world won’t know that,” he repeated. “After tonight, for your own sake--because a woman’s reputation cannot stand the breath of scandal, you’ll be _compelled_ to marry me. You’ll have no choice.” Jean stood quite still, staring in front of her. Once her lips moved, but no sound came from them. Slowly, laboriously almost, she was realising exactly what had happened, her mind adjusting itself to the recognition of the trap in which she had been caught. Her dream had come true, after all--horribly, inconceivably true. The heavy silence which had fallen seemed suddenly filled with the dream-Burke’s voice--mocking and exultant: “... you’ll be stamped with the mark of the beast for ever. It’s too late to try and run away.... It’s too late.” CHAPTER XXVII--INTO THE MIST “THEN 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.