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.