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.