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.