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.
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.