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.
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.