“Answer me!” he persisted, as she remained silent.
“Wait... wait a little...” she muttered helplessly.
She turned away from him and, leaning her elbows on the chimney-piece, buried her face in her hands.
The supreme test had come at last. She realised, now, that her renunciation—that renunciation which had cost her so much pain and bitterness—had been, after all, only something superficial and incomplete. She had not made the full sacrifice that duty and honour demanded of her. Though she had outwardly renounced her lover—bade him return to Nesta—she still held him hers by the utter faithfulness of his love for her. Nesta had had but the husk, the shell—a husband in name only, every hour of their life together an insult to her pride and womanhood.
Jean’s thoughts lashed her. Her shoulders bent and cowered a little as though beneath a physical blow.
There had been a time—oh! very long ago, it seemed, before Destiny had come with her snuffers and quenched the twin flames and love and happiness—a time when dimly, as in some exquisite dream, she had heard the sound of little voices, felt the helpless touch of tiny hands. Perhaps Nesta, too, had heard those voices, felt those clinging hands, while her soul quickened to the vision of a future which might hold some deeper meaning, some more sacred trust and purpose, than her empty, wayward past.
And she, Jean, had stood between Nesta and the fulfilment of that dream, forever forbidding her entrance to her woman’s kingdom.
She saw it all now with a terrible clarity of vision, understood to the full the two alternatives which faced her—to go with Blaise, as he implored, or to send him—her man, the man she loved—back to Nesta. There was no longer any middle course.
A voice sounded in her ears.
“No true happiness ever came of running away from duty. And if ever I’m up against such a thing—a choice like this—I hope to God I’d be able to hang on, to run straight, even if it half-killed me to do it!”