Jean stood quite still, staring in front of her. Once her lips moved, but no sound came from them. Slowly, laboriously almost, she was realising exactly what had happened, her mind adjusting itself to the recognition of the trap in which she had been caught.
Her dream had come true, after all--horribly, inconceivably true.
The heavy silence which had fallen seemed suddenly filled with the dream-Burke’s voice--mocking and exultant:
“... you’ll be stamped with the mark of the beast for ever. It’s too late to try and run away.... It’s too late.”
“THEN that telegram--that telegram from Judy--I suppose that was all part of the plan?”
Jean felt the futility of the question even while she asked it. The answer was so inevitable.
“Yes”--briefly. “I knew that Judy meant staying the night with her friends before she went away. She sent the wire--because I asked her to.”
There was such an immeasurable anguish of reproach in the low, quick-spoken whisper that Burke felt glad Judith was not there to hear it. Had it been otherwise, she might have regretted the share she had taken in the proceedings, small as it had been. She was not a man, half-crazed by love, in whose passion-blurred vision nothing counted save the winning of the one woman, nor had she known Burke’s plan in its entirety.
“Yes, Judy sent the wire,” he said.. “But give her so much credit, she didn’t know that I intended--this. She only knew that I wanted another chance of seeing you alone--of asking you to be my wife, and I told her that you wouldn’t come up to the bungalow unless you believed that she would be there too. I didn’t think you’d trust yourself alone with me again--after that afternoon at the inn”--with blunt candour.
“So you see I had to think of something--some way. And it was you yourself who suggested this method.”
“Yes. Don’t you remember what you told me that day I drove you hack from Dartmoor ‘_A woman’s happiness depends upon her reputation_.’”
She looked at him quickly, recalling the scattered details of that afternoon--Burke’s gibes at what he believed to be her fear of gossiping tongues and her own answer to his taunts: “No woman can afford to ignore scandal.” And then, following upon that, his sudden, curious absorption in his own thoughts.