she could not honourably refuse to pay the
price. She could not plead that she had mistaken her feelings towards
him. She had pledged her word to him, open-eyed, and she was not free,
as other women might be, to retract the promise she had given.

Added to this, Roger's sheer, dominant virility had imbued her with a
fatalistic sense of her total inability to escape him. She had had a
glimpse of the primitive man in him--of the man with the club. Even
were she to violate her conscience sufficiently to end the engagement
between them, she knew perfectly well that he would refuse to accept or
acknowledge any such termination. Wherever she hid herself he would
find out her hiding-place and come in search of her, and insist upon
the fulfilment of her promise. And supposing that, in desperation, she
married someone else, what was it he had said? "I swear to you if any
man takes you from me I'll kill him first and you after!"

So, there was no escape for her. Roger would dog her footsteps round
the world and back again sooner than let her go free of him. In a
vaguely aloof and apathetic manner she felt as though it was her
destiny to marry him. And no one can escape from destiny. Life had
shown her many beautiful things--even that rarest thing of all, a
beautiful and unselfish love. But it had shown them only to snatch
them away again once she had learned to value them.

If only she had never met Peter, never known the secret wonder and
glory, the swift, sudden strength, the exquisite mingling of passion
and selflessness which go to the making of the highest in love, she
might have been content to become Roger's wife and bear his children.

His big strength and virile, primitive possessiveness would appeal to
many women, and Nan reflected that had she cared for him it would have
been easy enough to tame him--with his tempestuous love, his savage
temper, and his shamefaced "little boy" repentances! A woman who loved
him in return might have led him by a thread of gossamer! It was the
very fact that Nan did not love him, and that he knew it, which drove
the brute in him uppermost in his dealings with her. He wanted to
_make_ her care, to bend her to his will, to force from her some
response to his own over-mastering passion.

Wearily she faced the situation for the hundredth time and knew that in
the long run she must abide by it. She had learned not to cry for the
moon any longer. She wanted nothing now ei