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 either in this world or the next except the love that was denied her.

Her thoughts went back to the day when she and Peter had first met and driven together through the twilit countryside to Abbencombe.  She remembered the sudden sadness which had fallen upon him and how she had tried to cheer him by repeating the verses of a little song.  It all seemed very long ago: 

  “But sometimes God on His great white Throne
    Looks down from the Heaven above,
  And lays in the hands that are empty
    The tremulous Star of Love.”

The words seemed to speak themselves in her brain just as she herself had spoken them that day, with the car slipping swiftly through the winter dusk.  She could feel again the throb of the engine—­see Peter’s whimsical grey-blue eyes darken suddenly to a stern and tragic gravity.