Don’t let her think she must come back to the room. I don’t need anybody. I just need to get to sleep.”

Constance hurried up to her room and locked her door. Her heart was beating wildly and her face was burning. She flung herself headlong upon her bed as she used to do when she was a very little child and broke into hushed sobs, the tears stinging their unaccustomed way to her eyes and pouring out in a flood. Constance had never been a crying girl. When she was grieved she usually hardened and grew sarcastic rather than to vent her sorrow in tears. But now it was something deeper than grief. It was utter humiliation. She felt as if she were groveling in the dust. She had caught a glimpse of her own soul reflected in those gloating dark eyes of the brooding stranger and she loathed herself as well as him. It was not just anger that he had dared to try to kiss her without her permission. That was something that she had always been quite able to control. She was accustomed to admiration. This was not the first time a man had tried to kiss her. But before she had always seen it coming and warded it off. This time it had come almost at her bidding. Just a little yielding of herself, the barriers thrown down, and she saw the evil thing coiled in her own self.

Startlingly it came to her how she had told Seagrave on the hillside that she was not a sinner and why should she need to be saved. It hadn’t even occurred to her that there were the makings of a sinner in one so well born and bred as herself. And now she saw that the thing that makes men and women fall into the depths of degradation, that very same thing in embryo had lain within her own heart and almost caused her to lose what she considered her self-respect.

It was of no use to tell herself that even if it had been consummated it would have been but a kiss, and what was a mere kiss? Constance was too honest with herself for that. She knew the power that had led her so far might easily have led farther someday. She knew that if it had not been for that sad-eyed stranger in her memory she would have let that kiss be completed, might even have returned it. Not that a single kiss would be considered to mean so much today. It was what that kiss stood for that was so appalling to her. A letting down of her own standards.

It had been no power of herself that had kept her from it. There had been no victory of her own better self. Perhaps she had no better self. How terrible!

She felt that she had been rescued, snatched from something she would all her life have loathed to remember. Doubtless in her escort’s mind it had been merely one more kiss, merely one more girl. He probably made all girls feel they were the one and only.