Outside in the corridor Rosemary met Sir George Orange, who claimed her then and there and dragged her willy-nilly to his wife's box. She never looked back once to see what Peter was doing. He had become merged in the crowd, and, anyway, this was the end.
She found herself presently being talked to, flattered, adulated by the distinguished Roumanian who turned the full battery of his mellow eyes and his persuasive tongue upon her, bent on making a breach in the wall of her prejudices and her thinly veiled enmity.
She told no one, not even Jasper, the gist of her conversation with Naniescu. He had put a proposal before her—a proposal which meant work for Rosemary Fowkes—the Uno of the International Review. He had proposed that she should go to Transylvania, study for herself the conditions now prevailing in the territory occupied by Roumania, and publish the result of her studies in the English and American Press. And this was just the sort of work that Rosemary longed for, now, more than at any other time of her life. Naniescu had played his cards well. He had known how to flatter, insidiously, delicately, this popular writer who had captured the public fancy and whose influence with pen and personality was paramount with a vast section of review and newspaper readers in England. What he had proposed could in no way hurt the most delicate scruples of an over-sensitive conscience, and the proposal came as a veritable Godsend to Rosemary at this moment when her whole soul was in a turmoil of remorse, longing, and rebellion. That her love for Peter Blakeney was not dead, she had known well enough all along, but she had little dreamed until this hour how completely it still possessed her, what power his glance, his touch, his nearness still had over her. She had thought of her love as of a heap of smouldering ashes, and lo! it proved itself to be a devastating fire that burned fiercely beneath.
And Peter?
Peter had set the future above the present; his pride above his love, and she, wounded to the quick, had allowed ambition and pride to throw her into Jasper Tarkington's arms. It was all done now. Irrevocably done. But even at the moment when she most bitterly regretted the past, she was resolved to keep her word loyally to Jasper. Sitting beside him in the car that took her home from the Albert Hall ball, she allowed her hand to rest contentedly in his. His arm was round her, and her cheek rested against his shoulder. She did not speak for she was very tired, but she listened, unshrinking, to the tender words which he whispered in her ear. Dear, kind Jasper! He had thoughts only for her. From the moment when she finally promised that she would be his wife, he had loaded her with delicate attentions and exquisite gifts. Every word he spoke was soothing and restful, so different to Peter's tempestuous outbursts, his unrestrained, passionate eloquence that would leave her limp and bruised, unable to understand his next mood, his sudden indifference to everything save his own future pursuits.