A lump formed in Mary's throat. The thought of performing the awful act required of her filled her with terror. If she uttered such an appalling blasphemy surely the wrath of Heaven would fall upon her? All the beliefs she had held when younger surged up into her mind. She had accepted without a shadow of doubt the accounts given her by the nuns at her convent of people who mocked God having been struck dead on the spot. Even if such things did not happen, there could be no escaping the Day of Judgment. The faithful and the backsliders alike would then have to account for their every act. Although she no longer practised her religion she had never ceased to believe that. How could she possibly make herself answerable for having committed such a terrible sin? The thought of it, and the price she must some day pay, would haunt her night and day for the rest of her life.

Yet, what if she refused? She had wantonly placed herself in the hands of these evil people. She was completely at their mercy. They would regard her standing firm in her true beliefs as a defiance of the dark power that they worshipped. To them, it would be like someone in a Christian church standing before the altar and proclaiming his allegiance to the Devil. Their rage at such an insult might cause them to rise up and fall upon her in a frenzy. They might even murder her.

They would, from fear that, having refused to serve Satan, if they let her go she would betray their vile secrets. Only by killing her could they be certain of saving themselves, or at least having to abandon this well-concealed meeting-place with all its costly furnishings. They would have nothing to fear from her disappearance; for she was living alone under an assumed name. Her landlady would report in a few days' time to the police that she had gone off leaving her things behind, but that would lead only to her being listed with hundreds of other missing persons. She had cut herself off even from Barney, the one and only person who might have tried to trace her.

Short of a miracle, escape was impossible and, having so long since fallen from a state of grace, how could she hope for one? Either she must pronounce the ultimate blasphemy or die there.

Desperately she sought for some middle course: some plea or trick by which she might postpone the issue. Her mind whirled with visions: of the Saviour, whom she was ordered to deny, upon the Cross; of a picture of Hell she had been shown as a child, in which naked men and women were being thrust by demons with pitchforks into the roaring flames; of a little coloured plaster statue of the Virgin before which she had knelt for many hundred nights when saying her prayers; of the insolently splendid figure of the Great Ram, and his terrifying black imp, as they had stood only a few feet from the spot where she was crouching, no more than a week ago.