But for Leila the lamp of belief had suddenly gone out, and when this next curtain dropped she felt that she must sit in the dark until old age made her indifferent.  And between forty-four and real old age a gulf is fixed.  This was the first time a man had tired of her.  Why! he had been tired before he began, or so she felt.  In one swift moment as of a drowning person, she saw again all the passages of their companionship, knew with certainty that it had never been a genuine flame.  Shame ran, consuming, in her veins.  She buried her face in the cushions.  This girl had possessed his real heart all the time.  With a laugh she thought:  ’I put my money on the wrong horse; I ought to have backed Edward.  I could have turned that poor monk’s head.  If only I had never seen Jimmy again; if I had torn his letter up, I could have made poor Edward love me!’ Ifs!  What folly!  Things happened as they must!

And, starting up, she began to roam the little room.  Without Jimmy she would be wretched, with him she would be wretched too!  ’I can’t bear to see his face,’ she thought; ’and I can’t live here without him!  It’s really funny!’ The thought of her hospital filled her with loathing.  To go there day after day with this despair eating at her heart—­she simply could not.  She went over her resources.  She had more money than she thought; Jimmy had given her a Christmas present of five hundred pounds.  She had wanted to tear up the cheque, or force him to take it back; but the realities of the previous five years had prevailed with her, and she had banked it.  She was glad now.  She had not to consider money.  Her mind sought to escape in the past.  She thought of her first husband, Ronny Fane; of their mosquito-curtained rooms in that ghastly Madras heat.  Poor Ronny!  What a pale, cynical young ghost started up under that name.  She thought of Lynch, his horsey, matter-of-fact solidity.  She had loved them both—­for a time.  She thought of the veldt, of Constantia, and the loom of Table Mountain under the stars; and the first sight of Jimmy, his straight look, the curve of his crisp head, the kind, fighting-schoolboy frankness of his face.  Even now, after all those months of their companionship, that long-ago evening at grape harvest, when she sang to him under the scented creepers, was the memory of him most charged with real feeling.  That one evening at any rate he had longed for her, eleven:  years ago, when she was in her prime.  She could have held her own then; Noel would have come in vain.  To think that this girl had still fifteen years before she would be even in her prime.  Fifteen years of witchery; and then another ten before she was on the shelf.  Why! if Noel married Jimmy, he would be an old man doting on her still, by the time she had reached this fatal age of forty-four:  She felt as if she must scream, and; stuffing her handkerchief into her mouth, turned out the light.  Darkness cooled her, a little.  She pulled aside