In that, however, he was somewhat maligned, for his penchant for beautiful and “select” ladies had capacities of development almost unguessed.  Previously Jasmine had never shown him any marked preference; and when, at first, he met her in town on her return from Wales he was no more than watchfully courteous and admiring.  When, however, he found her in a receptive mood, and evidently taking pleasure in his society, his vanity expanded greatly.  He at once became possessed by an absorbing interest in the woman who, of all others in London, had gifts which were not merely physical, but of a kind that stimulate the mind and rouse those sensibilities so easily dulled by dull and material people.  Jasmine had her material side; but there was in her the very triumph of the imaginative also; and through it the material became alive, buoyant and magnetic.

Without that magnetic power which belonged to the sensuous part of her she would not have gained control of M. Mennaval’s mind, for it was keen, suspicious, almost abnormally acute; and, while lacking real power, it protected itself against the power of others by assembled and well-disciplined adroitness and evasions.

Very soon, however, Jasmine’s sensitive beauty, which in her desire to intoxicate him became voluptuousness, enveloped his brain in a mist of rainbow reflections.  Under her deft questions and suggestions he allowed her to see the springs of his own diplomacy and the machinery inside the Moravian administration.  She caught glimpses of its ambitions, its unscrupulous use of its position in international relations, to gain advantage for itself, even by a dexterity which might easily bear another name, and by sudden disregard of international attachments not unlike treachery.

Rudyard was too busy to notice the more than cavalier attitude of M. Mennaval; and if he had noticed it, there would have been no intervention.  Of late a lesion of his higher moral sense made him strangely insensitive to obvious things.  He had an inborn chivalry, but the finest, truest chivalry was not his—­that which carefully protects a woman from temptation, by keeping her unostentatiously away from it; which remembers that vanity and the need for admiration drive women into pitfalls out of which they climb again maimed for life, if they climb at all.

He trusted Jasmine absolutely, while there was, at the same time, a great unrest in his heart and life—­an unrest which the accident at the Glencader Mine, his own share in a great rescue, and her gratitude for his safety did little to remove.  It produced no more than a passing effect upon Jasmine or upon himself.  The very convention of making light of bravery and danger, which has its value, was in their case an evil, preventing them from facing the inner meaning of it all.  If they had been less rich, if their house had been small, if their acquaintances had been fewer, if . . .