It was not by such incidents that they were to be awakened, and with the wild desire to make Stafford grateful to her, and owe her his success, the tragedy yonder must, in the case of Jasmine, have been obscured and robbed of its force.  At Glencader Jasmine had not got beyond desire to satisfy a vanity, which was as deep in her as life itself.  It was to regain her hold upon a man who had once acknowledged her power and, in a sense, had bowed to her will.  But that had changed, and, down beneath all her vanity and wilfulness, there was now a dangerous regard and passion for him which, under happy circumstances, might have transformed her life—­and his.  Now it all served to twist her soul and darken her footsteps.  On every hand she was engaged in a game of dissimulation, made the more dangerous by the thread of sincerity and desire running through it all.  Sometimes she started aghast at the deepening intrigue gathering in her path; at the deterioration in her husband; and at the hollow nature of her home life; but the excitement of the game she was playing, the ardour of the chase, was in her veins, and her inherited spirit of great daring kept her gay with vitality and intellectual adventure.

Day after day she had strengthened the cords by which she was drawing Ian to her; and in the confidence begotten of her services to him, of her influence upon M. Mennaval and the progress of her efforts, a new intimacy, different from any they had ever known, grew and thrived.  Ian scarcely knew how powerful had become the feeling between them.  He only realized that delight which comes from working with another for a cherished cause, the goal of one’s life, which has such deeper significance when the partner in the struggle is a woman.  They both experienced that most seductive of all influences, a secret knowledge and a pact of mutual silence and purpose.

“You trust me now?” Jasmine asked at last one day, when she had been able to assure Ian that the end was very near, that M. Mennaval had turned his face from Slavonia, and had carried his government with him—­almost.  In the heir-apparent to the throne of Moravia, whose influence with the Moravian Prime Minister was considerable, there still remained one obdurate element; but Ian’s triumph only lacked the removal of this one obstructive factor, and thereafter England would be secure from foreign attack, if war came in South Africa.  In that case Ian’s career might culminate at the head of the Foreign Office itself, or as representative of the throne in India, if he chose that splendid sphere.

“You do trust me, Ian?” Jasmine repeated, with a wistfulness as near reality as her own deceived soul could permit.

With a sincerity as deep as one can have who embarks on enterprises in which one regrets the means in contemplation of the end, Ian replied: 

“Yes, yes, I trust you, Jasmine, as I used to do when I was twenty and you were five.  You have brought back the boy in me.  All the dreams of youth are in my heart again, all the glow of the distant sky of hope.  I feel as though I lived upon a hill-top, under some greenwood tree, and—­”