“And ‘sported with Amaryllis in the shade,’” she broke in with a little laugh of triumph, her eyes brighter than he had ever seen them.  They were glowing with a fire of excitement which was like a fever devouring the spirit, with little dark, flying banners of fate or tragedy behind.

Strange that he caught the inner meaning of it as he looked into her eyes now.  In the depths of those eyes, where long ago he had drowned his spirit, it was as though he saw an army of reckless battalions marching to a great battle; but behind all were the black wings of vultures—­pinions of sorrow following the gay brigades.  Even as he gazed at her, something ominous and threatening caught his heart, and, with the end of his great enterprise in sight, a black premonition smothered him.

But with a smile he said:  “Well, it does look as though we are near the end of the journey.”

“And ‘journeys end in lovers’ meeting,’” she whispered softly, lowered her eyes, and then raised them again to his.

The light in them blinded him.  Had he not always loved her—­before any one came, before Rudyard came, before the world knew her?  All that he had ever felt in the vanished days rushed upon him with intolerable force.  Through his life-work, through his ambition, through helping him as no one else could have done at the time of crisis, she had reached the farthest confines of his nature.  She had woven, thread by thread, the magic carpet of that secret companionship by which the best as the worst of souls are sometimes carried into a land enchanted—­for a brief moment, before Fate stoops down and hangs a veil of plague over the scene of beauty, passion, and madness.

Her eyes, full of liquid fire, met his.  They half closed as her body swayed slightly towards him.

With a cry, almost rough in its intensity, he caught her in his arms and buried his face in the soft harvest of her hair.  “Jasmine—­Jasmine, my love!” he murmured.

Suddenly she broke from him.  “Oh no—­oh no, Ian!  The work is not done.  I can’t take my pay before I have earned it—­such pay—­such pay.”

He caught her hands and held them fast.  “Nothing can alter what is.  It stands.  Whatever the end, whatever happens to the thing I want to do, I—­”

He drew her closer.

“You say this before we know what Moravia will do; you—­oh, Ian, tell me it is not simply gratitude, and because I tried to help you; not only because—­”

He interrupted her with a passionate gesture.  “It belonged at first to what you were doing for me.  Now it is by itself, that which, for good or ill, was to be between you and me—­the foreordained thing.”

She drew back her head with a laugh of vanity and pride and bursting joy.  “Ah, it doesn’t matter now!” she said.  “It doesn’t matter.”

He looked at her questioningly.

“Nothing matters now,” she repeated, less enigmatically.  She stretched her arms up joyously, radiantly.