How heavy her head was!  Her worshipping maid, near dead with fatigue, watched her furtively, but avoided the eyes in the mirror which had a half-angry look, a look at once disturbed and elated, reckless and pitiful.  Lablanche was no reader of souls, but there was something here beyond the usual, and she moved and worked with unusual circumspection and lightness of touch.  Presently she began to unloose the coils of golden hair; but Jasmine stopped her with a gesture of weariness.

“No, don’t,” she said.  “I can’t stand your touch tonight, Lablanche.  I’ll do the rest myself.  My head aches so.  Good-night.”

“I will be so light with it, madame,” Lablanche said, protestingly.

“No, no.  Please go.  But the morning, quite early.”

“The hour, madame?”

“When the letters come, as soon as the letters come, Lablanche—­the first post.  Wake me then.”

She watched the door close, then turned to the mirror in front of her and looked at herself with eyes in which brooded a hundred thoughts and feelings:  thoughts contradictory, feelings opposed, imaginings conflicting, reflections that changed with each moment; and all under the spell of a passion which had become in the last few hours the most powerful influence her life had ever known.  Right or wrong, and it was wrong, horribly wrong; wise or unwise, and how could the wrong be wise! she knew she was under a spell more tyrannous than death, demanding more sacrifices than the gods of Hellas.

Self-indulgent she had been, reckless and wilful and terribly modern, taking sweets where she found them.  She had tried to squeeze the orange dry, in the vain belief that Wealth and Beauty can take what they want, when they want it, and that happiness will come by purchase; only to find one day that the thing you have bought, like a slave that revolts, stabs you in your sleep, and you wake with wide-eyed agony only to die, or to live—­with the light gone from the evening sky.

Suddenly, with the letters in her hand with which she had entered the room, she saw the white rose on her pillow.  Slowly she got up from the dressing-table and went over to the bed in a hushed kind of way.  With a strange, inquiring, half-shrinking look she regarded the flower.  One white rose.  It was not there when she left.  It had been brought from the hall below, from the great bunch on the Spanish table.  Those white roses, this white rose, had come from one who, selfish as he was, knew how to flatter a woman’s vanity.  From that delicate tribute of flattery and knowledge Rudyard had taken this flowering stem and brought it to her pillow.

It was all too malevolently cynical.  Her face contracted in pain and shame.  She had a soul to which she had never given its chance.  It had never bloomed.  Her abnormal wilfulness, her insane love of pleasure, her hereditary impulses, had been exercised at the expense of the great thing in her, the soul so capable of memorable and beautiful deeds.