As she looked at the flower, a sense of the path by which she had come, of what she had left behind, of what was yet to chance, shuddered into her heart.

That a flower given by Adrian Fellowes should be laid upon her pillow by her husband, by Rudyard Byng, was too ghastly or too devilishly humorous for words; and both aspects of the thing came to her.  Her face became white, and almost mechanically she put the letters she held on a writing-table near; then coming to the bed again she looked at the rose with a kind of horror.  Suddenly, however, she caught it up, and bursting into a laugh which was shrill and bitter she threw it across the room.  Still laughing hysterically, with her golden hair streaming about her head, folding her round like a veil which reached almost to her ankles, she came back to the chair at the dressing-table and sat down.

Slowly drawing the wonderful soft web of hair over her shoulders, she began to weave it into one wide strand, which grew and grew in length till it was like a great rope of spun gold.  Inch by inch, foot by foot it grew, until at last it lay coiled in her lap like a golden serpent, with a kind of tension which gave it life, such as Medusa’s hair must have known as the serpent-life entered into it.  There is—­or was—­in Florence a statue of Medusa, seated, in her fingers a strand of her hair, which is beginning to coil and bend and twist before her horror-stricken eyes; and this statue flashed before Jasmine’s eyes as she looked at the loose ends of gold falling beyond the blue ribbon with which she had tied the shining rope.

With the mad laughter of a few moments before still upon her lips, she held the flying threads in her hand, and so strained was her mind that it would not have caused her surprise if they had wound round her fingers or given forth forked tongues.  She laughed again—­a low and discordant laugh it was now.

“Such imaginings—­I think I must be mad,” she murmured.

Then she leaned her elbows on the dressing-table and looked at herself in the glass.

“Am I not mad?” she asked herself again.  Then there stole across her face a strange, far-away look, bringing a fresh touch of beauty to it, and flooding it for a moment with that imaginative look which had been her charm as a girl, a look of far-seeing and wonder and strange light.

“I wonder—­if I had had a mother!” she said, wistfully, her chin in her hand.  “If my mother had lived, what would I have been?”

She reached out to a small table near, and took from it a miniature at which she looked with painful longing.  “My dear, my very dear, you were so sweet, so good,” she said.  “Am I your daughter, your own daughter—­me?  Ah, sweetheart mother, come back to me!  For God’s sake come—­now.  Speak to me if you can.  Are you so very far away?  Whisper—­only whisper, and I shall hear.