She took a little phial from the drawer of the dressing-table.  “Just the tiny overdose and ‘good-bye, my lover, good-bye.’” Again that hard little laugh of bitterness broke from her.  “Or that needle Mr. Mappin had at Glencader.  A thrust of the point, and in an instant gone, and no one to know, no one to discover, no one to add blame to blame, to pile shame upon shame.  Just blackness—­blackness all at once, and no light or anything any more.  The fruit all gone from the trees, the garden all withered, the bower all ruined, the children all dead—­the pretty children all dead forever, the pretty children that never were born, that never lived in Jasmine’s garden.”

As there had come to Rudyard premonition of evil, so to-night, in the hour of triumph, when, beyond peradventure, she had got for Ian Stafford what would make his career great, what through him gave England security in her hour of truth, there came now to her something of the real significance of it all.

She had got what she wanted.  Her pride had been appeased, her vanity satisfied, her intellect flattered, her skill approved, and Ian was hers.  But the cost?

Words from Swinburne’s threnody on Baudelaire came to her mind.  How often she had quoted them for their sheer pagan beauty!  It was the kind of beauty which most appealed to her, which responded to the element of fatalism in her, the sense of doom always with her since she was a child, in spite of her gaiety, her wit, and her native eloquence.  She had never been happy, she had never had a real illusion, never aught save the passion of living, the desire to conquer unrest: 

“And now, no sacred staff shall break in blossom,
No choral salutation lure to light
The spirit sick with perfume and sweet night,
And Love’s tired eyes and hands and barren bosom. 
There is no help for these things, none to mend and none to mar
Not all our songs, oh, friend, can make Death clear or make Life durable
But still with rose and ivy and wild vine,
And with wild song about this dust of thine,
At least I fill a place where white dreams dwell,
And wreathe an unseen shrine.”

“’And Love’s tired eyes and hands and barren bosom. . . .  There is no help for these things, none to mend and none to mar....’” A sob rose in her throat.  “Oh, the beauty of it, the beauty and the misery and the despair of it!” she murmured.

Slowly she wound and wound the coil of golden hair about her neck, drawing it tighter, fold on fold, tighter and tighter.

“This would be the easiest way—­this,” she whispered.  “By my own hair!  Beauty would have its victim then.  No one would kiss it any more, because it killed a woman. . . .  No one would kiss it any more.”

She felt the touch of Ian Stafford’s lips upon it, she felt his face buried in it.  Her own face suffused, then Adrian Fellowes’ white rose, which Rudyard had laid upon her pillow, caught her eye where it lay on the floor.  With a cry as of a hurt animal she ran to her bed, crawled into it, and huddled down in the darkness, shivering and afraid.