“But now....  Two ways spread out, and only two, and one of these two I must take—­for your sake.  There is the third way, but I will not take it—­for your sake and for my own.  I will not walk in it ever.  Already my feet are burned by the fiery path, already I am choked by the smoke and the ashes.  No.  I cannot atone for what has been, but I can try and gather up the chances that are left.

“You must come with me away—­away, to start life afresh, somewhere, somehow; or I must go alone on some enterprise from which I shall not return.  You cannot bear what is, but, together, having braved the world, we could look into each other’s eyes without shrinking, knowing that we had been at least true to each other, true at the last to the thing that binds us, taking what Fate gave without repining, because we had faced all that the world could do against us.  It would mean that I should leave diplomacy forever, give up all that so far has possessed me in the business of life; but I should not lament.  I have done the one big thing I wanted to do, I have cut a swath in the field.  I have made some principalities and powers reckon with me.  It may be I have done all I was meant to do in doing that—­it may be.  In any case, the thing I did would stand as an accomplished work—­it would represent one definite and original thing; one piece of work in design all my own, in accomplishment as much yours as mine....  To go then—­together—­with only the one big violence to the conventions of the world, and take the law into our own hands?  Rudyard, who understands Life’s violence, would understand that; what he could never understand would be perpetual artifice, unseemly secretiveness.  He himself would have been a great filibuster in the olden days; he would have carried off the wives and daughters of the chiefs and kings he conquered; but he would never have stolen into the secret garden at night and filched with the hand of the sneak-thief—­never.

“To go with me—­away, and start afresh.  There will be always work to do, always suffering humanity to be helped.  We should help because we would have suffered, we should try to set right the one great mistake you made in not coming to me and so furfilling the old promise.  To set that error right, even though it be by wronging Rudyard by one great stroke—­that is better than hourly wronging him now with no surcease of that wrong.  No, no, this cannot go on.  You could not have it so.  I seem to feel that you are writing to me now, telling me to begone forever, saying that you had given me gifts—­success and love; and now to go and leave you in peace.

“Peace, Jasmine, it is that we cry for, pray for, adjure the heavens for in the end.  And all this vast, passionate love of mine is the strife of the soul for peace, for fruition.