my gun within reach, but I’d been playing the cornet, and just as he was crouching I blew a blast from it—­one of those jarring discords of Wagner in the “Gotterdammerung”—­and he turned tail and got away into the bush with a howl.  Hearing gets to be the most acute of all the senses with the pioneer.  If you’ve ever been really dying of thirst, and have reached water again, its sounds become wonderful to you ever after that—­the trickle of a creek, the wash of a wave on the shore, the drip on a tin roof, the drop over a fall, the swish of a rainstorm.  It’s the same with birds and trees.  And trees all make different sounds—­that’s the shape of the leaves.  It’s all music, too.”

Her breath came quickly with pleasure at the imagination and observation of his words.  “So it wasn’t strange that you should be ravished by Al’mah’s singing last night was it?” She looked at him keenly.  “Isn’t it curious that such a marvellous gift should be given to a woman who in other respects—­” she paused.

“Yes, I know what you mean.  She’s so untrained in lots of ways.  That’s what I was saying to Stafford a little while ago.  They live in a world of their own, the stage people.  There’s always a kind of irresponsibility.  The habit of letting themselves go in their art, I suppose, makes them, in real life, throw things down so hard when they don’t like them.  Living at high pressure is an art like music.  It alters the whole equilibrium, I suppose.  A woman like Al’mah would commit suicide, or kill a man, without realizing the true significance of it all.”

“Were you thinking that when you breakfasted with her?”

“Yes, when she was laughing and jesting—­and when she kissed me good-bye.”

“When—­she—­kissed you—­good-bye?”

Jasmine drew back, then half-glanced towards her stepmother in the other room.  She was only twenty-two, and though her emancipation had been accomplished in its way somewhat in advance of her generation, it had its origin in a very early period of her life, when she had been allowed to read books of verse—­Shelley, Byron, Shakespeare, Verlaine, Rossetti, Swinburne, and many others—­unchallenged and unguided.  The understanding of things, reserved for “the wise and prudent,” had been at first vaguely and then definitely conveyed to her by slow but subtle means—­an apprehension from instinct, not from knowledge.  There had never been a shock to her mind.

The knowledge of things had grown imperceptibly, and most of life’s ugly meanings were known—­at a great distance, to be sure, but still known.  Yet there came a sudden half-angry feeling when she heard Rudyard Byng say, so loosely, that Al’Mah had kissed him.  Was it possible, then, that a man, that any man, thought she might hear such things without resentment; that any man thought her to know so much of life that it did not matter what was said?  Did her outward appearance, then, bear such false evidence?