He did not understand quite, yet he saw that she misunderstood, and he handled the situation with a tact which seemed hardly to belong to a man of his training and calibre.

“She thought no more of kissing me,” he continued, presently, in a calm voice—­“a man she had seen only once before, and was not likely to see again, than would a child of five.  It meant nothing more to her than kissing Fanato on the stage.  It was pure impulse.  She forgot it as soon as it was done.  It was her way of showing gratitude.  Somewhat unconventional, wasn’t it?  But then, she is a little Irish, a little Spanish, and the rest Saxon; and she is all artist and bohemian.”

Jasmine’s face cleared, and her equilibrium was instantly restored.  She was glad she had misunderstood.  Yet Al’mah had not kissed her when she left, while expressing gratitude, too.  There was a difference.  She turned the subject, saying:  “Of course, she insists on sending me a new cloak, and keeping the other as a memento.  It was rather badly singed, wasn’t it?”

“It did its work well, and it deserves an honoured home.  Do you know that even as I flung the cloak round her, in the excitement of the moment I ‘sensed,’ as my young nephew says, the perfume you use.”

He lifted his hand, conscious that his fingers still carried some of that delicate perfume which her fingers left there as they lay in his palm when she greeted him on his entrance.  “It was like an incense from the cloak, as it blanketed the flames.  Strange, wasn’t it, that the undersense should be conscious of that little thing, while the over-sense was adding a sensational postscript to the opera?”

She smiled in a pleased way.  “Do you like the perfume?  I really use very little of it.”

“It’s like no other.  It starts a kind of cloud of ideas floating.  I don’t know how to describe it.  I imagine myself—­”

She interrupted, laughing merrily.  “My brother says it always makes him angry, and Ian Stafford calls it ’The Wild Tincture of Time’—­frivolously and sillily says that it comes from a bank whereon the ‘wild thyme’ grows!  But now, I want to ask you many questions.  We have been mentally dancing, while down beyond the Limpopo—­”

His demeanour instantly changed, and she noted the look cf power and purpose coming into the rather boyish and good-natured, the rash and yet determined, face.  It was not quite handsome.  The features were not regular, the forehead was perhaps a little too low, and the hair grew very thick, and would have been a vast mane if it had not been kept fairly close by his valet.  This valet was Krool, a half-caste—­ Hottentot and Boer—­whom he had rescued from Lobengula in the Matabele war, and who had in his day been ship-steward, barber, cook, guide, and native recruiter.  Krool had attached himself to Byng, and he would not be shaken off even when his master came home to England.