“I don’t think quite that.  But there is trouble in that palace.  Rudyard is going to South Africa.”

“Well, that is not unnatural.  I should expect him to do so.  I am going to South Africa also.”

For a moment she looked at him without speaking, and her face slowly paled.  “You are going to the Front—­you?”

“Yes—­’Back to the army again, sergeant, back to the army again.’  I was a gunner, you know, and not a bad one, either, if I do say it.”

“You are going to throw up a great career to go to the Front?  When you have got your foot at the top of the ladder, you climb down?” Her voice was choking a little.

He made a little whimsical gesture.  “There’s another ladder to climb.  I’ll have a try at it, and do my duty to my country, too.  I’ll have a double-barrelled claim on her, if possible.”

“I know that you are going because you will not stay when Rudyard goes,” she rejoined, almost irritably.

“What a quixotic idea!  Really you are too impossible and wrong-headed.”

He turned an earnest look upon her.  “No, I give you my word, I am not going because Rudyard is going.  I didn’t know he was going till you told me.  I got permission to go three hours after Kruger’s message came.”

“You are only feckless—­only feckless, as the Scotch say,” she rejoined with testy sadness.  “Well, since everybody is going, I am going too.  I am going with a hospital-ship.”

“Well, that would pay off a lot of old debts to the Almighty,” he replied, in kindly taunt.

“I haven’t been worse than most women, Ian,” she replied.  “Women haven’t been taught to do things, to pay off their debts.  Men run up bills and pay them off, and run them up again and again and pay them off; but we, while we run up bills, our ways of paying them off are so few, and so uninteresting.”

Suddenly she took from her pocket a letter.  “Here is a letter for you,” she said.  “It was lying on Jasmine’s table the night she was taken ill.  I don’t know why I did it, but I suppose I took it up so that Rudyard should not see it; and then I didn’t say anything to Jasmine about it at once.  She said nothing, either; but to-day I told her I’d seen the letter addressed to you, and had posted it.  I said it to see how she would take it.  She only nodded, and said nothing at first.  Then after a while she whispered, ‘Thank you, my dear,’ but in such a queer tone.  Ian, she meant you to have the letter, and here it is.”

She put it into his hands.  He remembered it.  It was the letter which Jasmine had laid on the table before him at that last interview when the world stood still.  After a moment’s hesitation he put it in his pocket.

“If she wished me to have it—­” he said in a low voice.

“If not, why, then, did she write it?  Didn’t she say she was glad I posted it?”

A moment followed, in which neither spoke.  Lady Tynemouth’s eyes were turned to the window; Stafford stood looking into the fire.