Looking at her visitor with a new sense of observation alive in her, Jasmine saw the inherent native drowsiness of the nature, the love of sleep and good living, the healthy primary desires, the striving, adventurous, yet, in one sense, unambitious soul.  The very cleft in the chin, like the alluring dimple of a child’s cheek, enlarged and hardened, was suggestive of animal beauty, with its parallel suggestion of indolence.  Yet, somehow, too ample as he was both in fact and by suggestion to the imagination there was an apparent underlying force, a capacity to do huge things when once roused.  He had been roused in his short day.  The life into which he had been thrown with men of vaster ambition and much more selfish ends than his own, had stirred him to prodigies of activity in those strenuous, wonderful, electric days when gold and diamonds changed the hard-bitten, wearied prospector, who had doggedly delved till he had forced open the hand of the Spirit of the Earth and caught the treasure that flowed forth, into a millionaire, into a conqueror, with the world at his feet.  He had been of those who, for many a night and many a year, eating food scarce fit for Kaffirs, had, in poverty and grim endeavour, seen the sun rise and fall over the Magaliesberg range, hope alive in the morning and dead at night.  He had faced the devilish storms which swept the high veld with lightning and the thunderstone, striking men dead as they fled for shelter to the boulders of some barren, mocking kopje; and he had had the occasional wild nights of carousal, when the miseries and robberies of life and time and the ceaseless weariness and hope deferred, were forgotten.

It was all there in his face—­the pioneer endeavour, the reckless effort, the gambler’s anxiety, the self-indulgence, the crude passions, with a far-off, vague idealism, the selfish outlook, and yet great breadth of feeling, with narrowness of individual purpose.  The rough life, the sordid struggle, had left their mark, and this easy, coaxing, comfortable life of London had not covered it up—­not yet.  He still belonged to other—­and higher—­spheres.

There was a great contrast between him and Ian Stafford.  Ian was handsome, exquisitely refined, lean and graceful of figure, with a mind which saw the end of your sentences from the first word, with a skill of speech like a Damascus blade, with knowledge of a half-dozen languages.  Ian had an allusiveness of conversation which made human intercourse a perpetual entertainment, and Jasmine’s intercourse with him a delight which lingered after his going until his coming again.  The contrast was prodigious—­and perplexing, for Rudyard Byng had qualities which compelled her interest.  She sighed as she reflected.

“I suppose you can’t get three millions all to yourself with your own hands without missing a good deal and getting a good deal you could do without,” she said to herself, as he wonderingly interjected the exclamation: