On Rudyard’s lips was a faint smile, but it lacked the old bonhomie which was part of his natural equipment; and there were still sharp, haggard traces of the agitation which had accompanied the expulsion of Krool.

For an instant the idea possessed her that she would tell him everything there was to tell, and face the consequences, no matter what they might be.  It was not in her nature to do things by halves, and since catastrophe was come, her will was to drink the whole cup to the dregs.  She did not want to spare herself.  Behind it all lay something of that terrible wilfulness which had controlled her life so far.  It was the unlovely soul of a great pride.  She did not want to be forgiven for anything.  She did not want to be condoned.  There was a spirit of defiance which refused to accept favours, preferring punishment to the pity or the pardon which stooped to make it easier for her.  It was a dangerous pride, and in the mood of it she might throw away everything, with an abandonment and recklessness only known to such passionate natures.

The mood came on her all at once as she stood and looked at Rudyard.  She read, or she thought she read in his eyes, in his smile, the superior spirit condescending to magnanimity, to compassion; and her whole nature was instantly up in arms.  She almost longed on the instant to strip herself bare, as it were, and let him see her as she really was, or as, in her despair, she thought she really was.  The mood in which she had talked to Lady Tynemouth was gone, and in its place a spirit of revolt was at work.  A certain sullenness which Rudyard and no one else had ever seen came into her eyes, and her lips became white with an ominous determination.  She forgot him and all that he would suffer if she told him the whole truth; and the whole truth would, in her passion, become far more than the truth:  she was again the egoist, the centre of the universe.  What happened to her was the only thing which mattered in all the world.  So it had ever been; and her beauty and her wit and her youth and the habit of being spoiled had made it all possible, without those rebuffs and that confusion which fate provides sooner or later for the egoist.

“Well,” she said, sharply, “say what you wish to say.  You have wanted to say it badly.  I am ready.”

He was stunned by what seemed to him the anger and the repugnance in her tone.

“You remember you asked me to come, Jasmine, when you took the sjambok from me.”

He nodded towards the table where it lay, then went forward and picked it up, his face hardening as he did so.