He was bewildered.  “What does this mean?” he asked.

“It is for a hospital-ship.”

“Sixty thousand pounds!  Why, it is nearly all you have.”

“It is two-thirds of what I have.”

“Why—­in God’s name, why?”

“To buy my freedom,” she answered, bitterly.

“From what?”

“From you.”

He staggered back and leaned heavily against a bookcase.

“Freedom from me!” he exclaimed, hoarsely.

He had had terribly bitter and revengeful feelings during the last hour, but all at once his real self emerged, the thing that was deepest in him.  “Freedom from me?  Has it come to that?”

“Yes, absolutely.  Do you remember the day you first said to me that something was wrong with it all,—­the day that Ian Stafford dined after his return from abroad?  Well, it has been all wrong—­cruelly wrong.  We haven’t made the best of things together, when everything was with us to do so.  I have spoiled it all.  It hasn’t been what you expected.”

“Nor what you expected?” he asked, sharply.

“Nor what I expected; but you are not to blame for that.”

Suddenly all he had ever felt for her swept through his being, and sullenness fled away.  “You have ceased to love me, then....  See, that is the one thing that matters, Jasmine.  All else disappears beside that.  Do you love me?  Do you love me still?  Do you love me, Jasmine?  Answer that.”

He looked like the ghost of his old dead self, pleading to be recognized.

His misery oppressed her.  “What does one know of one’s self in the midst of all this—­of everything that has nothing to do with love?” she asked.

What she might have said in the dark mood which was coming on her again it is hard to say, but from beneath the window of the room which looked on Park Lane, there came the voice of a street-minstrel, singing to a travelling piano, played by sympathetic fingers, the song: 

“She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps, And lovers around her are sighing—­”

The simple pathos of the song had nothing to do with her own experience or her own case, but the flood of it swept through her veins like tears.  She sank into a chair and listened for a moment with eyes shining, then she sprang up in an agitation which made her tremble and her face go white.

“No, no, no, Rudyard, I do not love you,” she said, swiftly.  “And because I do not love you, I will not stay.  I never loved you, never truly loved you at any time.  I never knew myself—­that is all that I can say.  I never was awake till now.  I never was wholly awake till I saw you driving Krool into the street with the sjambok.”

She flung up her hands.  “For God’s sake, let me be truthful at last.  I don’t want to hurt you—­I have hurt you enough, but I do not love you; and I must go.  I am going with Alice Tynemouth.  We are going together to do something.  Maybe I shall learn what will make life possible.”