“Nothing can set things right between you and me, Jasmine,” he had said.  “But there is Rudyard.  You must help him through.  He heard scandal about Mennaval last night at De Lancy Scovel’s.  He didn’t believe it.  It rests with you to give it all the lie.  Good-bye.”

That had been the end—­the black, bitter end.  Since then Ian had never spoken a word to her, nor she to him; but he had stood there in the shadow at the station like a ghost, reproachful, unresponsive, indifferent.  She recalled now the day when, after three years’ parting, she had left him cool, indifferent, and self-contained in the doorway of the sweet-shop in Regent Street; how she had entered her carriage, had clinched her hands, and cried with wilful passion:  “He shall not treat me so.  He shall show some feeling.  He shall!  He shall!”

Here was indifference again, but of another land.  Hers was not a woman’s vanity, in fury at being despised.  Vanity, maybe, was still there, but so slight that it made no contrast to the proud turmoil of a nature which had been humiliated beyond endurance; which, for its mistakes, had received accruing penalties as precise as though they had been catalogued; which had waked to find that a whole lifetime had been an error; and that it had no anchor in any set of principles or impelling habits.

And over all there hung the shadow of a man’s death, with its black suspicion.  When Ian Stafford looked at her from the shadow of the railway-station, the question had flashed into his mind, Did she kill him?  Around Adrian Fellowes’ death there hung a cloud of mystery which threw a sinister shadow on the path of three people.  In the middle of the night, Jasmine started from her sleep with the mystery of the man’s death torturing her, and with the shuddering question, Which? on her fevered lips.  Was it her husband—­was it Ian Stafford?  As he galloped over the veld, or sat with his pipe beside the camp-fire, Rudyard Byng was also drawn into the frigid gloom of the ugly thought, and his mind asked the question, Did she kill him?  It was as though each who had suffered from the man in life was destined to be menaced by his shade, till it should be exorcised by that person who had taken the useless life, saying, “It was I; I did it!”

As Jasmine entered the hospital, it seemed to her excited imagination as though she was entering a House of Judgment:  as though here in a court of everlasting equity she would meet those who had played their vital parts in her life.

What if Rudyard was here!  What if in these few days while she was to be here he was to cross her path!  What would she say?  What would she do?  What could be said or done?  Bitterness and resentment and dark suspicion were in her mind—­and in his.  Her pride was less wilful and tempestuous than on the day when she drove him from her; when he said things which flayed her soul, and left her body as though it had been beaten with rods.  Her bitterness,