The silence was horrible to her.  Her agitation culminated.  She could bear it no longer.  Blindly she ran to another door which led into the sitting-room of the matron, used for many purposes—­the hold-all of the odds and ends of the hospital life; where surgeons consulted, officers waited, and army authorities congregated for the business of the hospital.  She found the door, opened it and entered hastily.  One light was burning—­a lamp with a green shade.  She shut the door behind her quickly and leaned against it, closing her eyes with a sense of relief.  Presently some movement in the room startled her.  She opened her eyes.  A figure stood between the green lamp and the farther door.

It was her husband.

Her senses had deceived her.  His footsteps had not stopped before her bedroom-door.  She had not heard the handle of the door of her bedroom turn, but the handle of the door of this room.  The silence which had frightened her had followed his entrance here.

She hastily drew the coat about her.  The white linen of her night-dress showed.  She thrust it back, and instinctively drew behind the table, as though to hide her bare ankles.

He had started back at seeing her, but had instantly recovered himself.  “Well, Jasmine,” he said quietly, “we’ve met in a queer place.”

All at once her hot agitation left her, and she became cold and still.  She was in a maelstrom of feeling a minute before, though she could not have said what the feeling meant; now she was dominated by a haunting sense of injury, roused by resentment, not against him, but against everything and everybody, himself included.  All the work of the last few months seemed suddenly undone—­to go for nothing.  Just as a drunkard in his pledge made reformation, which has done its work for a period, feels a sudden maddening desire to indulge his passion for drink, and plunges into a debauch,—­the last maddening degradation before his final triumph,—­so Jasmine felt now the restrictions and self-control of the past few months fall away from her.  She emerged from it all the same woman who had flung her married life, her man, and her old world to the winds on the day that Krool had been driven into the street.  Like Krool, she too had gone out into the unknown—­into a strange land where “the Baas” had no habitation.

Rudyard’s words seemed to madden her, and there was a look of scrutiny and inquiry in his eyes which she saw—­and saw nothing else there.  There was the inquisition in his look which had been there in their last interview when he had said as plainly as man could say, “What did it mean—­that letter from Adrian Fellowes?”

It was all there in his eyes now—­that hateful inquiry, the piercing scrutiny of a judge in the Judgment House, and there came also into her eyes, as though in consequence, a look of scrutiny too.

“Did you kill Adrian Fellowes?  Was it you?” her disordered mind asked.