In her agitation the coat had fallen away from her white night-dress, and her breast showed behind the parted folds of the linen.  Involuntarily his eyes saw.  What memories passed through him were too vague to record; but a heavy sigh escaped him, followed, however, by a cloud which gathered on his brow.  The shadow of a man’s death thrust itself between them.  This war might have never been, had it not been for the treachery of the man who had been false to everything and every being that had come his way.  Indirectly this vast struggle in which thousands of lives were being lost had come through his wife’s disloyalty, however unintentional, or in whatever degree.  Whenever he thought of it, his pulses beat faster with indignation, and a deep resentment possessed him.

It was a resentment whose origin was not a mere personal wrong to him, but the betrayal of all that invaded his honour and the honour of his country.  The map was dead—­so much.  He had paid a price—­too small.

And Jasmine, as she looked at her husband now, was, oppressed by the same shadow—­the inescapable thing.  That was what she meant when she said, “There is a black sea between us.”

What came to her mind when she saw his glance fall on her breast, she could not have told.  But a sudden flame of anger consumed her.  The passion of the body was dead in her—­atrophied.  She was as one through whose veins had passed an icy fluid which stilled all the senses of desire, but never had her mind been so passionate, so alive.  In the months lately gone, there had been times when her mind was in a paroxysm of rebellion and resentment and remorse; but in this red corner of the universe, from which the usual world was shut out, from which all domestic existence, all social organization, habit or the amenities of social intercourse were excluded, she had been able to restore her equilibrium.  Yet now here, all at once, there was an invasion of this world of rigid, narrow organization, where there was no play; where all men’s acts were part of a deadly mortal issue; where the human being was only part of a scheme which allowed nothing of the flexible adaptations of the life of peace, the life of cities, of houses:  here was the sudden interposition of a purely personal life, of domestic being—­of sex.  She was conscious of no reasoning, of no mental protest which could be put into words:  she was only conscious of emotions which now shook her with their power, now left her starkly cold, her brain muffled, or again aflame with a suffering as intense as that of Procrustes on his bed of iron.

This it was that seized her now.  The glance of his eyes at her bared breast roused her.  She knew not why, except that there was an indefinable craving for a self respect which had been violated by herself and others; except that she longed for the thing which she felt he would not give her.  The look in his eye offered her nothing of that.