For Stafford the curtain was drawn before the shrine; but love was behind the curtain still.

He would not go to her as Barry had asked.  There in Brinkwort’s house in the covert of peaches and pomegranates was the man and the only man who should, who must, bring new bloom to her cheek.  Her suffering would carry her to Rudyard at the last, unless it might be that one or the other of them had taken Adrian Fellowes’ life.  If either had done that, there could be no reunion.

He did not know what Al’mah had told Jasmine, the thing which had cleared Jasmine’s vision, and made possible a path which should lead from the hospital to the house among the orchard-trees at Brinkwort’s Farm.

No, he would not, could not go to Jasmine—­unless, it might be, she was dying.  A sudden, sharp anxiety possessed him.  If, as Barry Whalen suggested, one of those ugly turns should come, which illnesses take in camp, and she should die without a friend near her, without Rudyard by her side!  He mounted his horse, and rode towards the hospital.

His inquiries at the hospital relieved his mind.  “If there is no turn for the worse, no complications, she will go on all right, and will be convalescent in a few days,” the medicine-man had said.

He gave instructions for a message to be sent to him if there was any change for the worse.  His first impulse, to tell them not to let her know he had inquired, he set aside.  There must not be subterfuge or secrecy any longer.  Let Destiny take her course.

As he left the hospital, he heard a wounded Boer prisoner say to a Tommy who had fought with him on opposite sides in the same engagement, “Alles zal recht kom!” All will come right, was the English of it.

Out of the agony of conflict would all come right—­for Boer, for Briton, for Rudyard, for Jasmine, for himself, for Al’mah?

As he entered his tent again, he was handed his mail, which had just arrived.  The first letter he touched had the postmark of Durban.  The address on the envelope was in the handwriting of Lady Tynemouth.

He almost shrank from opening it, because of the tragedy which had come to the husband of the woman who had been his faithful friend over so many years.  At an engagement a month before, Tynemouth had been blinded by shrapnel, and had been sent to Durban.  To the two letters he had written there had come no answer until now; and he felt that this reply would be a plaint against Fate, a rebellion against the future restraint and trial and responsibility which would be put upon the wife, who was so much of the irresponsible world.

After a moment, however, he muttered a reproach against his own darkness of spirit and his lack of faith in her womanliness, and opened the envelope.

It was not the letter he had imagined and feared.  It began by thanking him for his own letter, and then it plunged into the heart of her trouble: