“Pretty fairly self-possessed, I should say,” said Rigby, the youngest officer present at mess.  “Her husband under repair at Brinkwort’s Farm, in the care of the blue-ribbon nurse of the army, who makes a fellow well if he looks at her, and she studying organization at the Stay Awhile with a staff-officer.”

The reply of the Staff Officer was quick and cutting enough for any officers’ mess.

“I see by the latest papers from England, that Balfour says we’ll muddle through this war somehow,” he said.  “He must have known you, Rigby.  With the courage of the damned you carry a fearsome lot of impedimenta, and you muddle quite adequately.  The lady you have traduced has herself been seriously ill, and that is why she is not at Brinkwort’s Farm.  What a malicious mind you’ve got!  Byng would think so.”

“If Rigby had been in your place to-day,” interposed a gruff major, “the lady would surely have had a relapse.  Convalescence is no time for teaching the rudiments of human intercourse.”

Pale and angry, Rigby, who was half Scotch and correspondingly self-satisfied, rejoined stubbornly:  “I know what I know.  They haven’t met since she came up from Durban.  Sandlip told me that—­”

The Staff Officer broke the sentence.  “What Sandlip told you is what Nancy woutd tell Polly and Polly would tell the cook—­and then Rigby would know.  But statement number one is an Ananiasism, for Byng saw his wife at the hospital the night before Hetmeyer’s Kopje.  I can’t tell what they said, though, nor what was the colour of the lady’s pegnoir, for I am neither Nancy nor Polly nor the cook—­nor Rigby.”

With a maddened gesture Rigby got to his feet, but a man at his side pulled him down.  “Sit still, Baby Bunting, or you’ll not get over the hills to-morrow,” he said, and he offered Rigby a cigar from Rigby’s own cigar-case, cutting off the end, handing it to him and lighting a match.

“Gun out of action:  record the error of the day,” piped the thin precise voice of the Colonel from the head of the table.

A chorus of quiet laughter met the Colonel’s joke, founded on the technical fact that the variation in the firing of a gun, due to any number of causes, though apparently firing under the same conditions, is carted officially “the error of the day” in Admiralty reports.

“Here the incident closed,” as the newspapers say, but Rigby the tactless and the petty had shown that there was rumour concerning the relations of Byng and his wife, which Jasmine, at least, imagined did not exist.

When Jasmine read the note Al’mah had sent her, a flush stole slowly over her face, and then faded, leaving a whiteness, behind which was the emanation, not of fear, but of agitation and of shock.

It meant that Rudyard was dying, and that she must go to him.  That she must go to him?  Was that the thought in her mind—­that she must go to him?

If she wished to see him again before he went!  That midnight, when he was on his way to Hetmeyer’s Kopje, he had flung from her room into the night, and ridden away angrily on his grey horse, not hearing her voice faintly calling after him.  Now, did she want to see him—­the last time before he rode away again forever, on that white horse called Death?  A shudder passed through her.