She was unconscious of what her friendly Corporal was saying.  She only answered him mechanically now and then; and he, seeing that she was distraught, talked on in a comforting kind of way, telling her anecdotes of Rudyard, as they were told in that part of the army to which he belonged.

What was she going to do when she arrived?  What could she do if Rudyard was dead?  If Rudyard was still alive, she would make him understand that she was not the Jasmine of the days “before the flood”—­before that storm came which uprooted all that ever was in her life except the old, often anguished, longing to be good, and the power which swept her into bye and forbidden paths.  If he was gone, deaf to her voice and to any mortal sound, then—­there rushed into her vision the figure of Ian Stafford, but she put that from her with a trembling determination.  That was done forever.  She was as sure of it as she was sure of anything in the world.  Ian had not forgiven her, would never forgive her.  He despised her, rejected her, abhorred her.  Ian had saved her from the result of Rudyard’s rash retaliation and fury, and had then repulsed her, bidden her stand off from him with a magnanimity and a chivalry which had humiliated her.  He had protected her from the shame of an open tragedy, and then had shut the door in her face.  Rudyard, with the same evidence as Ian held,—­the same letter as proof—­he, whatever he believed or thought, he had forgiven her.  Only a few nights ago, that night before the fight at Hetmeyer’s Kopje, he had opened his arms to her and called her his wife.  In Rudyard was some great good thing, something which could not die, which must live on.  She sat up straight in the seat of the cart, her hands clinched.

No, no, no, Rudyard was not dead, and he should not die.  It mattered not what Al’mah had written, she must have her chance to prove herself; his big soul must have its chance to run a long course, must not be cut off at the moment when so much had been done; when there was so much to do.  Ian should see that she was not “just a little burst of eloquence,” as he had called her, not just a strumpet, as he thought her; but a woman now, beyond eloquence, far distant from the poppy-fields of pleasure.  She was young enough for it to be a virtue in her to avoid the poppy-fields.  She was not twenty-six years of age, and to have learned the truth at twenty-six, and still not to have been wholly destroyed by the lies of life, was something which might be turned to good account.

She was sharply roused, almost shocked out of her distraction.  Bright lights appeared suddenly in front of her, and she heard the voice of her Corporal saying:  “We’re here, ma’am, where old Brinkwort built a hospital for one, and that one’s yours, Mrs. Byng.”

He clucked to his horses and they slackened.  All at once the lights seemed to grow larger, and from the garden of Brinkwort’s house came the sharp voice of a soldier saying: