“Halt!  Who goes there?”

“A friend,” was the Corporal’s reply.

“Advance, friend, and give the countersign,” was brusquely returned.

A moment afterwards Jasmine was in the sweet-smelling garden, and the lights of the house were flaring out upon her.

She heard at the same time the voices of the sentry and of Corporal Shorter in low tones of badinage, and she frowned.  It was cruel that at the door of the dead or the dying there should be such levity.

All at once a figure came between her and the light.  Instinctively she knew it was Al’mah.

“Al’mah!  Al’mah!” she said painfully, and in a voice scarce above a whisper.

The figure of the singing-woman bent over her protectingly, as it might almost seem, and her hands were caught in a warm clasp.

“Am I in time?” Jasmine asked, and the words came from her in gasps.

Al’mah had no repentance for her deception.  She saw an agitation which seemed to her deeper and more real than any emotion ever shown by Jasmine, not excepting the tragical night at the Glencader Mine and the morning of the first meeting at the Stay Awhile Hospital.  The butterfly had become a thrush that sang with a heart in its throat.

She gathered Jasmine’s eyes to her own.  It seemed as though she never would answer.  To herself she even said, why should she hurry, since all was well, since she had brought the two together living, who had been dead to each other these months past, and, more than all, had been of the angry dead?  A little more pain and regret could do no harm, but only good.  Besides, now that she was face to face with the result of her own deception, she had a sudden fear that it might go wrong.  She had no remorse for the act, but only a faint apprehension of the possible consequences.  Suppose that in the shock of discovery Jasmine should throw everything to the winds, and lose herself in arrant egotism once more!  Suppose—­no, she would suppose nothing.  She must believe that all she had done was for the best.

She felt how cold were the small delicate hands in her own strong warm fingers, she saw the frightened appeal of the exquisite haunting eyes, and all at once realized the cause of that agitation—­the fear that death had come without understanding, that the door had been forever shut against the answering voices.

“You are in time,” she said gently, encouragingly, and she tightened the grasp of her hands.

As the volts of an electric shock quivering through a body are suddenly withdrawn, and the rigidity becomes a ghastly inertness, so Jasmine’s hands, and all her body, seemed released.  She felt as though she must fall, but she reasserted her strength, and slowly regained her balance, withdrawing her hands from those of Al’mah.

“He is alive—­he is alive—­he is alive,” she kept repeating to herself like one in a dream.  Then she added hastily, with an effort to bear herself with courage:  “Where is he?  Take me.”