Al’mah motioned, and in a moment they were inside the house.  A sense of something good and comforting came over Jasmine.  Here was an old, old room furnished in heavy and simple Dutch style, just as old Elias Brinkwort had left it.  It had the grave and heavy hospitableness of a picture of Teniers or Jan Steen.  It had the sense of home, the welcome of the cradle and the patriarch’s chair.  These were both here as they were when Elias Brinkwort and his people went out to join the Boer army in the hills, knowing that the verdomde Rooinek would not loot his house or ravage his belongings.

To Jasmine’s eyes, it brought a new strange sense, as though all at once doors had been opened up to new sensations of life.  Almost mechanically, yet with a curious vividness and permanency of vision, her eyes drifted from the patriarch’s chair to the cradle in the corner; and that picture would remain with her till she could see no more at all.  Unbidden and unconscious there came upon her lips a faint smile, and then a door in front of her was opened, and she was inside another room—­not a bedroom as she had expected, but a room where the Dutch simplicity and homely sincerity had been invaded by something English and military.  This she felt before her eyes fell on a man standing beside a table, fully dressed.  Though shaken and worn, it was a figure which had no affinity with death.

As she started back Al’mah closed the door behind her, and she found herself facing Rudyard, looking into his eyes.

Al’mah had miscalculated.  She did not realize Jasmine as she really was—­like one in a darkened room who leans out to the light and sun.  The old life, the old impetuous egoism, the long years of self were not yet gone from a character composite of impulse, vanity and intensity.  This had been too daring an experiment with one of her nature, which had within the last few months become as strangely, insistently, even fanatically honest, as it had been elusive in the past.  In spite of a tremulous effort to govern herself and see the situation as it really was—­an effort of one who desired her good to bring her and Rudyard together, the ruse itself became magnified to monstrous proportions, and her spirit suddenly revolted.  She felt that she had been inveigled; that what should have been her own voluntary act of expiation and submission, had been forced upon her, and pride, ever her most secret enemy, took possession of her.

“I have been tricked,” she said, with eyes aflame and her body trembling.  “You have trapped me here!” There was scorn and indignation in her voice.

He did not move, but his eyes were intent upon hers and persistently held them.  He had been near to death, and his vision had been more fully cleared than hers.  He knew that this was the end of all or the beginning of all things for them both; and though anger suddenly leaped at the bottom of his heart, he kept it in restraint, the primitive thing of which he had had enough.