“I did not trick you, Jasmine,” he answered, in a low voice.  “The letter was sent without my knowledge or permission.  Al’mah thought she was doing us both a good turn.  I never deceived you—­never.  I should not have sent for you in any case.  I heard you were ill and I tried to get up and go to you; but it was not possible.  Besides, they would not let me.  I wanted to go to you again, because, somehow, I felt that midnight meeting in the hospital was a mistake; that it ended as you would not really wish it to end.”

Again, with wonderful intuition for a man who knew so little of women, as he thought, he had said the one thing which could have cooled the anger that drowned the overwhelming gratitude she felt at his being alive—­overwhelming, in spite of the fact that her old mad temperament had flooded it for the moment.

He would have gone to her—­that was what he had said.  In spite of her conduct that midnight, when he was on his way to Hetmeyer’s Kopje, he would have come again to her!  How, indeed, he must have loved her; or how magnanimous, how impossibly magnanimous, he was!

How thin and worn he was, and how large the eyes were in the face grown hollow with suffering!  There were liberal streaks of grey also at his temples, and she noted there was one strand all white just in the centre of his thick hair.  A swift revulsion of feeling in her making for peace was, however, sharply arrested by the look in his eyes.  It had all the sombreness of reproach—­of immitigable reproach.  Could she face that look now and through the years to come?  It were easier to live alone to the end with her own remorse, drinking the cup that would not empty, on and on, than to live with that look in his eyes.

She turned her head away from him.  Her glance suddenly caught a sjambok lying along two nails on the wall.  His eyes followed hers, and in the minds of both was the scene when Rudyard drove Krool into the street under just such a whip of rhinoceros-hide.

Something of the old spirit worked in her in spite of all.  Idiosyncrasy may not be cauterized, temperament must assert itself, or the personality dies.  Was he to be her master—­was that the end of it all?  She had placed herself so completely in his power by her wilful waywardness and errors.  Free from blame, she would have been ruler over him; now she must be his slave!

“Why did you not use it on me?” she asked, in a voice almost like a cry, though it had a ring of bitter irony.  “Why don’t you use it now?  Don’t you want to?”

“You were always so small and beautiful,” he answered, slowly.  “A twenty-stamp mill to crush a bee!”

Again resentment rose in her, despite the far-off sense of joy she had in hearing him play with words.  She could forgive almost anything for that—­and yet she was real and had not merely the dilettante soul.  But why should he talk as though she was a fly and he an eagle?  Yet there was admiration in his eyes and in his words.  She was angry with herself—­and with him.  She was in chaos again.