“You treat me like a child, you condescend—­”

“Oh, for God’s sake—­for God’s sake!” he interrupted, with a sudden storm in his face; but suddenly, as though by a great mastery of the will, he conquered himself, and his face cleared.

“You must sit down, Jasmine,” he said, hurriedly.  “You look tired.  You haven’t got over your illness yet.”

He hastily stepped aside to get her a chair, but, as he took hold of it, he stumbled and swayed in weakness, born of an excitement far greater than her own; for he was thinking of the happiness of two people, not of the happiness of one; and he realized how critical was this hour.  He had a grasp of the bigger things, and his talk with Stafford of a few hours ago was in his mind—­a talk which, in its brevity, still had had the limitlessness of revelation.  He had made a promise to one of the best friends that man—­or woman—­ever had, as he thought; and he would keep it.  So he said to himself.  Stafford understood Jasmine, and Stafford had insisted that he be not deceived by some revolt on the part of Jasmine, which would be the outcome of her own humiliation, of her own anger with herself for all the trouble she had caused.  So he said to himself.

As he staggered with the chair she impulsively ran to aid him.

“Rudyard,” she exclaimed, with concern, “you must not do that.  You have not the strength.  It is silly of you to be up at all.  I wonder at Al’mah and the doctor!”

She pushed him to a big arm-chair beside the table and gently pressed him down into the seat.  He was very weak, and his hand trembled on the chair-arm.  She reached out, as if to take it; but, as though the act was too forward, her fingers slipped to his wrist instead, and she felt his pulse with the gravity of a doctor.

Despite his weakness a look of laughter crept into his eyes and stayed there.  He had read the little incident truly.  Presently, seeing the whiteness of his face but not the look in his eyes, she turned to the table, and pouring out a glass of water from a pitcher there, held it to his lips.

“Here, Rudyard,” she said, soothingly, “drink this.  You are faint.  You shouldn’t have got up simply because I was coming.”

As he leaned back to drink from the glass she caught the gentle humour of his look, begotten of the incident of a moment before.

There was no reproach in the strong, clear eyes of blue which even wounds and illness had not faced—­only humour, only a hovering joy, only a good-fellowship, and the look of home.  She suddenly thought of the room from which she had just come, and it seemed, not fantastically to her, that the look in his eyes belonged to the other room where were the patriarch’s chair and the baby’s cradle.  There was no offending magnanimity, no lofty compassion in his blameless eyes, but a human something which took no account of the years that the locust had eaten, the old mad, bad years, the wrong and the shame of them.