“Why did he go to South Africa?  Why did he not take me with him?  Why did he leave me here alone?” she had asked herself.  She did not realize that there would have been no fighting at all, that all the forces contending against her purity and devotion would never have gathered at her feet and washed against the shores of her resolution, if she had loved Rudyard Byng when she married him as she might have loved him, ought to have loved him.

The faithful love unconsciously announces its fidelity, and men instinctively are aware of it, and leave it unassailed.  It is the imperfect love which subtly invites the siege, which makes the call upon human interest, selfishness, or sympathy, so often without intended unscrupulousness at first.  She had escaped the suspicion, if not the censure, of the world—­or so she thought; and in the main she was right.  But she was now embarked on an enterprise which never would have been begun, if she had not gambled with her heart and soul three years ago; if she had not dragged away the veil from her inner self, putting her at the mercy of one who could say, “I know you—­what you are.”

Just before they went to the dining-room Byng came in and cheerily greeted Stafford, apologizing for having forgotten his engagement to dine with Wallstein.

“But you and Jasmine will have much to talk about,” he said—­“such old friends as you are; and fond of books and art and music and all that kind of thing....  Glad to see you looking so well, Stafford,” he continued.  “They say you are the coming man.  Well, au revoir.  I hope Jasmine will give you a good dinner.”  Presently he was gone—­in a heavy movement of good-nature and magnanimity.

“Changed—­greatly changed, and not for the better,” said Ian Stafford to himself.”  This life has told on him.  The bronze of the veld has vanished, and other things are disappearing.”

At the table with the lights and the flowers and the exquisite appointments, with appetite flattered and tempted by a dinner of rare simplicity and perfect cooking, Jasmine was radiant, amusing, and stimulating in her old way.  She had never seemed to him so much a mistress of delicate satire and allusiveness.  He rose to the combat with an alacrity made more agile by considerable abstinence, for clever women were few, and real talk was the rarest occurrence in his life, save with men in his own profession chiefly.

But later, in her sitting-room, after the coffee had come, there was a change, and the transition was made with much skill and sensitiveness.  Into Jasmine’s voice there came another and more reflective note, and the drift of the conversation changed.  Books brought the new current; and soon she had him moving almost unconsciously among old scenes, recalling old contests of ideas, and venturing on bold reproductions of past intellectual ideals.  But though they were in this dangerous field of the past, he did not once betray a sign of feeling, not even when, poring over Coventry Patmore’s poems, her hand touched his, and she read the lines which they had read together so long ago, with no thought of any significance to themselves: