, a stark cry of the soul. He held her face
back from him.... "If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have
had a thousand lovers, Jasmine. Perhaps you did--who knows! And now you
come down through the centuries purified by Time, to be my
jasmine-flower."

His lip trembled a little. There was a strange melancholy in his eyes,
belying the passion and rapture of his words.

In all their days together she had never seen him in this mood. She had
heard him storm about things at times, had watched his big impulses
working; had drawn the thunder from his clouds; but there was something
moving in him now which she had never seen before. Perhaps it was only
a passing phase, even a moment's mood, but it made a strange impression
on her. It was remembered by them both long after, when life had
scattered its vicissitudes before their stumbling feet and they had
passed through flood and fire.

She drew back and looked at him steadily, reflectively, and with an
element of surprise in her searching look. She had never thought him
gifted with perception or insight, though he had eloquence and an eye
for broad effects. She had thought him curiously ignorant of human
nature, born to be deceived, full of child-like illusions, never
understanding the real facts of life, save in the way of business--and
politics. Women he never seemed by a single phrase or word to
understand, and yet now he startled her with a sudden revelation and
insight of which she had not thought him capable.

"If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have had a thousand
lovers. Perhaps you did--who knows! ... And now you come down through
the centuries purified by Time--"

The words slowly repeated themselves in her brain. Many and many a time
she had imagined herself as having lived centuries ago, and again and
again in her sleep these imaginings had reflected themselves in wild
dreams of her far past--once as a priestess of Isis, once as a
Slavonian queen, once as a peasant in Syria, and many times as a
courtezan of Alexandria or Athens--many times as that: one of the
gifted, beautiful, wonderful women whose houses were the centres of
culture, influence, and power. She had imagined herself, against her
will, as one of these women, such as Cleopatra, for whom the world were
well lost; and who, at last, having squeezed the orange dry, but while
yet the sun was coming towards noon, in scorn of Life and Time had left
the precincts of the cheerful d