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:

"With all my will, but much against my heart,
We two now part.
My very Dear,
Our solace is the sad road lies so clear...
Go thou to East, I West.
We will not say
There's any hope, it is so far away..."

He read the verses with a smile of quiet enjoyment, saying, when he had
finished:

"A really moving and intimate piece of work. I wonder what their story
was--a hopeless love, of course. An affaire--an 'episode'--London
ladies now call such things."

"You find London has changed much since you went away--in three years
only?" she asked.

"Three years--why, it's an eternity, or a minute, as you are obliged to
live it. In penal servitude it is centu