d she was engaged in a
game of dissimulation, made the more dangerous by the thread of
sincerity and desire running through it all. Sometimes she started
aghast at the deepening intrigue gathering in her path; at the
deterioration in her husband; and at the hollow nature of her home
life; but the excitement of the game she was playing, the ardour of the
chase, was in her veins, and her inherited spirit of great daring kept
her gay with vitality and intellectual adventure.

Day after day she had strengthened the cords by which she was drawing
Ian to her; and in the confidence begotten of her services to him, of
her influence upon M. Mennaval and the progress of her efforts, a new
intimacy, different from any they had ever known, grew and thrived. Ian
scarcely knew how powerful had become the feeling between them. He only
realized that delight which comes from working with another for a
cherished cause, the goal of one's life, which has such deeper
significance when the partner in the struggle is a woman. They both
experienced that most seductive of all influences, a secret knowledge
and a pact of mutual silence and purpose.

"You trust me now?" Jasmine asked at last one day, when she had been
able to assure Ian that the end was very near, that M. Mennaval had
turned his face from Slavonia, and had carried his government with
him--almost. In the heir-apparent to the throne of Moravia, whose
influence with the Moravian Prime Minister was considerable, there
still remained one obdurate element; but Ian's triumph only lacked the
removal of this one obstructive factor, and thereafter England would be
secure from foreign attack, if war came in South Africa. In that case
Ian's career might culminate at the head of the Foreign Office itself,
or as representative of the throne in India, if he chose that splendid
sphere.

"You do trust me, Ian?" Jasmine repeated, with a wistfulness as near
reality as her own deceived soul could permit.

With a sincerity as deep as one can have who embarks on enterprises in
which one regrets the means in contemplation of the end, Ian replied:

"Yes, yes, I trust you, Jasmine, as I used to do when I was twenty and
you were five. You have brought back the boy in me. All the dreams of
youth are in my heart again, all the glow of the distant sky of hope. I
feel as though I lived upon a hill-top, under some greenwood tree,
and--"

"And 'sported with Amaryllis in the shade,'" she broke in with a l