white, and almost mechanically she put the letters she held on a
writing-table near; then coming to the bed again she looked at the rose
with a kind of horror. Suddenly, however, she caught it up, and
bursting into a laugh which was shrill and bitter she threw it across
the room. Still laughing hysterically, with her golden hair streaming
about her head, folding her round like a veil which reached almost to
her ankles, she came back to the chair at the dressing-table and sat
down.

Slowly drawing the wonderful soft web of hair over her shoulders, she
began to weave it into one wide strand, which grew and grew in length
till it was like a great rope of spun gold. Inch by inch, foot by foot
it grew, until at last it lay coiled in her lap like a golden serpent,
with a kind of tension which gave it life, such as Medusa's hair must
have known as the serpent-life entered into it. There is--or was--in
Florence a statue of Medusa, seated, in her fingers a strand of her
hair, which is beginning to coil and bend and twist before her
horror-stricken eyes; and this statue flashed before Jasmine's eyes as
she looked at the loose ends of gold falling beyond the blue ribbon
with which she had tied the shining rope.

With the mad laughter of a few moments before still upon her lips, she
held the flying threads in her hand, and so strained was her mind that
it would not have caused her surprise if they had wound round her
fingers or given forth forked tongues. She laughed again--a low and
discordant laugh it was now.

"Such imaginings--I think I must be mad," she murmured.

Then she leaned her elbows on the dressing-table and looked at herself
in the glass.

"Am I not mad?" she asked herself again. Then there stole across her
face a strange, far-away look, bringing a fresh touch of beauty to it,
and flooding it for a moment with that imaginative look which had been
her charm as a girl, a look of far-seeing and wonder and strange light.

"I wonder--if I had had a mother!" she said, wistfully, her chin in her
hand. "If my mother had lived, what would I have been?"

She reached out to a small table near, and took from it a miniature at
which she looked with painful longing. "My dear, my very dear, you were
so sweet, so good," she said. "Am I your daughter, your own
daughter--me? Ah, sweetheart mother, come back to me! For God's sake
come--now. Speak to me if you can. Are you so very far away?
Whisper--only whisper, and I shall hea