gins and the nets
spread for them?

Yet might it not be that here and there people were permanently happy?
And had things been different, might not he and Jasmine have been of
the radiant few? He desired her above all things; he was willing to
sacrifice all--all for her, if need be; and yet there was that which he
could not, would not face. All or nothing--all or nothing. If he must
drink of the cup of sorrow and passion mixed, then it would be from the
full cup.

With a stifled exclamation he sat down and began to write. Again and
again he stopped to think, his face lined and worn and old; then he
wrote on and on. Ambition, hope, youth, the Foreign Office, the
chancelleries of Europe, the perils of impending war, were all
forgotten, or sunk into the dusky streams of subconsciousness. One
thought dominated him. He was playing the game that has baffled all
men, the game of eluding destiny; and, like all men, he must break his
heart in the playing.

"Jasmine," he wrote, "this letter, this first real letter of love which
I have ever written you, will tell you how great that love is. It will
tell you, too, what it means to me, and what I see before us. To-day I
surrendered to you all of me that would be worth your keeping, if it
was so that you might take and keep it. When I kissed you, I set the
seal upon my eternal offering to you. You have given me success. It is
for that I thank you with all my soul, but it is not for that I love
you. Love flows from other fountains than gratitude. It rises from the
well which has its springs at the beginning of the world, where those
beings lived who loved before there were any gods at all, or any
faiths, or any truths save the truth of being.

"But it is because what I feel belongs to something in me deeper than I
have ever known that, since we parted a few hours ago, I see all in a
new light. You have brought to me what perhaps could only have come as
it did--through fire and cloud and storm. I did not will it so, indeed,
I did not wish it so, as you know; but it came in spite of all. And I
shall speak to you of it as to my own soul. I want no illusions, no
self-deception, no pretense to be added to my debt to you. With
wide-open eyes I want to look at it. I know that this love of mine for
you is my fate, the first and the last passion of my soul. And to have
known it with all its misery,--for misery there must be; misery,
Jasmine, there is--to have known it, to have felt it,