ng for
his hand.

So it had come. His letter to Jasmine which told all--Rudyard had read
it. And here was the end of everything--the roses faded before they had
bloomed an hour. It was not for them to flourish "till the world's last
year."

His hand reached out for the letter. With eyes almost blind he raised
it, and slowly and mechanically took the document of tragedy from the
envelope. Why should Rudyard insist on his reading it? It was a
devilish revenge, which he could not resent. But time--he must have
time; therefore he would do Rudyard's bidding, and read this thing he
had written, look at it with eyes in which Penalty was gathering its
mists.

So this was the end of it all--friendship gone with the man before him;
shame come to the woman he loved; misery to every one; a home-life
shattered; and from the souls of three people peace banished for
evermore.

He opened out the pages with a slowness that seemed almost apathy,
while the man opposite clinched his hands on the table spasmodically.
Still the music from the other room with cheap, flippant sensuousness
stole through the burdened air:

"Singing, it will flourish till the world's last year--"

He looked at the writing vaguely, blindly. Why should this be exacted
of him, this futile penalty? Then all at once his sight cleared; for
this handwriting was not his--this letter was not his; these wild,
passionate phrases--this terrible suggestiveness of meaning, these
references to the past, this appeal for further hours of love together,
this abjectly tender appeal to Jasmine that she would wear one of his
white roses when he saw her the next day--would she not see him between
eleven and twelve o'clock?--all these words were not his.

They were written by the man who was playing the piano in the next
room; by the man who had come and gone in this house like one who had
the right to do so; who had, as it were, fed from Rudyard Byng's hand;
who lived on what Byng paid him; who had been trusted with the
innermost life of the household and the life and the business of the
master of it.

The letter was signed, Adrian.

His own face blanched like the face of the man before him. He had
braced himself to face the consequences of his own letter to the woman
he loved, and he was face to face with the consequences of another
man's letter to the same woman, to the woman who had two lovers. He was
face to face with Rudyard's tragedy, and with his own.... She, Jasmi