ning to leave the bedroom she caught sight of her face and figure
again in the big mirror, and she seemed to herself like some other
woman. There was that strange, distant look of agony in her eyes, that
transfiguring look in the face; there was the figure somehow gone
slimmer in these few hours; and there was a frail appearance which did
not belong to her.

As she was about to leave the room to descend the stairs, there came a
knock at the door. A bunch of white violets was handed in, with a
pencilled note in Rudyard's handwriting.

White violets--white violets!

The note read, "Wear these to-night, Jasmine."

White violets--how strange that he should send them! These they send
for the young, the innocent, and the dead. Rudyard had sent them to
her--from how far away! He was there just across the hallway, and yet
he might have been in Bolivia, so far as their real life was concerned.

She was under no illusion. This day, and perhaps a few, a very few
others, must be lived under the same roof, in order that they could
separate without scandal; but things could never go on as in the past.
She had realized that the night before, when still that chance of which
she had spoken to Stafford was hers; when she had wound the coil of her
wonderful hair round her throat, and had imagined that self-destruction
which has tempted so many of more spiritual make than herself. It was
melodramatic, emotional, theatrical, maybe; but the emotional, the
theatrical, the egotistic mortal has his or her tragedy, which is just
as real as that which comes to those of more spiritual vein, just as
real as that which comes to the more classical victim of fate. Jasmine
had the deep defects of her qualities. Her suffering was not the less
acute because it found its way out with impassioned demonstration.

There was, however, no melodrama in the quiet trembling with which she
took the white violets, the symbol of love and death. She was sure that
Rudyard was not aware of their significance and meaning, but that did
not modify the effect upon her. Her trouble just now was too deep for
tears, too bitter for words, too terrible for aught save numb
endurance. Nothing seemed to matter in a sense, and yet the little
routine of life meant so much in its iron insistence. The habits of
convention are so powerful that life's great issues are often obscured
by them. Going to her final doom a woman would stop to give the last
careful touch to her hair--the