h. He heard
scandal about Mennaval last night at De Lancy Scovel's. He didn't
believe it. It rests with you to give it all the lie. Good-bye."

That had been the end--the black, bitter end. Since then Ian had never
spoken a word to her, nor she to him; but he had stood there in the
shadow at the station like a ghost, reproachful, unresponsive,
indifferent. She recalled now the day when, after three years' parting,
she had left him cool, indifferent, and self-contained in the doorway
of the sweet-shop in Regent Street; how she had entered her carriage,
had clinched her hands, and cried with wilful passion: "He shall not
treat me so. He shall show some feeling. He shall! He shall!"

Here was indifference again, but of another land. Hers was not a
woman's vanity, in fury at being despised. Vanity, maybe, was still
there, but so slight that it made no contrast to the proud turmoil of a
nature which had been humiliated beyond endurance; which, for its
mistakes, had received accruing penalties as precise as though they had
been catalogued; which had waked to find that a whole lifetime had been
an error; and that it had no anchor in any set of principles or
impelling habits.

And over all there hung the shadow of a man's death, with its black
suspicion. When Ian Stafford looked at her from the shadow of the
railway-station, the question had flashed into his mind, Did she kill
him? Around Adrian Fellowes' death there hung a cloud of mystery which
threw a sinister shadow on the path of three people. In the middle of
the night, Jasmine started from her sleep with the mystery of the man's
death torturing her, and with the shuddering question, Which? on her
fevered lips. Was it her husband--was it Ian Stafford? As he galloped
over the veld, or sat with his pipe beside the camp-fire, Rudyard Byng
was also drawn into the frigid gloom of the ugly thought, and his mind
asked the question, Did she kill him? It was as though each who had
suffered from the man in life was destined to be menaced by his shade,
till it should be exorcised by that person who had taken the useless
life, saying, "It was I; I did it!"

As Jasmine entered the hospital, it seemed to her excited imagination
as though she was entering a House of Judgment: as though here in a
court of everlasting equity she would meet those who had played their
vital parts in her life.

What if Rudyard was here! What if in these few days while she was to be
here he was to cross