ife; where surgeons consulted, officers
waited, and army authorities congregated for the business of the
hospital. She found the door, opened it and entered hastily. One light
was burning--a lamp with a green shade. She shut the door behind her
quickly and leaned against it, closing her eyes with a sense of relief.
Presently some movement in the room startled her. She opened her eyes.
A figure stood between the green lamp and the farther door.

It was her husband.

Her senses had deceived her. His footsteps had not stopped before her
bedroom-door. She had not heard the handle of the door of her bedroom
turn, but the handle of the door of this room. The silence which had
frightened her had followed his entrance here.

She hastily drew the coat about her. The white linen of her night-dress
showed. She thrust it back, and instinctively drew behind the table, as
though to hide her bare ankles.

He had started back at seeing her, but had instantly recovered himself.
"Well, Jasmine," he said quietly, "we've met in a queer place."

All at once her hot agitation left her, and she became cold and still.
She was in a maelstrom of feeling a minute before, though she could not
have said what the feeling meant; now she was dominated by a haunting
sense of injury, roused by resentment, not against him, but against
everything and everybody, himself included. All the work of the last
few months seemed suddenly undone--to go for nothing. Just as a
drunkard in his pledge made reformation, which has done its work for a
period, feels a sudden maddening desire to indulge his passion for
drink, and plunges into a debauch,--the last maddening degradation
before his final triumph,--so Jasmine felt now the restrictions and
self-control of the past few months fall away from her. She emerged
from it all the same woman who had flung her married life, her man, and
her old world to the winds on the day that Krool had been driven into
the street. Like Krool, she too had gone out into the unknown--into a
strange land where "the Baas" had no habitation.

Rudyard's words seemed to madden her, and there was a look of scrutiny
and inquiry in his eyes which she saw--and saw nothing else there.
There was the inquisition in his look which had been there in their
last interview when he had said as plainly as man could say, "What did
it mean--that letter from Adrian Fellowes?"

It was all there in his eyes now--that hateful inquiry, the piercing
scruti