gave
seemed the most delightful thing he had ever seen.

"She is a flower, a jasmine-flower," he said, happily, as he made his
way into the street.

When he had gone she fled to her bedroom. Standing before the mirror,
she looked at herself long, laughing feverishly. Then suddenly she
turned and threw herself upon the bed, bursting into a passion of
tears. Sobs shook her.

"Oh, Ian," she said, raising her head at last, "oh, Ian, Ian, I hate
myself!"

Down in the library her stepmother was saying to her father, "You are
right, Jasmine will marry the nabob."

"I am sorry for Ian Stafford," was the response.

"Men get over such things," came the quietly cynical reply.

"Jasmine takes a lot of getting over," answered Jasmine's father. "She
has got the brains of all the family, the beauty her family never
had--the genius of my father, and the wilfulness, and--"

He paused, for, after all, he was not talking to the mother of his
child.

"Yes, all of it, dear child," was the enigmatical reply.

"I wish--Nelly, I do wish that--"

"Yes, I know what you wish, Cuthbert, but it's no good. I'm not of any
use to her. She will work out her own destiny alone--as her grandfather
did."

"God knows I hope not! A man can carry it off, but a woman--"

Slow and almost stupid as he was, he knew that her inheritance from her
grandfather's nature was a perilous gift.

CHAPTER IV

THE PARTNERS MEET

England was more stunned than shocked. The dark significance, the evil
consequences destined to flow from the Jameson Raid had not yet reached
the general mind. There was something gallant and romantic in this wild
invasion: a few hundred men, with no commissariat and insufficient
clothing, with enough ammunition and guns for only the merest flurry of
battle, doing this unbelievable gamble with Fate--challenging a
republic of fighting men with well-stocked arsenals and capable
artillery, with ample sources of supply, with command of railways and
communications. It was certainly magnificent; but it was magnificent
folly.

It did not take England long to decide that point; and not even the
Laureate's paean in the organ of the aristocracy and upper middle class
could evoke any outburst of feeling. There was plenty of admiration for
the pluck and boldness, for the careless indifference with which the
raiders risked their lives; for the romantic side of the dash from
Pitsani to the Rand; but the thing was so palpably imposs