tless, craving
for amusement and excitement and--she was going to say romance, but
there was no romance in those sordid hours of pleasure-making, when she
plucked the fruit as it lay to her hand--ah, if only Rudyard had not
gone to South Africa then! That five months held no romance. She had
never known but one romance, and it was over and done. The floods had
washed it away.

"You are right. War does not wait even for me," she exclaimed. "It came
to meet me, to destroy me, when I was not armed. It came in the night
as you have come, and found me helpless as I am now."

Suddenly she clasped her hands and wrung them, then threw them above
her head in a gesture of despair. "Why didn't God or Destiny, or
whatever it is, stop you from coming here! There is nothing between us
worth keeping, and there can never be. There is a black sea between us.
I never want to see you any more."

In her agitation the coat had fallen away from her white night-dress,
and her breast showed behind the parted folds of the linen.
Involuntarily his eyes saw. What memories passed through him were too
vague to record; but a heavy sigh escaped him, followed, however, by a
cloud which gathered on his brow. The shadow of a man's death thrust
itself between them. This war might have never been, had it not been
for the treachery of the man who had been false to everything and every
being that had come his way. Indirectly this vast struggle in which
thousands of lives were being lost had come through his wife's
disloyalty, however unintentional, or in whatever degree. Whenever he
thought of it, his pulses beat faster with indignation, and a deep
resentment possessed him.

It was a resentment whose origin was not a mere personal wrong to him,
but the betrayal of all that invaded his honour and the honour of his
country. The map was dead--so much. He had paid a price--too small.

And Jasmine, as she looked at her husband now, was, oppressed by the
same shadow--the inescapable thing. That was what she meant when she
said, "There is a black sea between us."

What came to her mind when she saw his glance fall on her breast, she
could not have told. But a sudden flame of anger consumed her. The
passion of the body was dead in her--atrophied. She was as one through
whose veins had passed an icy fluid which stilled all the senses of
desire, but never had her mind been so passionate, so alive. In the
months lately gone, there had been times when her mind w