rd pistol
or sword in hand, and die as many such a man has done, without trying
to save his own life or to take the life of another. That he could not
do. Rudyard did not know the truth, had not the faintest knowledge that
Jasmine had been more to himself than an old and dear friend. To pay
the price in any other way than by eliminating himself from the
equation was to smirch her name, be the ruin of a home, and destroy all
hope for the future.

It had seemed to him that there was no other way than to disappear
honourably through one of the hundred gates which the war would open to
him--to go where Death ambushed the reckless or the brave, and take the
stroke meant for him, on a field of honour all too kind to himself and
soothing to those good friends who would mourn his going, those who
hoped for him the now unattainable things.

In a spirit of stoic despair he had come to the seat of war. He had
invited Destiny to sweep him up in her reaping, by placing himself in
the ambit of her scythe; but the sharp reaping-hook had passed him by.

The innumerable exits were there in the wall of life and none had
opened to him; but since the evening when he saw Jasmine at the railway
station, there had been an opening of doors in his soul hitherto
hidden. Beyond these doors he saw glimpses of a new world--not like the
one he had lived in, not so green, so various, or tumultuous, but it
had the lure of that peace, not sterile or somnolent, which summons the
burdened life, or the soul with a vocation, to the hood of a monk--a
busy self-forgetfulness.

Looking after Barry Whalen's retreating figure he saw this new, grave
world opening out before him; and as the vision floated before his
eyes, Barry's appeal that he should visit Jasmine at the hospital came
to him.

Jasmine suffered. He recalled Barry's words: "She's as thin as she once
wasn't, but twice as beautiful. Her eyes are as big as stars, and she
can smile still, but it's a new one--a war-smile, I expect. Everything
gets a turn of its own at the Front."

Jasmine suffered in body. He knew that she suffered in mind also. To go
to her? Was that his duty? Was it his desire? Did his heart cry out for
it either in pity--or in love?

In love? Slowly a warm flood of feeling passed through him. It was
dimly borne in on him, as he gazed at the hospital in the distance,
that this thing called Love, which seizes upon our innermost selves,
which takes up residence in the inner sa