ything to the winds, and lose herself in arrant
egotism once more! Suppose--no, she would suppose nothing. She must
believe that all she had done was for the best.

She felt how cold were the small delicate hands in her own strong warm
fingers, she saw the frightened appeal of the exquisite haunting eyes,
and all at once realized the cause of that agitation--the fear that
death had come without understanding, that the door had been forever
shut against the answering voices.

"You are in time," she said gently, encouragingly, and she tightened
the grasp of her hands.

As the volts of an electric shock quivering through a body are suddenly
withdrawn, and the rigidity becomes a ghastly inertness, so Jasmine's
hands, and all her body, seemed released. She felt as though she must
fall, but she reasserted her strength, and slowly regained her balance,
withdrawing her hands from those of Al'mah.

"He is alive--he is alive--he is alive," she kept repeating to herself
like one in a dream. Then she added hastily, with an effort to bear
herself with courage: "Where is he? Take me."

Al'mah motioned, and in a moment they were inside the house. A sense of
something good and comforting came over Jasmine. Here was an old, old
room furnished in heavy and simple Dutch style, just as old Elias
Brinkwort had left it. It had the grave and heavy hospitableness of a
picture of Teniers or Jan Steen. It had the sense of home, the welcome
of the cradle and the patriarch's chair. These were both here as they
were when Elias Brinkwort and his people went out to join the Boer army
in the hills, knowing that the verdomde Rooinek would not loot his
house or ravage his belongings.

To Jasmine's eyes, it brought a new strange sense, as though all at
once doors had been opened up to new sensations of life. Almost
mechanically, yet with a curious vividness and permanency of vision,
her eyes drifted from the patriarch's chair to the cradle in the
corner; and that picture would remain with her till she could see no
more at all. Unbidden and unconscious there came upon her lips a faint
smile, and then a door in front of her was opened, and she was inside
another room--not a bedroom as she had expected, but a room where the
Dutch simplicity and homely sincerity had been invaded by something
English and military. This she felt before her eyes fell on a man
standing beside a table, fully dressed. Though shaken and worn, it was
a figure which had no aff