ery soon, however, Jasmine's sensitive beauty, which in her desire to
intoxicate him became voluptuousness, enveloped his brain in a mist of
rainbow reflections. Under her deft questions and suggestions he
allowed her to see the springs of his own diplomacy and the machinery
inside the Moravian administration. She caught glimpses of its
ambitions, its unscrupulous use of its position in international
relations, to gain advantage for itself, even by a dexterity which
might easily bear another name, and by sudden disregard of
international attachments not unlike treachery.

Rudyard was too busy to notice the more than cavalier attitude of M.
Mennaval; and if he had noticed it, there would have been no
intervention. Of late a lesion of his higher moral sense made him
strangely insensitive to obvious things. He had an inborn chivalry, but
the finest, truest chivalry was not his--that which carefully protects
a woman from temptation, by keeping her unostentatiously away from it;
which remembers that vanity and the need for admiration drive women
into pitfalls out of which they climb again maimed for life, if they
climb at all.

He trusted Jasmine absolutely, while there was, at the same time, a
great unrest in his heart and life--an unrest which the accident at the
Glencader Mine, his own share in a great rescue, and her gratitude for
his safety did little to remove. It produced no more than a passing
effect upon Jasmine or upon himself. The very convention of making
light of bravery and danger, which has its value, was in their case an
evil, preventing them from facing the inner meaning of it all. If they
had been less rich, if their house had been small, if their
acquaintances had been fewer, if ...

It was not by such incidents that they were to be awakened, and with
the wild desire to make Stafford grateful to her, and owe her his
success, the tragedy yonder must, in the case of Jasmine, have been
obscured and robbed of its force. At Glencader Jasmine had not got
beyond desire to satisfy a vanity, which was as deep in her as life
itself. It was to regain her hold upon a man who had once acknowledged
her power and, in a sense, had bowed to her will. But that had changed,
and, down beneath all her vanity and wilfulness, there was now a
dangerous regard and passion for him which, under happy circumstances,
might have transformed her life--and his. Now it all served to twist
her soul and darken her footsteps. On every han