e eyes of wild animals ... and
a pretty child. I wonder, I wonder if--"

But she got no farther with that thought. "I shall hate everything on
earth if it goes from me, the beauty of things; and I feel that it is
going. The freshness of sense has gone, somehow. I am not stirred as I
used to be, not by the same things. If I lose that sense I shall kill
myself. Perhaps that would be the easiest way now. Just the overdose
of--"

She took a little phial from the drawer of the dressing-table. "Just
the tiny overdose and 'good-bye, my lover, good-bye.'" Again that hard
little laugh of bitterness broke from her. "Or that needle Mr. Mappin
had at Glencader. A thrust of the point, and in an instant gone, and no
one to know, no one to discover, no one to add blame to blame, to pile
shame upon shame. Just blackness--blackness all at once, and no light
or anything any more. The fruit all gone from the trees, the garden all
withered, the bower all ruined, the children all dead--the pretty
children all dead forever, the pretty children that never were born,
that never lived in Jasmine's garden."

As there had come to Rudyard premonition of evil, so to-night, in the
hour of triumph, when, beyond peradventure, she had got for Ian
Stafford what would make his career great, what through him gave
England security in her hour of truth, there came now to her something
of the real significance of it all.

She had got what she wanted. Her pride had been appeased, her vanity
satisfied, her intellect flattered, her skill approved, and Ian was
hers. But the cost?

Words from Swinburne's threnody on Baudelaire came to her mind. How
often she had quoted them for their sheer pagan beauty! It was the kind
of beauty which most appealed to her, which responded to the element of
fatalism in her, the sense of doom always with her since she was a
child, in spite of her gaiety, her wit, and her native eloquence. She
had never been happy, she had never had a real illusion, never aught
save the passion of living, the desire to conquer unrest:

"And now, no sacred staff shall break in blossom,
No choral salutation lure to light
The spirit sick with perfume and sweet night,
And Love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom.
There is no help for these things, none to mend and none to mar
Not all our songs, oh, friend, can make Death clear or make Life durable
But still with rose and ivy and wild vine,
And with wild song about this dust