of that one price his lips tightened, his brow clouded,
his eyes half closed with shame.

Rudyard Byng was his friend, whose bread he had eaten, whom he had
known since they were boys at school. He remembered acutely Rudyard's
words to him that fateful night when he had dined with Jasmine
alone--"You will have much to talk about, to say to each other, such
old friends as you are." He recalled how Rudyard had left them,
trusting them, happy in the thought that Jasmine would have a pleasant
evening with the old friend who had first introduced him to her, and
that the old friend would enjoy his eager hospitality. Rudyard had
blown his friend's trumpet wherever men would listen to him; had
proclaimed Stafford as the coming man: and this was what he had done to
Rudyard!

This was what he had done; but what did he propose to do? What of the
future? To go on in miserable intrigue, twisting the nature, making
demands upon life out of all those usual ways in which walk love and
companionship--paths that lead through gardens of poppies, maybe, but
finding grey wilderness at the end? Never, never the right to take the
loved one by the hand before all the world and say: "We two are one,
and the reckoning of the world must be made with both." Never to have
the right to stand together in pride before the wide-eyed many and say:
"See what you choose to see, say what you choose to say, do what you
choose to do, we do not care." The open sharing of worldly success; the
inner joys which the world may not see--these things could not be for
Jasmine and for him.

Yet he loved her. Every fibre in his being thrilled to the thought of
her. But as his passion beat like wild music in his veins, a blindness
suddenly stole into his sight, and in deep agitation he got up, opened
the window, and looked out into the night. For long he stood gazing
into the quiet street, and watched a daughter of the night, with
dilatory steps and neglected mien, go up towards the more frequented
quarter of Piccadilly. Life was grim in so much of it, futile in more,
feeble at the best, foolish in the light of a single generation or a
single century or a thousand years. It was only reasonable in the vast
proportions of eternity. It had only little sips of happiness to give,
not long draughts of joy. Who drank deep, long draughts--who of all the
men and women he had ever known? Who had had the primrose path without
the rain of fire, the cinders beneath the feet, the