at any man thought her to know so much of
life that it did not matter what was said? Did her outward appearance,
then, bear such false evidence?

He did not understand quite, yet he saw that she misunderstood, and he
handled the situation with a tact which seemed hardly to belong to a
man of his training and calibre.

"She thought no more of kissing me," he continued, presently, in a calm
voice--"a man she had seen only once before, and was not likely to see
again, than would a child of five. It meant nothing more to her than
kissing Fanato on the stage. It was pure impulse. She forgot it as soon
as it was done. It was her way of showing gratitude. Somewhat
unconventional, wasn't it? But then, she is a little Irish, a little
Spanish, and the rest Saxon; and she is all artist and bohemian."

Jasmine's face cleared, and her equilibrium was instantly restored. She
was glad she had misunderstood. Yet Al'mah had not kissed her when she
left, while expressing gratitude, too. There was a difference. She
turned the subject, saying: "Of course, she insists on sending me a new
cloak, and keeping the other as a memento. It was rather badly singed,
wasn't it?"

"It did its work well, and it deserves an honoured home. Do you know
that even as I flung the cloak round her, in the excitement of the
moment I 'sensed,' as my young nephew says, the perfume you use."

He lifted his hand, conscious that his fingers still carried some of
that delicate perfume which her fingers left there as they lay in his
palm when she greeted him on his entrance. "It was like an incense from
the cloak, as it blanketed the flames. Strange, wasn't it, that the
undersense should be conscious of that little thing, while the
over-sense was adding a sensational postscript to the opera?"

She smiled in a pleased way. "Do you like the perfume? I really use
very little of it."

"It's like no other. It starts a kind of cloud of ideas floating. I
don't know how to describe it. I imagine myself--"

She interrupted, laughing merrily. "My brother says it always makes him
angry, and Ian Stafford calls it 'The Wild Tincture of
Time'--frivolously and sillily says that it comes from a bank whereon
the 'wild thyme' grows! But now, I want to ask you many questions. We
have been mentally dancing, while down beyond the Limpopo--"

His demeanour instantly changed, and she noted the look cf power and
purpose coming into the rather boyish and good-natured, the rash and