y Tynemouth subsided into
a chair with a sigh.

"My dear Jasmine, you look so frail," she said. "A short time ago I
feared you were going to blossom into too ripe fruit, now you look
almost a little pinched. But it quite becomes you, mignonne--quite. You
have dark lines under your eyes, and that transparency of skin--it is
quite too fetching. Are you glad to see me?"

"I would have seen no one to-day, no one, except you or Rudyard."

"Love and duty," said Lady Tynemouth, laughing, yet acutely alive to
the something so terribly wrong, of which she had spoken to Ian
Stafford.

"Why is it my duty to see you, Alice?" asked Jasmine, with the dry
glint in her tone which had made her conversation so pleasing to men.

"You clever girl, how you turn the tables on me," her friend replied,
and then, seeing the sjambok on the table, took it up. "What is this
formidable instrument? Are you flagellating the saints?"

"Not the saints, Alice."

"You don't mean to say you are going to scourge yourself?"

Then they both smiled--and both immediately sighed. Lady Tynemouth's
sympathy was deeply roused for Jasmine, and she meant to try and win
her confidence and to help her in her trouble, if she could; but she
was full of something else at this particular moment, and she was not
completely conscious of the agony before her.

"Have you been using this sjambok on Mennaval?" she asked with an
attempt at lightness. "I saw him leaving as I came in. He looked rather
dejected--or stormy, I don't quite know which."

"Does it matter which? I didn't see Mennaval today."

"Then no wonder he looked dejected and stormy. But what is the history
of this instrument of torture?" she asked, holding up the sjambok again.

"Krool."

"Krool! Jasmine, you surely don't mean to say that you--"

"Not I--it was Rudyard. Krool was insolent--a half-caste, you know."

"Krool--why, yes, it was he I saw being helped into a cab by a
policeman just down there in Piccadilly. You don't mean that Rudyard--"

She pushed the sjambok away from her.

"Yes--terribly."

"Then I suppose the insolence was terrible enough to justify it."

"Quite, I think." Jasmine's voice was calm.

"But of course it is not usual--in these parts."

"Rudyard is not usual in these parts, or Krool either. It was a touch
of the Vaal."

Lady Tynemouth gave a little shudder. "I hope it won't become
fashionable. We are altogether too sensational nowadays. But,
seriously, Jasmine,