is smile, the
superior spirit condescending to magnanimity, to compassion; and her
whole nature was instantly up in arms. She almost longed on the instant
to strip herself bare, as it were, and let him see her as she really
was, or as, in her despair, she thought she really was. The mood in
which she had talked to Lady Tynemouth was gone, and in its place a
spirit of revolt was at work. A certain sullenness which Rudyard and no
one else had ever seen came into her eyes, and her lips became white
with an ominous determination. She forgot him and all that he would
suffer if she told him the whole truth; and the whole truth would, in
her passion, become far more than the truth: she was again the egoist,
the centre of the universe. What happened to her was the only thing
which mattered in all the world. So it had ever been; and her beauty
and her wit and her youth and the habit of being spoiled had made it
all possible, without those rebuffs and that confusion which fate
provides sooner or later for the egoist.

"Well," she said, sharply, "say what you wish to say. You have wanted
to say it badly. I am ready."

He was stunned by what seemed to him the anger and the repugnance in
her tone.

"You remember you asked me to come, Jasmine, when you took the sjambok
from me."

He nodded towards the table where it lay, then went forward and picked
it up, his face hardening as he did so.

Like a pendulum her mood swung back. By accident he had said the one
thing which could have moved her, changed her at the moment. The savage
side of him appealed to her. What he lacked in brilliance and the
lighter gifts of raillery and eloquence and mental give-and-take, he
had balanced by his natural forces--from the power-house, as she had
called it long ago. Pity, solicitude, the forced smile, magnanimity,
she did not want in this black mood. They would have made her cruelly
audacious, and her temper would have known no license; but now,
suddenly, she had a vision of him as he stamped down the staircase, his
coat off, laying the sjambok on the shoulders of the man who had
injured her so, who hated her so, and had done so over all the years.
It appealed to her.

In her heart of hearts she was sure he had done it directly or
indirectly for her sake; and that was infinitely more to her than that
he should stoop from the heights to pick her up. He was what he was
because Heaven had made him so; and she was what she was because Heaven
had f