me one had
to kill him. There was Rudyard Byng, Ian Stafford, or yourself. It fell
to me. I did your work. You will not tell; but it would not matter if
you did. Nothing would happen--nothing at all. Think it out, and you
will see why."

Jasmine shuddered violently. Her body was as cold as ice.

"Yes, I know. What are you going to do after the war?"

"Back to Covent Garden perhaps; or perhaps there will be no 'after the
war.' It may all end here. Who knows--who cares!"

Jasmine came close to her. For an instant a flood of revulsion had
overpowered her; but now it was all gone.

"We pay for all the wrong we do. We pay for all the good we get"--once
Ian Stafford had said that, and it rang in her ears now. Al'mah would
pay, and would pay here--here in this world. Meanwhile, Al'mah was a
woman who, like herself, had suffered.

"Let me be your friend; let me help you," Jasmine said, and she took
both of Almah's hands in her own.

Somehow Jasmine's own heart had grown larger, fuller, and kinder all at
once. Until lately she had never ached to help the world or any human
being in all her life; there had never been any of the divine pity
which finds its employ in sacrifice. She had been kind, she had been
generous, she had in the past few months given service unstinted; but
it was more as her own cure for her own ills than yearning compassion
for all those who were distressed "in mind, body, or estate."

But since last evening, in the glimmer of the stars, when Rudyard went
from her with bitter anger on his lips, and a contempt which threw her
far behind him,--since that hour, when, in her helplessness, she had
sunk to the ground with an appeal to Something outside herself, her
heart had greatly softened. Once before she had appealed to the
Invisible--that night before her catastrophe, when she wound her
wonderful hair round her throat and drew it tighter and tighter, and
had cried out to the beloved mother she had never known. But her
inborn, her cultivated, her almost invincible egoism, had not even then
been scattered by the bitter helplessness of her life.

That cry last night was a cry to the Something behind all. Only in the
last few hours--why, she knew not--her heart had found a new sense. She
felt her soul's eyes looking beyond herself. The Something that made
her raise her eyes to the stars, which seemed a pervading power, a
brooding tenderness and solicitude, had drawn her mind away into the
mind of humani