“Try another shelf higher up, and it’s more like it.  Wot a head for a coronet ’ers!  W’y—­”

But the voice of the butler recalled them from the fields of imagination, and they went with lordly leisure upon the business of the household.

Socially this was to be the day of Jasmine’s greatest triumph.  One of the British royal family was, with the member of another great reigning family, honouring her table—­though the ladies of neither were to be present; and this had been a drop of chagrin in her cup.  She had been unaware of the gossip there had been of late,—­though it was unlikely the great ladies would have known of it—­and she would have been slow to believe what Ian had told her this day, that men had talked lightly of her at De Lancy Scovel’s house.  Her eyes had been shut; her wilful nature had not been sensitive to the quality of the social air about her.  People came—­almost “everybody” came—­to her house, and would come, of course, until there was some open scandal; until her husband intervened.  Yet everybody did not come.  The royal princesses had not found it convenient to come; and this may have meant nothing, or very much indeed.  To Jasmine, however, as she hastily robed herself for dinner, her mind working with lightning swiftness, it did not matter at all; if all the kings and queens of all the world had promised to come and had not come, it would have meant nothing to her this night of nights.

In her eyes there was the look of one who has seen some horrible thing, though she gave her orders with coherence and decision as usual, and with great deftness she assisted her maid in the hasty toilette.  Her face was very pale, save for one or two hectic spots which took the place of the nectarine bloom so seldom absent from her cheeks, and in its place was a new, shining, strange look like a most delicate film—­the transfiguring kind of look which great joy or great pain gives.

Coming up the staircase from the street, she had seen Krool enter her husband’s room more hastily than usual, and had heard him greeted sharply—­something that sounded strange to her ears, for Rudyard was uniformly kind to Krool.  Never had Rudyard’s voice sounded as it did now.  Of course it was her imagination, but it was like a voice which came from some desolate place, distant, arid and alien.  That was not the voice in which he had wooed her on the day when they heard of Jameson’s Raid.  That was not the voice which had spoken to her in broken tones of love on the day Ian first dined with her after her marriage—­that fateful, desperate day.  This was a voice which had a cheerless, fretful note, a savage something in it.  Presently they two would meet, and she knew how it would be—­an outward semblance, a superficial amenity and confidence before their guests; the smile of intimacy, when there was no intimacy, and never, never, could be again; only acting, only make-believe, only the artifice of deceit.