She almost ran into Lady Tynemouth's arms as the door opened. With a swift apology she sped away, after closing the door upon the visitor.
Jasmine rose and embraced her friend, and Lady 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.