"Nothing can help me," he answered.

They went down the hill by the Tekkeh of the Dancing Dervishes.

* * * * *

Mrs. Clarke did not go back to her villa at Buyukderer that day. It was already late in the afternoon when her caique touched the wharf at the foot of the Galata bridge.

"I shall stay another night at the hotel," she said to Dion. "Will you drive up with me?"

He assented. When they reached the hotel he said:

"May I come in for a few minutes?"

"Of course."

When they were in the dim, rather bare room with the white walls, between which the fierce noises from the Grande Rue found a home, he said:

"I feel before I leave I must speak about what you did last night, the message you gave to Vane of our Embassy. I dare say you are right and that I ought to face things. But no one can judge for a man in my situation, a man who's had everything cut from under him. I haven't ended it. That proves I've got a remnant of something—you needn't call it strength—left in me. Since you've told my name, I'll take it back. Perhaps it was cowardly to give it up. I believe it was. Robin might think so, if he knew. And he may know things. But I can't meet casual people."

"I'm afraid I did what I did partly for myself," she said, taking off her little hat and laying it, with her gloves, on a table.

"For yourself? Why?"

"I'll explain to-morrow. I shall see you before I go. Come for me at ten, will you, and we'll drive to Stamboul. I'll tell you there."

"Please tell me now, if you're not tired after being out all day."

"I'm never tired."

"Once Mrs. Chetwinde told me that you were made of iron."

Mrs. Clarke sent him a curious keen glance of intense and almost lambent inquiry, but he did not notice it. The strong interest that notices things was absent from him. Would it ever be in him again?

"I suppose I have a great deal of stamina," she said casually. "Well, sit down, and I'll try to explain."

She lit a cigarette and sat on a divan in the far corner of the large room, between one of the windows and the door which led into the bedroom. Dion sat down, facing her and the noise from the Grande Rue. He wondered for a moment why she had chosen a place so close to the window.

"I had a double reason for doing what I did," she said. "One part unselfish, the other not. I'll be very frank. I willed that you should come here."

"Why did you do that?"

"I wanted to see you. I wanted to help you. You don't think I, or any one, can do that. You think everything is over for you—"

"I know it is," he interrupted, in a voice which sounded cold and dull and final.

"You think that. Any man like you, in your situation, would think that. Let us leave it for the moment. I wished you to come here, and willed you to come here. For some reason you have come. You didn't let me know you were here, but, by chance as it seems, we met. I don't mean to lose sight of you. I intend that you shall come either to Buyukderer, or to some place on the Bosporus not far off that's endurable in the summer, and that you shall stay there for a time."

"Why?"

"I want to find out if I can be of any good to you."

"You can't. I don't even know why you wish to. But you can't."

"We'll leave that," she said, with inflexible composure. "I don't much care what you think about it. I shan't be governed, or affected even, by that. The point is, I mean you to come. How are you to come, surreptitiously or openly, sneaking in by-ways, your real name concealed, or treading the highway, your real name known? For your own sake it must be openly and with your own name, and for my sake too. You need to face your great tragedy, to stand right up to it. It's your only chance. A man is always pursued by what he runs away from; he can always make a friend of what he stands up to."

"A friend?"

His voice broke in with the most piercing and bitter irony through the many noises in the room—sounds of cries, of carriage wheels, of horses' hoofs ringing on an uneven pavement, of iron shutters being pulled violently down over shop fronts, of soldiers marching, of distant bugles calling, of guitars and mandolins accompanying a Neapolitan song.

"Yes, a friend," said the husky and inflexible, but very feminine voice, which resembled no other voice of woman that he had ever heard. "So much for my thought of you. And now for my thought of myself. I am a woman who has faced a great scandal and come out of it the winner. I was horribly attacked, and I succeeded in what the papers call reestablishing my reputation. You and I know very well what that means. I know by personal experience, you by the behavior of your own wife."

Dion moved abruptly like a man in physical pain, but Mrs. Clarke continued:

"I don't ask you to forgive me for hurting you. You and I must be frank with each other, or we can be of no use to each other. After what has happened many women might be inclined to avoid me as your wife did. Fortunately I have so many friends who believe in me that I am in a fairly strong position. I don't want to weaken that position on account of Jimmy. Now, if you came to Buyukderer under an assumed name, I couldn't introduce you to any one, or explain you without telling lies. Gossip runs along the shores of the Bosporus like fire along a hayrick. How can I be seen perpetually with a man whom I never introduce to any of my friends, who isn't known at his own Embassy? Both for your own sake and for mine we must be frank about the whole thing."

"But I never said I should come to Buyukderer," he said.

And there was a sort of dull, lifeless obstinacy in his voice.

"You have come to Constantinople and you will come to Buyukderer," she replied quietly.

He looked at her across the room. The light was beginning to fade, but still the awnings were drawn down beyond the windows, darkening the large bare room. He saw her as a study in gray and white, with colorless, unshining hair, a body so thin and flexible that it was difficult to believe it contained nerves like a network of steel and muscles capable of prolonged endurance, a face that was haggard in its white beauty, eyes that looked enormous and fixed in the twilight. The whole aspect of her was melancholy and determined, beautiful and yet almost tragic. He felt upon him the listless yet imperative grasp which he had first known in Mrs. Chetwinde's drawing-room, the grasp which resembled Stamboul's.

"I suppose I shall go to Buyukderer," he said slowly. "But I don't know why you wish it."

"I have always liked you."

"Yes, I think you have."

"I don't care to see a man such as you are destroyed by a good woman."

He got up.

"No one is destroying me," he said, with a dull and hopeless defiance.

"Dion, don't misunderstand me. It wouldn't be strange if you thought I bore your wife a grudge because she didn't care about knowing me. But, honestly, I am indifferent to a great many things that most women fuss about. I quite understood her reluctance. Directly I saw her I knew that she had ideals, and that she expected all those who were intimately in her life to live up to them. Instead of accepting the world as it has been created, such women must go one better than the Creator (if there is one), and invent an imaginary world. Now I shouldn't be at home in an imaginary world. I'm not good enough for that, and don't want to be. Your wife is very good, but she lives for herself, for her own virtues and the peace and happiness she gets out of them."

"She lived for Robin," he interrupted.

"Robin was a part of herself," Mrs. Clarke said dryly. "Women like that don't know how to love as lovers, because they care for the virtues in men rather than for the men themselves. They are robed in ideals, and they are in mortal fear of a speck of dust falling on the robe. The dust of my scandal was upon me, so your wife avoided me. That I was innocent didn't matter. I had been mixed up with something ugly. Your chivalry was instinctively on the side of justice. Her virtue inclined to the other side. Her virtue is destructive."

He was silent.

"Now it has driven you out like a scapegoat into the wilderness!"

"No, no!" he muttered, without conviction.

"But don't let it destroy you. I would rather deliberately destroy myself than let any one destroy me. In the one case there's strength of a kind, in the other there's no strength at all. I speak very plainly, but I'm not a woman full of ideals. I accept the world just as it is, men just as they are. If a speck of dust alights on me, I don't think myself hopelessly befouled; and if some one I loved made a slip, I should only think that it is human to err and that it's humanity I love."

"Humanity!" he repeated, looking down. "Ah!" He sighed deeply.

He raised his head.

"And if some one you loved killed your Jimmy?"

"As you——?"

"Yes—yes?"

"I should love him all the more because of the misery added to him," she said firmly. "There's only one thing a really great love can't forgive."

"What is it?"

"The deliberate desire and intention to hurt it and degrade it."

"I never had that."

"No."

"Then—then you think she never loved me at all?"

But Mrs. Clarke did not answer that question.

The daylight was rapidly failing. She seemed almost to be fading away in the dimness and in the noises of evening which rose from the Grande Rue. Yet something of her remained and was very definite, so definite that even Dion, broken on the wheel and indifferent to casual influences as few men are ever indifferent, felt it almost powerfully—the concentration of her will, the unyielding determination of her mind, active and intense behind the pale mask of her physical body.

He turned away and went to the window farthest from her. He leaned out to the Grande Rue. Above his head was the sloping awning. It seemed to him to serve as a sounding-board to the fierce noises of the mongrel city.

"Start again!"

Surely among the voices of the city now filling his ears there was a husky voice which had said that.

Had Mrs. Clarke spoken?

"Start again."

But not on the familiar road! To do that would be impossible. If there were indeed any new life for him it must be an utterly different life from any he had known.

He had tried the straight life of unselfishness, purity, fidelity and devotion—devotion to a woman and also to a manly ideal. That life had convulsively rejected him. Had he still within him sufficient energy of any kind to lay hold on a new life?

For a moment he saw before him under the awning Robin's eyes as they had been when his little son was dying in his arms.

He drew back from the street. The sitting-room was empty, but the door between it and the bedroom was open. No doubt Mrs. Clarke had gone in there to put away her hat. As he looked at the door the Russian maid, whom he had seen at Park Side, Knightsbridge, came from the inner room.

"Madame hopes Monsieur will call to see her to-morrow before she starts to Buyukderer," she said, with her strong foreign accent.

"Thank you," said Dion.

As he went out the maid shut the bedroom door.



CHAPTER III

Two days later Mrs. Clarke sat with the British Ambassadress in the British Palace at Therapia, a building of wood with balconies looking over the Bosporus. She was alone with Lady Ingleton in the latter's sitting-room, which was filled with curious Oriental things, with flowers, and with little dogs of the Pekinese breed, who lay about in various attitudes of contentment, looking serenely imbecile, and as if they were in danger of water on the brain.

Lady Ingleton was an old friend of Mrs. Clarke, and was a woman wholly indifferent to the prejudices which govern ordinary persons. She had spent the greater part of her life abroad, and looked like a weary Italian, though she was half English, a quarter Irish, and a quarter French. She was very dark, and had large, dreamy dark eyes which knew how to look bored, a low voice which could say very sharp things at times, and a languid manner which concealed more often than it betrayed an intelligence always on the alert.

"What is it, Cynthia?" said Lady Ingleton. "But first tell me if you like this Sine carpet. I found it in the bazaar last Thursday, and it cost the eyes out of my head. Carey, of course, has said for the hundredth time that I am ruining him, and bringing his red hair in sorrow to the tomb. Even if I am, it seems to me the carpet is worth it."

Mrs. Clarke studied the carpet for a moment with earnest attention. She even knelt down to look closely at it, and passed her hands over it gently, while Lady Ingleton watched her with a sort of dark and still admiration.

"It's a marvel," she said, getting up. "If you had let it go I should almost have despised you."

"Please tell that to Carey when he comes to you to complain. And now, what is it?"

"You remember several months ago the tragedy of a man called Dion Leith, who fought in the South African War, came home and almost immediately after his return killed his only son by mistake out shooting?"

"Yes. You knew him, I think you said. He was married to that beautiful Rosamund Everard who used to sing. I heard her once at Tippie Chetwinde's. Esme Darlington was a great admirer or hers, of course pour le bon motif."

"Dion Leith's here."

"In Therapia?"

"No, in a hideous little hotel in Constantinople."

"Why?"

"I don't think he knows. His wife has given him up. She was a mother, not a lover, so you can imagine her feelings about the man who killed her child. It seems she was une mere folle. She has left him and, according to him, has given herself to God. He's in a most peculiar condition. He was a model husband, absolutely devoted and entirely irreproachable. Even before marriage, I should think he had kept out of the way of—things. The athlete with ideals—he was that, one supposes."

"How extraordinarily attractive!" said Lady Ingleton, in a lazy and rather drawling voice.

"So he had a great deal to fasten on the woman who has cast him out. Just now, like the coffin of Mohammed, he's suspended. That's the impression I get from him."

"Do you want to bring him down to earth?"

"All he's known and cared for in life has failed him. He was traveling under an assumed name even, for fear people should point him out as the man who killed his own son. All that sort of thing is no use. I gave his secret away deliberately to young Vane, and asked him to speak to the Ambassador. And now I've come to you. I want you to have him here once or twice and be nice to him. Then I can see something of him, poor fellow, and do something for him."

A faint smile curved Lady Ingleton's sensitive lips.

"Of course. Then he's coming to the Bosporus?"

"He'll probably spend some time at Buyukderer. He must face his fate and take up life again."

"He doesn't intend to do what his wife has done?"

Lady Ingleton was still smiling faintly.

"I should say his experience rather inclines him to take an opposite direction."

"Is he good-looking?"

"What he has been through has ravaged his face."

"That probably makes him much handsomer than he ever was before."

"He hates the thought of meeting any one. But if you will have him here once or twice, and people know it, it will make things all right."

"Will he come?"

"Yes."

"You know I always do what you want."

"I never want you to do dull things."

"That's true. The dogs don't come into play against the people you bring here."

It was a legend in Constantinople in Embassy circles that Lady Ingleton always "set the dogs" at bores. Even at official dinners, when she had as much as she could stand of the heavy bigwigs whom she was obliged to invite, she surreptitiously touched a bell. This was a signal to the footman to bring in the dogs, who were trained to yap at and to investigate closely visitors. The yapping and the investigations created a feeling of general restlessness and an almost inevitable movement, which invariably led to the speedy departure of the unwelcome guests; who went, as Lady Ingleton said, "not knowing why." Enough that they went! The dogs were rewarded with lumps of sugar as are the canine performers in a circus. Sir Carey complained that it was bad diplomacy, but he was devoted to his wife, and even secretly loved her characteristic selfishness.

"Let Dion Leith come and I'll cast my mantle over him—for your sake, Cynthia. You are a remarkable woman."

"Why?"

But Lady Ingleton did not say why. There were immense reticences between her and Cynthia Clarke.

Dion left Hughes's Hotel and went to Buyukderer.

He had not consciously known why he did this. Until he met Mrs. Clarke near the British Embassy he had scarcely been aware how sordid and ugly and common under its small ostentations Hughes's Hotel was. She made him see the dreariness of his surroundings, although she had never seen them; she made him again aware of things. That she was able to affect him strongly, although he did not care for her, he knew by the sudden approach to the brink of a complete emotional breakdown which she had brought about in him at their first meeting. He remembered the hand he had taken and had put against his forehead. There had been no cool solace in it for the fever within him. Why, then, did he go to Buyukderer? Certainly he did not go in hope. He was dwelling in a region far beyond where hope can live.

But here was some one who was far away from the land that had seen his tragedy, and who meant something in connexion with him, who intended something which had to do with him. In England his mother had been powerless to help him; Beattie had been powerless to help him. Canon Wilton had tried to use his almost stern power of manly sincerity on behalf of the soul of Dion. He and Dion had had a long interview after the inquest on the little body of Robin was over, and he had drawn nearer to the inmost chamber than any one else had, though Bruce Evelin, even in his almost fierce grief for Robin, had been wonderfully kind and understanding. But even Canon Wilton had utterly failed to be of any real use. Perhaps he had known Rosamund too well.

Till now Mrs. Clarke was the one human being who had succeeded in making a definite impression on Dion since Robin's death and Rosamund's fearful reception of the news of it. He felt her will, and perhaps he felt something else in her without telling himself that he did so: her knowledge of a life absolutely different from the life he had hitherto known, absolutely different, too, from the life known to, and lived by, those who had been nearest to him and with whom he had been most closely intimate. The old life with all its associations had cast him out. That was his feeling. Possibly, without being aware of it, and driven by the necessity that is within man to lay hold of something, to seek after refuge in the blackest moments of existence, he was feebly and instinctively feeling after an unknown life which was represented to his imagination by the pale beauty of Mrs. Clarke. She had described his situation as one of suspension between the heaven and the earth. His heaven had certainly rejected him. Possibly, without knowing it, and without any hope of future happiness or even of future peace, he faintly descried her earth; possibly, in going to Buyukderer, he was making an unconscious effort to gain it.

He wondered about this afterwards, but not at all in the moment of his going. Things were not clear to him then. He was still in the vague, but he was not to walk in vagueness forever. Fate which, by its malign action, had caused him to inflict a frightful injury upon the good woman he loved still held in reserve for him new and tremendous experience. He thought that in Welsley he had reached the ultimate depths which a man can sound. It was not so.

Dion came to Buyukderer on a breezy blue day, a day which seemed full of hope and elation, which was radiant with sunlight and dancing waters, and buoyant with ardent life. Gone were those delicate dreamy influences which sometimes float over the Bosporus even in the noontides of summer, when the winds are still, and the long shores of Asia seem to lie wrapped in a soft siesta, holding their secrets of the Orient closely hidden from the eyes of Europe. Europe gazes at Asia, but Asia is gravely indifferent to Europe; she listens only to the voices which come to her from her own depths, and, like an Almeh reclining, is stirred only by music unknown to the West.

As the steamer on which he traveled voyaged towards the Black Sea, Dion paced up and down the deck and looked always at the shore of Asia. That line of hills represented to him the unknown. If he could only lose himself in Asia and forget! But there was nothing passionate in his longing. It was only a gray desire born in a broken mind and a broken nature.

Once during the voyage he thought of Robin. Did Robin know where he was, whither he was going? Since Rosamund had utterly rejected him, strangely his dead boy and he had at moments seemed to Dion to be near to each other encompassed by the same thick darkness. Even once he had seemed to see Robin groping, like one lost and vainly seeking after light. His vagueness was broken upon sometimes by fantastic visions. But to-day he had no consciousness at all of Robin. The veil of death which hung between him and the child he had slain seemed to be of stone, absolutely impenetrable. And all his visions had left him.

Palaces and villas came into sight and vanished; Yildiz upon its hill scattered among the trees of its immense park; Dolmabaghcheh stretched out along the water's edges, with its rose-beds before it; and its gravely staring sentinels; Beylerbey Serai on the Asian shore, with its marble quay and its terraced gardens, not far from Kandili and the sweet waters of Asia. Presently the Giant's Mountain appeared staring across the water at Buyukderer. The prow of the steamer was headed for the European shore. Dion saw the bay opening to receive them under its wooded hills which are pierced by the great valley. It stretched its arms as if in welcome, and very calm was the water between them. Here the wind failed. Along the shore were villas, and gardens rising in terraces, where roses, lemon trees, laurels grew in almost rank abundance. Across the water came the soft sound of music, a song of Greece lifted above the thrumming of guitars. And something in the aspect of this Turkish haven, sheltered from the winds of that Black Sea which had come into sight off Kirech Burnu, something in the song which floated over the water, struck deep into Dion's heart. Abruptly he was released from his frozen detachment; tears sprang into his eyes, memories surged up in his mind—memories of a land not very far from this land; of the maidens of the Porch; of the hill of Drouva kept by the stars and the sleeping winds; of Zante dreaming of the sunset; of Hermes keeping watch over the child in the green recesses of Elis.

"Why do I come here? What have I to do here, or in any place dedicated to beauty and to peace?"

His brown face twitched, and the wrinkles which sprayed out from his eyelids over his thin cheeks worked till the network of them seemed to hold an independent and furious life.

"If I were a happy traveler as I once was!"

The thought pierced him, and was followed immediately by the remembrance of some words spoken by Mrs. Clarke:

"My friend, it will have to come."

That which had to come, would it come here, in this sheltered place, where the song died away like a thing enticed by the long valley to be kept by the amorous trees? Mrs. Clarke's voice had sounded full of inflexible knowledge when she had spoken these words, and she had looked at him with eyes that were full of knowledge. It was as if those eyes had seen the weeping of many men.

The steamer drew near to the shore. The bright bustle of the quay was apparent. Dion made his effort and conquered himself. But he felt almost afraid of Buyukderer. In the ugly roar of the Grande Rue he had surely been safer than he would be here in this place which seemed planned for intimate happiness.

The steamer came alongside the pier.

When Dion stepped on to the quay a tall young Englishman with broad shoulders, rather a baby face, and large intelligent blue eyes immediately walked up to him.

"Are you Mr. Dion Leith?"

Dion, startled, was about to say "No" with determined hostility when he remembered Mrs. Clarke. He had come here; he was, he supposed, going to stay here for some days at least; of course he must face things.

"Yes," he said gruffly.

In an easy, agreeable manner the stranger explained that he was Cyril Vane, second secretary of the British Embassy, and a friend of Mrs. Clarke's, and that he had come down at her request to meet Dion, and to tell him that there was a charming room reserved for him at the Belgrad Hotel.

"I'll walk up with you if you like," he added, in a casual voice. "It's no distance. That your luggage?"

He put it in the charge of a porter from the hotel.

"I'm over at Therapia just now. The Ambassador hopes to see you. He's a delightful fellow."

He talked pleasantly, and looked remarkably unobservant till they reached the hotel, where he parted from Dion.

"I dare say I shall see you soon. Very glad to do anything I can for you. Mrs. Clarke lies at the Villa Hafiz. Any one can tell you where it is."

He walked coolly away in the sun, looking like an immense fair baby in his thin, light-colored clothes.

"Does he know?" thought Dion, looking after him.

Then he went up into his bedroom which looked out upon the sea. When the luggage had been brought in and the door was shut, he sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the polished uncarpeted floor.

"Why have I come here? What have I to do here?" he thought.

He missed the uproar of Pera. It had exercised a species of pressure upon his soul, a deadening influence.

Ever since Robin's death he had lived in towns, and had walked about streets. He had been for a time in Paris, then in Marseilles, where he had stayed for more than two months haunted by an idea of crossing over to Africa and losing himself in the vastness of the lands of the sun. But something had held him back, perhaps a dread of the immense loneliness which would surely beset him on the other side of the sea; and he had gone to Geneva, then to Zurich, to Milan, Genoa, Naples, Berlin and Budapest. From Budapest he had come to Constantinople. He had known the loneliness of cities, but an instinct had led him to avoid the loneliness of the silent and solitary places. There had been an atmosphere of peace in quiet Welsley. He was afraid of such an atmosphere and had sought always its opposite.

"Why have I come here?" he thought again.

In this small place he felt exposed, almost as if he were naked and could be seen by strangers. In Pera at least he was covered.

"I shall have to go away from here," he thought.

He got up from the bed and began to unpack. As he did this, the uselessness of what he was doing, the arid futility of every bit of the web of small details which, in their sum, were his life, flowed upon his soul like stagnant water forced into movement by some horrible machinery. He was like something agitating in a vast void, something whose incessant movements produced no effect, had no sort of relation to anything. In his loneliness of the cities he had begun to lose that self-respect which belongs to all happy Englishmen of his type. Mrs. Clarke had immediately noticed that certain details in his dress showed a beginning of neglect. Since he had met her he had rectified them, almost unconsciously. But now suddenly the burden of detail seemed unbearable.

It was only by an almost fierce exercise of the will that he forced himself to finish unpacking, and to lay his things out neatly in drawers and on the dressing-table. Then he took off his boots and his jacket, stretched himself out on the bed with his arms behind him and his hands grasping the bedstead, and shut his eyes.

There was something shameful in his flaccid idleness, in the aimlessness of his whole life now, devoid of all work, undirected towards any effort. But that was not his fault. He had worked with energy in business, with equal energy in play, worked for self's sake, for love's sake, and for country's sake. And for all he had done, for his effort of purity as a boy and a youth, for his effort of love as a husband and a father, for his effort of valor as a soldier, he had been rewarded with the most horrible punishment which can fall upon a man. Effort, therefore, on his part was useless; it was worse than useless, it was grotesque. Let others make their efforts, his were done.

He wished that he could sleep.

* * * * *

The dreadful inertia of Dion did not seem to be dreadful to Mrs. Clarke. Perhaps she was more intelligent than most women, and generated within herself so much energy of some kind that she was not driven to seek for it in others; or perhaps she was more sympathetic, more imaginative, than most women, and pardoned because she understood. At any rate, she accepted Dion as he was, and neither criticized him, attempted to bully him, nor seemed to wish to change him.

She had indeed insisted that he must face his fate and had ruthlessly given him back his name; she had also deliberately set about to entangle him in the silken cords of a social relation. But he knew within a couple of days of his arrival at Buyukderer that he did not fear her. No woman perhaps ever lived who worried a man less in friendship, or who gave, without any insistence upon it, a stronger impression of loyalty, of tenacity in affection to those for whom she cared. Although often almost delicately blunt in words, in action she was full of tact. She was one of those rare women who absolutely understand men, and who know how to convey to men instantly the fact of their understanding. Such women are always attractive to men. Even if they are plain, and not otherwise specially clever, they possess for men a lure.

Mrs. Clarke had told Dion in Constantinople that she meant him to come to Buyukderer. This was an almost insolent assertion of will-power. But when he was there she let him alone. On the day of his arrival there had come no message from the Villa Hafiz to his hotel. He had, perhaps, expected one; he knew that he was relieved not to receive it. Late in the afternoon he went for a solitary walk up the valley, avoiding the many people who poured forth from the villas and hotels to take their air, as the sun sank low behind Therapia, and the light upon the water lost in glory and gained in magic. Gay parties embarked in caiques. Some people drove in small victorias drawn by spirited, quick-trotting horses; others rode; others strolled up and down slowly by the edge of the sea. A gay brightness of sociable life made Buyukderer intimately merry as evening drew on. Instinctively Dion left the laughter and the voices behind him.

His wandering led him to the valley of roses, where he sat down by the stream, and for the first time tasted something of the simplicity and charm of Turkish country life. It did not charm him, but in a dim way he felt it, was faintly aware of a soothing influence which touched him like a cool hand. For a long time he stayed there, and he thought, "If I remain at Buyukderer I shall often visit this place beside the stream." Once he was disturbed by the noise of a cantering horse in the lane close by, but otherwise he was fortunate that day; few people came to his retreat, and none of them were foreigners. Two or three Turks strolled by, holding their beads; and once some veiled women came, escorted by a eunuch, threw some petals of flowers upon the surface of the tinkling water, and walked on up the narrow valley, chattering in childish voices, and laughing with a twitter that was like the twitter of birds.

In the soft darkness he walked slowly back to his hotel. And that night he slept better than he had ever slept in Pera.

On the following day there was still no message from the Villa Hafiz, and he did not see Mrs. Clarke. He took a row boat, with a big Albanian boatman for company, and rowed out on the Bosporus till they came in sight of the Black Sea. The wind got up; Dion stripped to his shirt and trousers, rolled his shirt sleeves up to the shoulders, and had a long pull at the oars. He rowed till the perspiration ran down his lean body. The boatman admired his muscles and his strength.

"Inglese?" he asked.

Dion nodded.

"Les Inglesi tres forts, molto forte!" he observed, mixing French with Italian to show his linguistic accomplishments, "Moi tres fort aussi."

Dion talked to the man. When he left the boat at the quay he said he would take it again on the morrow. The intention to go away from Buyukderer, to drown himself again in the uproar of Pera, was already fading out of his mind. Mrs. Clarke's silence had, perhaps, reassured him. The Villa Hafiz did not summon him. He could seek it if he would. Evidently it was not going to seek him.

Again he felt grateful to Mrs. Clarke. Her silence, her neglect of him, increased his faith in her friendship for him.

His second day in Buyukderer dawned; in the late afternoon of it, now sure of his freedom, he went to the Villa Hafiz.

He did not know that Mrs. Clarke was rich. Indeed he had heard in London that she only had a small income, but that she "did wonders" with it. In London he had seen her at Claridge's and at the marvelous flat in Knightsbridge. Now, at Buyukderer, he found her in a small, but beautifully arranged and furnished, villa with a lovely climbing garden behind it. Evidently she could not live in ugly surroundings or among cheap and unbeautiful things. He saw at a glance that the rugs and carpets on the polished floors of the villa were exquisite, that the furniture was not merely graceful and in place but really choice and valuable, and that the few ornaments and pieces of china scattered about, with the most deft decision as to the exactly right place for each mirror, bowl, vase and incense holder, were rarely fine. Yet in the airy rooms there was no dreary look of the museum. On the contrary, they had an intimate, almost a homely air, in spite of their beauty. Books and magazines were allowed their place, and on a grand piano, almost in the middle of the largest room, which opened by long windows into an adroitly tangled rose garden where a small fountain purred amongst blue lilies, there was a quantity of music. The whole house was strongly scented with flowers. Dion was greeted at its threshold by a wave of delicious perfume.

Mrs. Clarke received him in her most casual, most impersonal manner, and made no allusion to the fact that she knew he had already been for two days in Buyukderer without coming near her. She asked him if his room at the hotel was all right, and when he thanked her for bothering about him said that Cyril Vane had seen to it.

"He's a kind, useful sort of boy," she added, "and often helps me with little things."

That day she said nothing about the Ambassador and Lady Ingleton, and showed no disposition to assume any proprietorship over Dion. She took him over the house, and also into the garden.

Upon the highest terrace of the latter, far above the house, between two magnificent cypresses, there stood a pavilion. It was made of the wood of the plane tree, was painted dull green, had trees growing thickly at its back, and was partially concealed by a luxuriant creeper with deep orange-colored flowers, not unlike orange-colored jasmine, which Mrs. Clarke had seen first in Egypt and had acclimatized in Turkey. The center of the front of this pavilion was open to the terrace, but could be closed by sliding doors which, when pushed back, fitted into the hollow walls on either side. The interior was furnished with bookcases, divans covered with cushions and embroideries, coffee tables, and Eastern rugs. Antique bronze lamps hung by chains from the painted ceiling, which was divided into lozenges alternately dull green and dull gold. The view from this detached library was very beautiful. Over the roof of the villa, beyond the broad white road and the quay, the long bay stretched out into the Bosporus. Across its tranquil waters, and the waters beaten up into waves by the winds from the Black Sea, rose the shores of Asia, Beikos, Anadoli Kavak, Anadoli Fanar, with lines of hills and the Giant's Mountain. Immediately below, and stretching away to right and left, were the curving shores of Europe, with the villas and palaces of Buyukderer held between the blue sea and the tree-covered heights of Kabatash; the park of the Russian Palace, the summer home of Russia's representative at the Sublime Porte, gardens of many rich merchants of Constantinople and of Turkish, Greek and Armenian magnates, and the fertile and well-watered country extending to Therapia, Stania and Bebek on the one hand, and to Rumili Kavak, with the great Belgrad forest behind it, and to Rumili Fanar, where the Bosporus flows into the Black Sea, on the other.

"Come up here whenever you like," Mrs. Clarke said to Dion. "You can ring at the side gate of the garden, and come up without entering the house or letting me know you are here. I have my own sitting-room on the first floor of the villa next to my bedroom, the little blue-and-green room I showed you just now. The books I'm reading at present are there. No one will bother you, and you won't bother any one."

He thanked her, not very warmly, perhaps, but with a genuine attempt at real gratitude, and said he would come. They walked up and down the terrace for a little while, in silence for the most part. Before they went down he mentioned that he had been out rowing.

"I ride for exercise," said Mrs. Clarke. "You can easily hire a good horse here, but I have one of my own, Selim. Nearly every afternoon I ride."

"Were you riding the day before yesterday?" Dion asked.

"Yes, in the Kesstane Dereh, or Valley of Roses, as many people call it."

"Were you alone?"

"Yes."

Dion had thought of the cantering horse which he had heard in the lane as he sat beside the stream. He felt sure it was Selim he had heard. Mrs. Clarke did not ask the reason for his questions. She seemed to him a totally incurious woman. Presently they descended to the house, and he wished her good-by. She did not ask him to stay any longer, did not propose any expedition, or any day or hour for another meeting. She just let him go with a grave, and almost abstracted good-by.

When he was alone he realized something; she had assumed that he was going to make a long stay in Buyukderer. Once, in speaking of the foliage, she had said, "You will notice in September——" Why was she so certain he would stay on? There was nothing to prevent him from going away by the steamer on the morrow. She did nothing to curb his freedom; she seemed almost indifferent to the fact of his presence there; yet she had told him he would come, and was evidently certain that he would stay.

He wondered a little, but only a little, about her will. Then his mind returned to an old haunt in which continually it wandered, obsessed by a horror that seemed already ancient, the walled garden at Welsley in which he had searched in the dark for a fleeing woman. Perpetually he heard the movement of that woman's dress as she disappeared into the darkness, and the sound of a door, the door of his own home, being locked against him to give her time to escape from him. That sound had cut his life in two. He saw, as he had seen many times in the past, the falling downwards of edges that bled, the edges of his severed life.

And he forgot the garden of the Villa Hafiz, the pavilion which stood on the hill looking over the sea to Asia, the grave woman who had told him, indifferently, that he could go to it when he would.

Nevertheless on the following day he found himself at the garden gate; he rang the bell; he was admitted by Osman, the placidly smiling gardener, and he ascended to the pavilion. No one was there. He stayed for three hours, and nobody came to interrupt him. Down below the wooden villa held closely the secret of its life. Once, as he gazed down on it, he wondered for a moment about Mrs. Clarke, how she passed her hours without a companion, which she was doing just then. The siren of a steamer sounded in the bay. He went into the pavilion. On one of the coffee-tables he found lying a small thin book bound in white vellum. He took it up and read the name in gold letters: "The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi." It was the book he had found Beattie reading on the night when Robin was born, on the night when Bruce Evelin and Guy had discussed Mrs. Clarke's divorce case and Mrs. Clarke. He shuddered in the warmth of the pavilion. Then resolutely he picked the book up. At the beginning, after some blank pages, there was a portrait of Sir Richard Burton. Dion looked at the strong, tragic face, with its burning expression, for a long time. Then he stretched himself on one of the divans and began to read the book.

Down below, in the villa, Mrs. Clarke was sitting in the green-and-blue room in the first floor with Lady Ingleton, and they were talking about Dion.

"He's here now," said Mrs. Clarke to her friend.

"Where?"

"In the garden. I haven't seen him, but Osman tells me he has gone up to the pavilion."

"We can stroll up there later on, and then you can introduce him if you want to."

"No."

Lady Ingleton did not look surprised on receiving this brusk negative.

"Shall I get Carey to see him first?" she asked, in her lazy voice. "Cyril Vane has prepared the way before him, and Carey is all sympathy and readiness to do what he can. The Greek tragedy of the situation appeals to him tremendously, and of course he has a hundredfold more tact than I have."

"Mr. Leith must go to the Embassy. But what he has been through has developed in him a sort of wildness that is almost like that of an animal. If he saw an outstretched hand he would probably bolt."

"And yet he's sitting in your pavilion."

"Because he knows he won't see any outstretched hand there. He was here for two days without coming near me, and even then he only came because I had taken no notice of him."

"I know. You spread the food outside, go indoors and close the shutters, and then, when no one is looking, it creeps up, takes the food, and vanishes."

"A very great grief eats away the conventions, and beneath the conventions there is always something strongly animal."

For a moment Lady Ingleton looked at Mrs. Clarke and was silent. Then she said, very quietly and simply:

"Does he realize yet how cruel you are?"

"He isn't thinking about me."

"But he will."

Mrs. Clarke stared at the wall for a minute. Then she said:

"Ask the Ambassador if he will ride with me to-morrow afternoon, will you, unless he's engaged?"

"At what time?"

"Half-past four. Perhaps he'll dine afterwards."

"Very well. And now I'm going up to the pavilion."

But she did not go, although she was genuinely curious about the man who had killed his son and had been cast out by the woman he loved. Secretly Lady Ingleton was much more softly romantic than Mrs. Clarke was. She was hard on bores, and floated in an atmosphere of delicate selfishness, but she could be very kind if her imagination was roused, and though almost strangely devoid of prejudices she had instincts that were not unsound.

That evening she gave Mrs. Clarke's message to her husband.

"To-morrow—to-morrow?" he said, in his light tenor voice, inquiringly. "Yes, I can go. As it happens, I'm breakfasting with Borinsky at the Russian Palace, so I shall be on the spot. John can meet me with Freddie."

Freddie was the Ambassador's favorite horse.

"But can Borinsky put up with you till half-past four?"

"Cynthia Clarke won't mind if I turn up before my time."

"No. She's devoted to you, and you know it, and love it."

Sir Carey smiled. He and his wife were happy people, and he never wished to stray from his path of happiness, not even with Mrs. Clarke. But he had been a beautiful youth, whom many women had loved, and was a remarkably handsome man, although his red hair was turning gray. Honestly he liked to be admired by women, and to feel that his fascination for them was still intact. And he did not actively object to the fact of his wife's being aware of it. For he loved her very much, and he knew that a woman does not love a man less because other women feel his power.

He appreciated Mrs. Clarke, and thought her full of intelligence, of nuances, and tres fine. Her husband had been his right-hand man at the Embassy, but he had taken Mrs. Clarke's part when the divorce proceedings were initiated, and had stood up for her ever since. Like Esme Darlington he believed that she was a wild mind in an innocent body.

On the following day he rode with her towards Rumili Kavak, and presently, returning, to the four cross-roads at the mouth of the Valley of Roses. A Turkish youth was standing there. Mrs. Clarke spoke to him in Turkish and he replied. She turned to the Ambassador.

"You do want a cup of coffee, don't you?"

"If you tell me I do."

"By the stream just beyond the lane. And I'll ride home. I've ordered all the things you like best for dinner. Ahmed Bey and Madame Davroulos will make a four."

"And Delia and Cyril Vane a two!"

"You must try to control your very natural jealousy."

"I will."

He dismounted and gave the reins to the Turkish youth.

Sitting very erect on her black Arab horse, Mrs. Clarke watched him disappear down the lane in which Dion had heard the cantering feet of a horse as he sat alone beside the stream.

Then she rode back to Buyukderer.



CHAPTER IV

Whether Mrs. Clarke had put "The Kasidah" in a conspicuous place in the pavilion with a definite object, or whether she had been reading it and by chance had laid it down, Dion could not tell. He believed, however, that she had intended that this book should be read by him at this crisis in his life. She had frankly acknowledged that she wished to rouse him out of his inertia; she was a very mental woman; a book was a weapon that such a woman would be likely to employ.

At any rate, Dion felt her influence in "The Kasidah."

The book took possession of him; it burnt him like a flame; even it made him for a short time forget. That was incredible, yet it was the fact.

It was an antichristian book. A woman's love of God had made Dion in his bitterness antichristian. It was an enormously vital book, and called to the vitality which misery had not killed within him. There were passages in it which seemed to have been written specially for him—passages that went into him like a sword and drew blood from out of the very depths of him.

"Better the worm of Izrail than Death that walks in form of life"—that was for him. He had substituted for death, swift, easy, a mere nothing, the long, slow terrific something. Death that walks in form of life. Deliberately he had chosen that.

"On thought itself feed not thy thought; nor turn From Sun and Light to gaze At darkling cloisters paved with tombs where rot The bones of bygone days——"

What else had he done since he had wandered in the wilderness?

"There is no Good, there is no Bad, these be The whims of mortal will: What works me weal that call I 'good,' what harms And hurts I hold as 'ill.'"

These words drove out the pale Fantasy he had fallen down and worshiped. It had harmed and hurt him. Haji Abdu El-Yezdi bade him henceforth hold it as "ill." If he could only do that, would not gates open before him, would not, perhaps, the power to live again in a new way arise within him?

"Do what thy Manhood bids thee do, from None but self expect applause; He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes And keeps his self-made laws.

All other Life is living Death, a world where None but Phantoms dwell, A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling Of the Camel bell."

He had lived the other life, for he had lived for another; he had lived to earn the applause of affection from Rosamund; he had striven always to fit his life into her pattern; now he was alone with the result.

"Pluck the old woman from thy breast: be Stout in woe, be stark in weal— . . . . . . . spurn Bribe of Heav'n and threat of Hell."

He had chosen the death that walks in the form of life; now something powerful, stirred from sleep by the influence of one not dead, rose up in him to reject that death. And it was the same thing that long ago had enabled him to be pure before his marriage, the same thing which had enabled him to put England before even Rosamund, the same thing which had held him up in many difficult days in South Africa, and had kept him cheerful and bravely gay through the long separation from all he cared for, the same thing which had begun to dominate Rosamund during those few short days at Welsley, the brief period of reunion in happiness which had preceded the crash into the abyss; it was the fiery spark of Dion's strength which not all his weakness had succeeded in extinguishing, a strength which had made for good in the past, a strength which might make for evil in the future.

Did Mrs. Clarke know of this strength, and was she subtly appealing to it?

"Pluck the old woman from thy breast."

Again and again Dion repeated those words to himself, and he saw himself, an ineffably tragic, because a weak figure, feebly drifting with his black misery through cities which knew him not, wandering alone, sitting alone, peering at the lives of others, watching their vices without interest, without either approval or condemnation, staring with dull eyes at their fetes and their funerals, their affections, their cruelties, their passions, their crimes. He saw himself in a garden at Pera staring at painted women, neither desiring them nor turning from them with any disgust. He saw himself—as an old woman. A smoldering defiance within him sent out a spurt of scorching flame.

* * * * *

Sitting alone by the stream in the Valley of Roses Dion heard the sound of steps, and presently saw a slight, very refined-looking man in riding-breeches, with a hunting-crop in his hand, coming down to the bank. He sat down on a rough wooden bench under a willow tree, lit a cigar and gazed into the water. He had large, imaginative gray eyes. There was something military and something poetic in his manner and bearing and in his whole appearance. Almost directly from a little rustic cafe close by a Greek lad came, carrying a wooden stool. On it he placed a steaming brass coffee pot, a cup and saucer, sugar, a stick of burning incense in a tiny vase, and a rose with a long stalk. Then he went swiftly away, looking very intelligent. The stranger—obviously an Englishman—picked up the rose, held it, smelt it, laid it down and began to sip his coffee. Then in a very casual, easy-going way, like a man who was naturally sociable, and who enjoyed having a word with any one whom he came across, he began to speak to Dion.

When that day died Dion stood alone looking down into the stream. He looked till he saw in it the face of night. Broken stars quivered in the water; among them for a moment he perceived the eyes of a child, of a child who had been able to love him as a woman had not been able to love him, and to forgive him as a woman could not forgive him.

When Dion walked back to his hotel the candlelight glimmered over the dining-table at the Villa Hafiz where Mrs. Clarke sat with her three guests—the Ambassador, Madame Davroulos, the wife of a Greek millionaire whose home was at Smyrna, and Ahmed Bey, one of the Sultan's adjutants.

Hadi Bey had long ago passed out of her life.

That evening the Ambassador got up to go rather early. His caique was lying against the quay.

"Come out by the garden gate, won't you?" said Mrs. Clarke to him, and she led the way to the tangled rose garden, where sometimes she sat and read the poems of Hafiz.

Madame Davroulos was smoking a large cigar in a corner of the drawing-room and talking volubly to Ahmed Bey, who was listening as only a Turk can listen, with a smiling and immense serenity, twisting a string of amber beads in his padded fingers.

"He was there?" said Mrs. Clarke, in her quietest and most impersonal manner.

"Yes—he was there."

The Ambassador paused by the fountain, and stood with one foot on the marble edge of the basin, gazing down on the blue lilies whose color looked dull and almost black in the night.

"He was there. I talked with him for quite half an hour. He seemed glad to talk; he talked almost fiercely."

Mrs. Clarke's white face looked faintly surprised.

"Eventually I told him who I was, and he told his name to me, watching me narrowly to see how I should take it. My air of complete serenity over the revelation seemed to reassure him. I said I knew he was a friend of yours and that my wife and I would be very glad to see him at Therapia, and at the Embassy in Pera later on. He said he would come to Therapia to-morrow."

This time Mrs. Clarke looked almost strongly surprised.

"What did you talk about?" she asked.

"Chiefly about a book he seems to have been reading recently, Richard Burton's 'Kasidah.' You know it, of course?"

"I remember Omar Khayyam much better."

"He spoke strangely, almost terribly about it. Perhaps you know how converts to Roman Catholicism talk in the early days of their conversion, as if they alone understood the true meaning of being safe in sunlight, cradled and cherished in the blaze, as it were. Well, he spoke like one just converted to a belief in the all-sufficiency of this life if it is thoroughly lived; and, I confess, he gave me the impression of being cradled and cherished in thick darkness."

Sir Carey was silent for a moment. Then he said:

"What was this man, Leith?"

"Do you mean——?"

"Before his married life came to an end?"

"The straight, athletic, orthodox young Englishman; very sane and simple, healthily moral; not perhaps particularly religious, but full of sentiment and trust in a boyish sort of way. I remember he read Christian morals into Greek art."

Sir Carey raised his eyebrows.

"One could sum him up by saying that he absolutely believed in and exclusively adored a strong religious, beautiful, healthy-minded and healthy-bodied Englishwoman, who has now, I believe, entered a sisterhood, or something of the kind. She colored his whole life. He saw life through her eyes, and believed through her faith. At least, I should think so."

"Then he's an absolutely different man from what he was."

"The strong religious, beautiful, healthy-minded and bodied Englishwoman has condemned as a crime a mere terrible mistake. She has taken herself away from her husband and given herself to God. She cared for the child."

Mrs. Clarke laid a curious cold emphasis on the last sentence.

"Horrible!" said Sir Carey slowly. "And so now he turns from the Protestant's God to Destiny playing with the pawns upon the great chessboard. But if he's a man of sentiment, and not an intellectual, he'll never find this life all-sufficient, however he lives it. The darkness will never be enough for him."

"It has to be enough for a great many of us," said Mrs. Clarke.

There was a long pause, which she broke by saying, in a lighter voice:

"As he's going to visit you, I can go on having him here. You'll let people know, won't you?"

"That he's a friend of ours? Of course."

"That will make things all right."

"You run your unconventionalities always on the public race-course, in sight of the grand stand packed with the conventionalities."

"What else can I do? Besides, secret things are always found out."

"You never went in for them."

"And yet my own husband misunderstood me."

"Poor Beadon! He was an excellent councilor."

"And an excellent husband."

"But he made a great fool of himself."

"Yes," said Mrs. Clarke, without any animus. "And so Mr. Leith made a sad impression upon you?"

"A few men can be tormented. He is one of them. He has gone down into the dark places. Perhaps the Furies are with him there, the attendants of the Goddess of Death."

He glanced at his companion. She was standing absolutely still, gazing down into the water. Her white face looked beautiful, but strangely haggard and implacable in the night. And for a moment his mind dwelt on the image conjured up by his last words, and he thought of her as the Goddess of Death.

"Well," he said, "I must go, or Delia will be wondering. She knows your power."

"And knows I am too faithful to her not to resist yours."

He pressed her hand, then said rather abruptly:

"Are you feverish to-night?"

"No," said Mrs. Clarke, almost with the hint of a sudden irritation. "I am never feverish."

Sir Carey went away to his caique.

When he had gone Mrs. Clarke stood alone by the fountain for a moment, frowning, and with her thin lips closely compressed, almost, indeed, pinched together. She gazed down at her hands. They were lovely hands, small, sensitive, refined; they looked clever, too, not like tapering fools. She knew very well how lovely they were, yet now she looked at them with a certain distaste. Betraying hands! Abruptly she extended them towards the fountain, and let the cool silver of the water spray over them. And as she watched the spray she thought of the wrinkles about Dion's eyes.

"Ah, ma chere, qu'est que vous faites la toute seule? Vous prenez un bain?"

The powerful contralto of Madame Davroulos flowed out from the drawing-room, and her alluring mustache appeared at the lighted French windows.

Mrs. Clarke dried her hands with a minute handkerchief, and, without troubling about an explanation, turned away from the rose garden. But when her two guests were gone she told her Greek butler to bring out an arm-chair and a foot-stool, and the Russian maid, whom Dion had seen, to bring her a silk wrap. Then she sent them both to bed, lit a cigarette and sat down by the fountain, smoking cigarette after cigarette quickly. Not till the freshness of dawn was in the air, and a curious living grayness made the tangled rose bushes look artificial and the fountain strangely cold, did she get up to go to bed.

She looked very tired; but she always looked tired, although she scarcely knew what physical fatigue was. The gray of dawn grew about her and emphasized her peculiar pallor, the shadows beneath her large eyes, the haunted look about her cheeks and her temples.

As she went into the house she pulled cruelly at a rose bush. A white rose came away from its stalk in her hand. She crushed its petals and flung them away on the sill of the window.

While Mrs. Clarke was sitting by the fountain in the garden of the Villa Hafiz, Dion was sleepless in his bedroom at the Hotel Belgrad. He was considering whether he should end his life or whether he should change the way of his life. He was not conscious of struggle. He did not feel excited. But he did feel determined. The strength he possessed was asserting itself. It had slumbered within him; it had not died.

Either he would die now or he would genuinely live, would lay a grip on life somehow.

If he chose to die how would Mrs. Clarke take the news of his death? He imagined some one going to the Villa Hafiz from the Hotel Belgrad with a message: "The English gentleman Mr. Vane took the room for has just killed himself. What is to be done with the body?" What would Mrs. Clarke say? What would she look like? What would she do? He remembered the sign of the cross she had made in the flat in Knightsbridge. With that sign she had dismissed the soul of Brayfield into the eternities. Would she dismiss the soul of Dion Leith with the sign of the cross?

If she heard of his death, Rosamund would of course be unmoved, or would, perhaps, feel a sense of relief. And doubtless she would offer up to God a prayer in which his name would be mentioned. Women who loved God were always ready with a prayer. If it came too late, never mind! It was a prayer, and therefore an act acceptable to God.

But Mrs. Clarke? Certainly she would not pray about it. Dion had a feeling that she would be angry. He had never seen her angry, but he felt sure she could be enraged in a frozen, still, terrible way. If he died perhaps a thread would snap, the thread of her design. For she had some purpose in connexion with him. She had willed him to come to this place; she was willing him to remain in it. Apparently she wished to raise him out of the dust. He thought of Eyub, of Mrs. Clarke walking beside him on the dusty road. She had seemed very much at home in the dust. But she was not like Rosamund; she was not afraid of a speck of dust falling upon the robe of her ideals. What was Mrs. Clarke's purpose in connexion with him? He did not pursue that question, but dismissed it, incurious still in his misery, which had become more active since his strength had stirred out of sleep. If he did not die how was he going to live? He had lived by the affections. Could he live by the lusts? He had no personal ambitions; he had no avarice to prompt him to energy; he was not in love with himself. Suddenly he realized the value of egoism to the egoist, and that he was very poor because he was really not an egoist by nature. If he had been, if he were, perhaps things would have gone better for him in the past, would be more endurable now. But he had lived not to himself but to another.

He told himself that to do that was the rankest folly. At any rate he would never do that again. But the unselfishness of love had become a habit with him. Even in his extreme youth he had instinctively saved up, moved, no doubt, by an inherent desire to have as large a gift as possible ready when the moment for giving came.

If he lived on he must live for himself; he must reverse all his rules of conduct; he must fling himself into the life of self-gratification. He had come to believe that the men who trample are the men who succeed and who have the happiest lives. Sensitiveness does not pay; loving consideration of others brings no real reward; men do not get what they give. It is the hard and the passionate man who is the victor in life, not the man who is tender, thoughtful, even unselfish in the midst of his passion. Self-control—what a reward Dion had received for the self-control of his youth!

If he lived he would cast it away.

He sat at his window till dawn, till the sea woke and the hills of Asia were visible under a clear and delicate sky. He leaned out and felt the atmosphere of beginning that is peculiar to the first hour of daylight. Could he begin again? It seemed impossible. Yet now he felt he could not deprive himself of life. Suicide is a cowardly act, even though a certain kind of courage must prompt the pulling of the trigger, the insertion of the knife, or the pouring between the lips of the poison. Dion had not the courage of that cowardice, or the cowardice of that courage. Perhaps, without knowing it, in deciding to live he was only taking one more step on the road whose beginning he had seen in Elis, as he waited alone outside of the house where Hermes watched over the child; was saving the distant Rosamund from a stroke which would pierce through her armor even though she knelt before the throne of God. But he was conscious only of the feeling that he could not kill himself, though he did not know why he could not. The capacity for suicide evidently was not contained in his nature. He rejected the worm of Izrail; he rejected, too, the other death. He must, then, live.

He washed and lay down on his bed. And directly he lay down he wondered why he had been sitting up and mentally debating a great question. For in the Valley of Roses he had surely decided it before he spoke to Sir Carey Ingleton. When he said he would visit Lady Ingleton he must have decided. That visit would mean the return to what is called normal life, the exit from the existence of a castaway, the entrance into relations with his kind. He dreaded that visit, but he meant to pay it. In paying it he would take his first step away from the death that walks in form of life.

He could not sleep, and soon he got up again and went to the window. A gust of wind came to him from the sea. It seemed to hint at a land that was cold, and he thought of Russia, and then again of the distant places in which he might lose himself, places in which no one would know who he was, or trouble about the past events of his life. There before him was Asia rising out of the dawn. He had only to cross a narrow bit of sea and a continent was ready to receive him and to hide him. So he had thought of Africa on many a night as he sat in the Hotel des Colonies at Marseilles. But he had not crossed to Africa.

The wind died away. It had only been a capricious gust, a wandering guest of the morning. Down below in the Bay of Buyukderer the waters were quiet; the row boats lay still at the edge of the quay; the small yachts, with their sails furled, slept at their moorings. The wind had been like a summons, a sudden tug at him as of a hand saying, with its bones, its muscles, its nerves, its sinews, "Come with me!"

Once before he had felt something like that in a London Divorce Court, but it had been fainter, subtler and perhaps warmer. The memory of his curiosity about the unwise life returned to him, somehow linked with the wandering wind. In his months of the living death he had often looked on at it in the cities through which he had drifted, but he had never taken part in it. He had been emptied of the force to do that by his misery. Now he was conscious of force though his misery was not lessened, seemed to him even to have increased. He had often been dulled by grief; now he felt cruelly alive.

He went down to the sea, found the Albanian boatman with whom he had rowed on his first day at Buyukderer, took his boat out and bathed from it. The current beyond the bay was strong. He had a longing to let it take him whither it would. If only he could find an influence to which he could give himself, an influence which would sweep him away!

If only he could get rid of his long fidelity!

When he climbed dripping, and with his hair plastered down on his forehead, into the boat, the Albanian stared at him as if in surprise.

"What's the matter?" said Dion in French, when he was dry and getting into his clothes.

But the man only replied:

"Monsieur tres fort molto forte, moi aussi tres fort. Monsieur venez sempre con moi!"

And he smiled with the evident intention of being agreeable to a valuable client. Dion did not badger him with any more questions. As the boat touched the quay he told the man to be ready to start for Therapia that day at any time after three o'clock.

When he reached the summer villa of the Ambassador he was informed by a tall English footman that Lady Ingleton was at home. She received Dion in the midst of the little dogs, but after he had been with her for a very few minutes she rang for a servant and banished them. Secretly she was deeply interested in this man who had killed his son, but she gave Dion no reason to suppose that she was concentrating on him. Her lazy, indifferent manner was perfectly natural, but perhaps now and then she was more definitely kind than usual; and she managed somehow to show Dion that she was ready to be his friend.

"If you stay long we must take you over one day on the yacht to Brusa," she said presently. "Cynthia loves Brusa, and so does my husband. We went over there once with Pierre Loti. Cynthia and poor Beadon Clarke were of the party, I remember. We had a delightful time."

"Why do you say poor Beadon Clarke?" asked Dion abruptly.

That day he was at a great parting of the ways. He was concentrated upon himself and his own decision, so concentrated that the conventions meant little to him. He was totally unaware of the bruskness of such a question asked of a woman whom he had never seen before.

"One pities a thoroughly good fellow who does a thoroughly foolish thing. It was a very, very foolish thing to do to attack Cynthia."

"I was in court during part of the trial."

"Well, then, you know how foolish it was. Some people can't be attacked with impunity."

The inflexion of Lady Ingleton's voice at that moment made Dion think of Mrs. Chetwinde. Once or twice Mrs. Chetwinde's voice had sounded almost exactly like that when she had spoken of Mrs. Clarke.

"Especially people who are innocent," he said.

"Naturally, as Cynthia was. Beadon Clarke made a terrible mistake, poor fellow."

When Dion got up to go she again alluded to his staying on at Buyukderer, with an "if" attached to the allusion, and her dark eyes, which looked like an Italian's, rested upon him with a soft, but very intelligent, scrutiny. He had an odd feeling that she had taken a liking to him, and yet that she did not wish him to stay on in Buyukderer.

"I don't quite know what I am going to do," he said.

As he spoke the hideous freedom of his empty life seemed to gather itself together, and to flow stealthily upon him like a filthy wave bearing refuse upon its surface.

"I'm a free agent," he added, looking hard at Lady Ingleton. "I have no ties."

He shook her hand and went away.

That evening she said to her husband:

"I have felt sorry for myself occasionally, and for other people in my Christian moments, but I have never in the past felt so sorry for any one as I feel now for Mr. Leith."

"Because of the tragedy which has marred his life?"

"It isn't only that. He's on the edge of so much."

"You don't mean——?"

Sir Carey paused.

"No, no," Lady Ingleton said, almost impatiently. "Life hasn't done with that man yet. I could almost find it in my heart to wish it had. Shall we take him to Brusa on the yacht? That would advertise our acquaintance with him to all the gossips on the Bosporus. I promised Cynthia I would throw my mantle over him."

"I'm always ready for a visit to your only rival," said Sir Carey.

"La Mosquee Verte! I'll think about it. We might go for three or four days."

Her warm voice sounded rather reluctant; yet her husband knew that she wished to go.

"It would be an excellent way of showing your mantle to the gossips," he remarked. "But you always think of excellent ways."

Two days later the Embassy yacht, the "Leyla," having on board Sir Carey and Lady Ingleton, Mrs. Clarke, Cyril Vane, Dion, and Turkish Jane, the doyenne of the Pekinese, sailed for Mudania on the sea of Marmora, which is the Port of Brusa.



CHAPTER V

On the day after the return of the "Leyla" from Mudania, Mrs. Clarke asked Dion if he would dine with her at the Villa Hafiz. She asked him by word of mouth. They had met on the quay. It was morning, and Dion was about to embark in the Albanian's boat for a row on the Bosporus when he saw Mrs. Clarke's thin figure approaching him under a white umbrella lined with delicate green. She was wearing smoked spectacles, which made her white face look strange and almost forbidding in the strong sunlight.

"I can't come," he said.

And there was a sound almost of desperation in his voice.

"I can't."

She said nothing, but she stood there beside him looking very inflexible. Apparently she was waiting for an explanation of his refusal, though she did not ask for it.

"I can't be with people. It's no use. I've tried it. You didn't know—"

"Yes, I did," she interrupted him.

"You did know?"

He stood staring blankly at her.

"Surely I—I tried my best. I did my utmost to hide it."

"You couldn't hide it from me."

"I must go away," he said.

"Come to-night. Nobody will be there."

"It isn't a party?"

"We shall be alone."

"You meant to ask people?"

"I won't. I'll ask nobody. Half-past eight?"

"I'll come," he said.

She turned away without another word.

Just after half-past eight he rang at the door of the villa.

As he went into the hall and smelt the strong perfume of flowers he wondered that he had dared to come. But he had been with Mrs. Clarke when she was in horrible circumstances; he had sat and watched her when she was under the knife; he had helped her to pass through a crowd of people fighting to stare at her and making hideous comments upon her. Then why, even to-night, should he dread her eyes? His remembrance of her tragedy made him feel that hers was the one house into which he could enter that night.

As he walked into the drawing-room he recollected walking into Mrs. Chetwinde's drawing-room, full of interest in the woman who was in sanctuary, but who was soon to be delivered up, stripped by a man of the law's horrible allegations, to the gaping crowd. Now she was living peacefully among her friends, the custodian of her boy, a woman who had won through; and he was a wanderer, a childless father, the slayer of his son.

Mrs. Clarke kept him waiting for a few minutes. He stood at the French window and listened to the fountain. In the fall of the water there was surely an undertune. He seemed to know that it was there and yet he could not hear it; and he felt baffled as if by a thin mystery.

Then Mrs. Clarke came in and they went at once to dinner.

During dinner they talked very little. She spoke when the Greek butler was in the room, and Dion did his best in reply; nevertheless the conversation languished. Although Dion had so few words to give to his hostess he felt abnormally alive. The whole of him was like a quivering nerve.

When dinner was over Mrs. Clarke said to the butler:

"Osman will make the coffee for us. He knows about it. We shall have it in the pavilion."

The butler, who, although a Greek, looked at that moment almost incredibly stolid, moved his rather pouting lips, no doubt in assent, and was gone. They saw him no more that night.

They walked slowly from terrace to terrace of the climbing garden till they came to the height on which the pavilion stood guarded by the two mighty cypresses. There was no moon, and the night was a very dark purple night, with stars that looked dim and remote, like lost stars in the wilderness of infinity. From the terraces came the scent of flowers. In the pavilion one hanging lamp gave a faint light which emphasized the obscurity. It shone through colored panes and drew thick shadows on the floor and on sections of the divans. The heaps of cushions were colorless, and had a strange look of unyielding massiveness, as if they were blocks of some hard material. Osman stood beside one of the coffee-tables.

As soon as his mistress appeared he began to make the coffee. Dion stayed upon the terrace, and Mrs. Clarke went into the pavilion and sat down.

The cypresses were like dark towers in the night. Dion looked up at them. Their summits were lost in the brooding purple darkness. Cypresses! Why had he thought of cypresses in England in connexion with Mrs. Clarke? Why had he seen her standing among cypresses, seen himself coming to her and with her in the midst of the immense shadows they cast? No doubt simply because he knew she lived much in Turkey, the land of the cypress. That must have been the reason. Nevertheless now he was oppressed by a weight of mystery somehow connected with those dark and gigantic trees; and he remembered the theory that the past, the present and the future are simultaneously in being, and that those who are said to read the future in reality possess only the power of seeing what already is on another plane. Had he in England, however vaguely, however dimly, seen as through a crack some blurred vision of what was already in existence? He felt almost afraid of the cypresses. Nevertheless, as he stood looking up at them, his sense almost of fear tempted him to make an experiment. He remained absolutely still, and strove to concentrate all his faculties. After a long pause he shut his eyes.

"If the far future is even now in being," he said mentally, "let me look upon it now."

He saw nothing; but immediately he heard the sound of wind among pine trees, as he had heard it with Rosamund in the green valley of Elis. It rose in the silent night, that long murmur of eternity, and presently faded away.

He shuddered and turned sharply towards the pavilion.

Osman had gone, and Mrs. Clarke was pouring the coffee into the tiny cups.

"There's no wind, is there—is there?" he asked her.

She looked up at him.

"But not a breath!" she said.

After a pause she added:

"Why do you ask such a thing?"

"I heard wind in—in the tops of trees," he almost stammered.

"That's impossible."

"But I say I did!" he exclaimed, with violence. "In pine trees."

"There are no pine trees here," she said, in her husky voice. "Sit down and have your coffee."

He obeyed her and sat down quickly, and quickly he took the coffee-cup from her.

"Have a little mastika with it," she said.

And she pushed a tall liqueur-glass full of the colorless liquid towards him.

"Yes," he said.

As he drank he looked out sideways through the wide opening in the pavilion. There was not a breath of wind.

"I can't understand why I heard the noise of wind in pine trees," he forced himself to say.

"Seemed to hear it," she corrected him. "Perhaps you were thinking of it."

"But I wasn't!"

A jeweled gleam from the lamp fell upon one side of her face. She moved, and the light dropped away from her.

"What were you thinking of?" she asked.

"Of the future."

"Ah!"

"That's why it is inexplicable."

"I don't understand."

"Don't let us talk about it any more," he said, in an almost terrible voice. "I must have had an hallucination."

"Have you ever before thought you were the victim of an hallucination?" she asked.

"Yes. Several times I have seen the eyes of my little boy. I saw them a few nights ago in the stream that flows through the Valley of Roses, just after Sir Carey had left me."

"Don't look into water again except in daylight. It is the night that brings fancies with it. If you gaze very long at anything in a dim light you are sure to see something strange or horrible."

"But an hallucination of sound! I must go away from here! Perhaps in some other place—"

But she interrupted him inflexibly.

"Going away would be absolutely useless. A man can't travel away from himself."

"But I can't lead a normal life. It's impossible. Those horrible nights on the 'Leyla'——"

He stopped. The effort he had made during the trip to Brusa seemed to have exhausted the last remnants of any moral force he had still possessed when he started on that journey.

"I had made up my mind to begin again, to lay hold on some sort of real life," he continued, after a pause. "I was determined to face things. I called at Therapia. I accepted Lady Ingleton's invitation. I've done all I can to make a new start. But it's no use. I can't keep it up. I haven't the force for it. It was hell—being with happy people."

"You mean the Ingletons. Yes, they are very happy."

"And Vane, who's just engaged to be married. I saw her photograph in his cabin. They were all—all very kind. Lady Ingleton did everything to make me feel at ease. He's a delightful fellow—the Ambassador, I mean. But I simply can't stand mingling my life with lives that are happy. So I had better go away and be alone again."

"And lives that are unhappy?"

"What do you mean?"

"Can't you mingle your life with them, or with one of them?"

He was silent, looking towards her. She was wearing a very dark blue tea-gown of some thin material in which her thin body seemed lost. He saw the dark folds of it flowing over the divan on which she was leaning, and trailing to the rug at her feet. Her face was a faint whiteness under her colorless hair. Her eyes were two darknesses in it. He could not see them distinctly, but he knew they were looking intent and distressed.

"Haven't you told me I look punished?" said the husky voice.

"Are you unhappy?" he asked.

"Do you think I have much reason to be happy?"

"You have your boy."

"For a few weeks in the year. I have lost my husband in a horrible way, worse than if he had died. I live entirely alone. I can't marry again. And yet I'm not at all old, and not at all finished. But perhaps you have never really thought about my situation seriously. After all, why should you? Why should any one? I won my case, and so of course it's all right."

"Are you unhappy, then?"

"What do you suppose about me?"

"I know you've gone through a great deal. But you have your boy."

There was a sound almost of dull obstinacy in his voice.

"Some women are not merely mothers, or potential mothers!" said an almost fierce voice. "Some women are just women first and mothers second. There are women who love men for themselves, not merely because men are possible child-bringers. To a real and complete woman no child can ever be the perfect substitute for a husband or a lover. Even nature has put the lover first and the child second. I forbid you to say that I have my boy, as if that settled the question of my happiness. I forbid you."

He heard her breathing quickly. Then she added:

"But how could you be expected to understand women like me?"

The intensity of her sudden outburst startled him as the strength of the current in the Bosporus had startled him when he plunged into the sea from the Albanian's boat.

"You have been brought up in another school," she continued slowly, and with a sort of icy bitterness. "I forgive you."

She got up from the divan and went out upon the terrace, leaving him alone in the pavilion, which seemed suddenly colder when she had left it.

He did not follow her. A breath from a human furnace had scorched him—had scorched the nerve, and the nerve quivered.

"You have been brought up in a different school." Welsley and Stamboul—Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke. Once, somewhere, he had made that comparison. As he sat in the pavilion it seemed to him that for a moment he heard the cool chiming of bells in a gray cathedral tower, the faint sound of the Dresden Amen. But he looked out through the opening in the pavilion, and far down below he saw lights on the Bay of Buyukderer, the vague outlines of hills; and the perfume that came to him out of the night was not the damp smell of an English garden.

An English garden! In the darkness of a November night he stood within the walls of an English garden; he heard a cry, saw the movement of a woman's body, and knew that his life was in ruins. The woman fled, but he followed her blindly; he sought for her in the dark. He wanted to tell her that he had been but the instrument of Fate, that he was not to blame, that he needed compassion more than any other man living. But she eluded him in the darkness, and presently he heard a key grind in a lock. A friend had locked the door of his home against him in order that his wife might have time to escape from him.

Then he heard a husky voice say, "My friend, it will have to come." And, suddenly it came.

He broke down absolutely, threw himself on his face on the divan with his arms stretched out beyond his head, grasped the cushions and sobbed. His body shook and twitched; his face was contorted; his soul writhed. A storm that came from within him broke upon him. He crashed into the abyss. Down, down he went, till the last faint ray from above was utterly blotted out. She whom he had loved so much sent him down, she who far away had given herself to God. He felt her ruthless hands—the hands of a good woman, the hands of a loving mother—pressing him down. Let her have her will. He would go into the last darkness. Then, perhaps, she would be more at ease; then, perhaps, she would know the true peace of God. He would pay to the uttermost farthing both for himself and for her.

Outside, just hidden from him by the pavilion wall, Mrs. Clarke stood in the shadow of one of the cypresses, and listened. The trip on the "Leyla" had served two purposes. It was better so. When a thing must be, the sooner it is over the better. And she had waited for a very long time. She drew her brows together as she thought of the long time she had waited. Then she moved and walked away down the terrace. She had heard enough.

She went to the far end of the terrace. A wooden seat was placed there in the shadow of a plane tree. She sat down on it, rested her pointed chin in the palm of her right hand, with her elbow on her knee, and remained motionless. She was giving him time; time to weep away the past and the good woman who had ruined his life. Even now she knew how to be patient. In a way she pitied him. If she had not had to be patient for such a long time she would have pitied him much more. But he had often hurt her; and, as Lady Ingleton had said, she was by nature a cruel woman. Nevertheless she pitied him for being, or for having been, so exclusive in love. And she wondered at him not a little.

Lit-up caiques glided out on the bay far beneath her. A band was playing on the quay. She wished it would stop, and she glanced at a little watch which Aristide Dumeny had given her, and which was pinned among the dark blue folds of her gown. But she could not see its face clearly, and she lit a match. A quarter-past ten. The band played till eleven. She lit a cigarette and stared down the hill at the moving lights in the bay.

She had made many water excursions at night. Some of them—two or three at least—had been mentioned in the Divorce Court. She had had a narrow escape that summer in London. It had given her a lesson; but she still had much to learn before she could be considered a past mistress in the school of discretion. Almost ever since she could remember she had been driven by the reckless spirit within her. But she had been given a compensation for that in the force of her will. That force had done wonders for her all through her life. It had even captured and retained for her many women friends. Driven she had been, and no doubt would always be, but she believed that she would always skirt the precipices of life, and would never fall into the abysses.

The timorous and overscrupulous women were the women who missed their footing, because, when they made a false step, they made it in fear and trembling, with the shadow of regret always dogging their heels. And yet, now Jimmy was getting a big boy, even she knew moments of fear.

She moved restlessly. The torch was luring her on, and yet now, for an instant, she was conscious of holding back. August was not far off; Jimmy was coming out to her for his holidays. Suppose, after all, she gave it up? A word from her—or merely a silence—and that man in the pavilion close by would go away from Buyukderer and would probably never come back. If, for once in her life, she played for safety?

The sound of the band on the quay—there had been a short interval of silence—came up to her again. Forty minutes more! She would give that man in the pavilion and herself forty minutes. She could see the lights which outlined the kiosk. When they went out she would come to a decision. Till then, sitting alone, she could indulge in a mental debate. The mere fact that, at this point, she debated the question which filled her mind proved Jimmy's power over her. As she thought that she began to resent her boy's power. And it would grow; inevitably it would grow. She moved her thin shoulders. Then she sat very still.

If only she didn't love Jimmy so much! Suppose she had lost her case in the Divorce Case and Jimmy had been taken away from her? Even now she shuddered when she thought of the risk she had run. She remembered again the period of waiting when the jury could not come to an agreement. What torture she had endured, though no one knew it, or, perhaps, ever would know it! Had not that torture been a tremendous warning to her against the unwise life? Why go into danger again? But perhaps there was no danger any more. A man who has tried to divorce his wife once, and has failed, is scarcely likely to try again. Nevertheless she was full of hesitation to-night.

This fact puzzled and almost alarmed her, for she was not given to hesitation. She was a woman who thought clearly, who knew what she wanted and what she did not want, and who acted promptly and decisively. Perhaps she hesitated now because she had been forced to remain inactive in this particular case for such a long time; or perhaps she had received an obscure warning from something within her which knew what she—the whole of her that was Cynthia Clarke—did not consciously know.

The leaves of the plane tree rustled above her head, and she sighed. As she sat there in the purple darkness she looked like a victim; and for a moment she thought of herself as a victim.

Even that man in the pavilion who was agonizing had said to her that she looked "punished." She had been surprised, almost startled, by his flash of discernment. But she was sure he thought that matter only a question of coloring, of emaciation, of the shapes of features, and of the way eyes were set in the head.

When would the lights far below go out? She hated her indecision. It was new to her, and she felt it to be a weakness. Whatever she had been till now, she had certainly never been a weak woman, except perhaps from the absurd point of view of the Exeter Hall moralist. Scruples had been strangers to her, a baggage she had not burdened herself with on her journey.

Jimmy! That night Dion Leith had told her that he had seen the eyes of his boy in the stream that flowed through the Kesstane Dereh. She looked out into the purple night, and somewhere in the dim vastness full of mysteries and of half revelations she saw the frank and merciless eyes of a young Eton boy.

Should she be governed by them? Could she submit to the ignorant domination of a child who knew nothing of the complications of human life, nothing of the ways in which human beings are driven by imperious desires, or needs, which have perhaps been sown in ground of flesh and blood by dead parents, or by ancestors laid even with the dust? Could she immolate herself before the altar of the curious love which grew within her as Jimmy grew?

She was by nature perverse, and it was partly her love for Jimmy which pushed her towards the man who killed his son. But she had not told that even to herself. And she never told her secrets to other people, not even when they were women friends!

The lights on the kiosk on the quay went out. Mrs. Clarke was startled by the leaping up of the darkness which seemed to come from the sea. For her ears had been closed against the band, and she had forgotten the limit she had mentally put to her indecision. Eleven o'clock already! She got up from her seat. But still she hesitated. She did not know what she was going to do. She stood for a moment. Then she walked softly towards the pavilion. When she was near to it she stopped and listened. She did not hear any sound from within. There was nothing to prevent her from descending to the villa, from writing a note to Dion Leith asking him to leave Buyukderer on the morrow, and from going up to her bedroom. He would find the note in the hall when he came down; he would go away; she need never see him again. If she did that it would mean a new life for her, free from complications, a life dedicated to Jimmy, a life deliberately controlled.

It would mean, too, the futile close of a long pursuit; the crushing of an old and hitherto frustrated desire; the return, when Jimmy went back to England after the holidays, to an empty life which she hated, more than hated, a life of horrible restlessness, a life in which the imagination preyed, like a vulture, upon the body. It would mean the wise, instead of the unwise, life.

She stood there. With one hand she felt the little watch which Dumeny had given her. It was cold to the touch of her dry, hot hand. She felt the rough emerald set in the back of it. She and Dumeny had found that in the bazaars together, in those bazaars which Dumeny changed from Eastern shops into the Arabian Nights. Dion Leith could never do such a thing for her. But perhaps she could do it for him. The thought of that lured her. She stood at the street corner; it was very dark and still; she knew that the strange ways radiated from the place where she stood, but there was no one to go with her down them. She waited—waited. And then she saw far off the gleam of the torch from which spring colored fires. It flitted through the darkness; it hovered. The gleam of it lit up, like a goblin light, the beginnings of the strange ways. She saw shadowy forms slipping away stealthily into their narrow and winding distances; she saw obscure stairways, leaning balconies full of soft blackness. She divined the rooms beyond. And whispering voices came to her ears.

All the time she was feeling the watch with its rough uncut emerald.

Government came upon her. She felt, as often before, a great hand catch her in a grip of iron. She ceased to resist.

Still holding the watch, she went to the opening in the pavilion.

The hanging lamp had gone out. For a moment she could only see darkness in the interior. It looked empty. There was no sound within. Could the man she had been thinking about, debating about, have slipped away while she was sitting under the plane tree? She had been thinking so deeply that she had not heard the noise of the band on the quay; she might not have heard his footsteps. While she had been considering whether she should leave him perhaps he had fled from her.

This flashing thought brought her back at once to her true and irrevocable self, and she was filled instantly with fierce determination and a cold intense anger. Jimmy was forgotten. He was dead to her at that moment. She leaned forward, peering into the darkness.

"Dion!" she said. "Dion!"

There was no answer, but she saw something stir within, something low down. He was there—or something was there, something alive. She went into the pavilion, and knelt down by it.

"Dion!" she said.

He raised himself on the divan, and turned on his side.

"Why are you kneeling down?" he said. "Don't kneel. I hate to see a woman kneeling, and I know you never pray. Get up."

He spoke in a voice that was new to her. It seemed to her hot and hard. She obeyed him at once and got up from her knees.

"What did you mean just now when you asked me whether I couldn't mingle my life with an unhappy life? Sit here beside me."

She sat down on the edge of the divan very near to him.

"What do you suppose I meant?"

"Do you mean to say you like me in that way?"

"Yes."

"That you care about me?"

"Yes."

"You said you willed me to come out to Constantinople. Was it for that reason?"

She hesitated. She had an instinctive understanding of men, but she knew that, in one way, Dion was not an ordinary man; and even if he had been, the catastrophe in his life might well have put him for the time beyond the limits of her experience, wide though they were.

"No," she said, at last. "I didn't like you in that way till I met you in the street, and saw what she had done to you."

"Then it was only pity?"

"Was it? I knew your value in England."

She paused, then added, in an almost light and much more impersonal voice:

"I think I may say that I'm a connoisseur of values. And I hate to see a good thing flung away."

"I'm not a good thing. Perhaps I might have become one. I believe I was on the way to becoming worth something. But now I'm nothing, and I wish to be nothing."

"I don't wish you to be anything but what you are."

"Once you telegraphed to me—'May Allah have you in His hand.'"

"I remember."

"It's turned out differently," he said, almost with brutality.

"We don't know that. You came back."

"Yes. I was kept safe for a very good reason. I had to kill my child. I've accomplished that mission, and now, perhaps, Allah will let me alone."

She could not see his face or the expression in his eyes clearly, but now she saw his body move sharply. It twisted to the right and back again. She put out her hand and took his listlessly, almost as she had taken it in Mrs. Chetwinde's drawing-room when she had met him for the first time.

"Your hand is like fire," he whispered.

"Do you think I am ice?" she whispered back, huskily.

"Once I tried to take my hand away from yours."

"Try to take it away now, if you wish."

As she spoke she closed her hand tenaciously upon his. Her little fingers felt almost like steel on his hand, and he thought of the current of the Bosporus which had pulled at his swimming body.

To be taken and swept away! That at least would be better than drifting, better than death in the form of life, better than slinking in loneliness to watch the doings of others.

"I don't wish to take it away," he said.

And with the words mentally he bade an eternal farewell to Rosamund and to all the aspirations of his youth. From her and from them he turned away to follow the gleam of the torch. It flickered through the darkness; it wavered; it waited—for him. He had tried the life of wisdom, and it had cast him out; perhaps there was a place for him in the unwise life. He felt spiritually exhausted; but there was within him a physical fever which answered to the fever in the hand which had closed on his.