initial commit of ebook 4603HEADmain

1 files changed, 28695 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/4603.txt b/4603.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e332197
--- /dev/null
+++ b/4603.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,28695 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of In the Wilderness, by Robert Hichens
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: In the Wilderness
+
+Author: Robert Hichens
+
+Release Date: April 13, 2006 [EBook #4603]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE WILDERNESS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny; John Bickers
+
+
+
+
+
+IN THE WILDERNESS
+
+
+By Robert Hichens
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I--HERMES AND THE CHILD
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Amedeo Dorini, the hall porter of the Hotel Cavour in Milan, stood on
+the pavement before the hotel one autumn afternoon in the year 1894,
+waiting for the omnibus, which had gone to the station, and which was
+now due to return, bearing--Amedeo hoped--a load of generously inclined
+travelers. During the years of his not unpleasant servitude Amedeo had
+become a student of human nature. He had learnt to judge shrewdly and
+soundly, to sum up quickly, to deliver verdicts which were not unjust.
+And now, as he saw the omnibus, with its two fat brown horses, coming
+slowly along by the cab rank, and turning into the Piazza that is
+presided over by Cavour's statue, he prepared almost mechanically to
+measure and weigh evidence, to criticize and come to a conclusion.
+
+He glanced first at the roof of the omnibus to take stock of the luggage
+pile there. There was plenty of it, and a good deal of it was leather
+and reassuring. Amedeo had a horror of tin trunks--they usually gave
+such small tips. Having examined the luggage he sent a searching glance
+to two rows of heads which were visible inside the vehicle. The brawny
+porters hurried out, the luggage chute was placed in position, the
+omnibus door was opened, and the first traveler stepped forth.
+
+A German of the most economical type, large, red and wary, with a mouth
+like a buttoned-up pocket, was followed by a broad-waisted wife, with
+dragged hair and a looped-up gown. Amedeo's smile tightened. A Frenchman
+followed them, pale and elaborate, a "one-nighter," as Amedeo instantly
+decided in his mind. Such Frenchmen are seldom extravagant in hotels.
+This gentleman would want a good room for a small price, would be
+extremely critical about the cooking, and have a wandering eye and a
+short memory for all servants in the morning.
+
+An elderly Englishwoman was the fourth personage to appear. She was
+badly dressed in black, wore a tam-o'-shanter with a huge black-headed
+pin thrust through it, clung to a bag, smiled with amiable patronage as
+she emerged, and at once, without reason, began to address Amedeo and
+the porters in fluent, incorrect, and too carefully pronounced Italian.
+Amedeo knew her--the Tabby who haunts Swiss and Italian hotels, the
+eternal Tabby drastically complete.
+
+A gay Italian is gaiety in flight, a human lark with a song. But a
+gloomy Italian is oppressive and almost terrible. Despite the training
+of years Amedeo's smile flickered and died out. A ferocious expression
+surged up in his dark eyes as he turned rather bruskly to scrutinize
+without hope the few remaining clients. But suddenly his face cleared as
+he heard a buoyant voice say in English:
+
+"I'll get out first, Godfather, and give you a hand."
+
+On the last word, a tall and lithe figure stepped swiftly, and with a
+sort of athletic certainty, out of the omnibus, turned at once towards
+it, and, with a movement eloquent of affection and almost tender
+reverence, stretched forth an arm and open hand.
+
+A spare man of middle height, elderly, with thick gray hair, and a
+clean-shaven, much-lined face, wearing a large loose overcoat and soft
+brown hat, took the hand as he emerged. He did not need it; Amedeo
+realized that, realized also that he was glad to take it, enjoyed
+receiving this kind and unnecessary help.
+
+"And now for Beatrice!" he said.
+
+And he gave in his turn a hand to the girl who followed him.
+
+There were still two people in the omnibus, the elderly man's Italian
+valet and an Englishman. As the latter got out, and stretched his limbs
+cramped with much sitting, he saw Amedeo, with genuine smiles, escorting
+the two girls and the elderly man towards the glass-roofed hall, on the
+left of which was the lift. The figure of the girl who had stepped out
+first was about to disappear. As the Englishman looked she vanished.
+But he had time to realize that a gait, the carriage of a head and its
+movement in turning, can produce on an observer a moral effect. A joyous
+sanity came to him from this unknown girl and made him feel joyously
+sane. It seemed to sweep over him, like a cool and fresh breeze of the
+sea falling through pine woods, to lift from him some of the dust of
+his journey. He resolved to give the remainder of the dust to the public
+garden, told his name, Dion Leith, to the manager, learnt that the room
+he had ordered was ready for him, had his luggage sent up to it, and
+then made his way to the trees on the far side of the broad road which
+skirts the hotel. When he was among them he took off his hat, kept it
+in his hand, and, so, strolled on down the almost deserted paths. As
+he walked he tasted the autumn, not with any sadness, but with an
+appreciation that was almost voluptuous. He was at a time of life and
+experience, when, if the body is healthy, the soul is untroubled by
+care, each season of the year holds its thrill for the strongly beating
+heart, its tonic gift for the mind. Falling leaves were handfuls of gold
+for this man. The faint chill in the air as evening drew on turned his
+thoughts to the brightness and warmth of English fires burning on the
+hearths of houses that sheltered dear and protected lives. The far-off
+voices of calling children, coming to him from hidden places among the
+trees, did not make him pensive because of their contrast with things
+that were dying. He hailed them as voices of the youth which lasts in
+the world, though the world may seem to be old to those who are old.
+
+Dion Leith had a powerful grip on life and good things. He was young,
+just twenty-six, strong and healthy, though slim-built in body,
+alert and vigorous in mind, unperturbed in soul, buoyant and warmly
+imaginative. Just at that moment the joy of life was almost at full
+flood in him, for he had recently been reveling in a new and glorious
+experience, and now carried it with him, a precious memory.
+
+He had been traveling, and his wanderings had given him glimpses of two
+worlds. In one of these worlds he had looked into the depths, had felt
+as if he realized fully for the first time the violence of the angry and
+ugly passions that deform life; in the other he had scaled the heights,
+had tasted the still purity, the freshness, the exquisite calm, which
+are also to be found in life.
+
+He had visited Constantinople and had sailed from it to Greece. From
+Greece he had taken ship to Brindisi, and was now on his way home to
+England.
+
+What he had thought at the time to be an ill chance had sent him on his
+way alone. Guy Daventry, his great friend, who was to go with him, had
+been seized by an illness. It was too late then to find another man
+free. So, reluctantly, and inclined to grumble a little at fate, Dion
+had set off in solitude.
+
+He knew now that his solitude had given him keen sensations, which
+he could scarcely have felt with the best of friends. Never, in any
+company, had he been so repelled, enticed, disgusted, deeply enchanted,
+as on these lonely wanderings which were now a part of his life.
+
+How he had hated Constantinople, and how he had loved Greece! His
+expectation had been betrayed by the event. He had not known himself
+when he left England, or the part of himself which he had known had been
+the lesser part, and he had taken it for the greater. For he had set out
+on his journey with his hopes mainly fixed on Constantinople. Its road
+of wildness and tumult, its barbaric glitter, its crude mixture of
+races, even its passions and crimes--a legend in history, a solid fact
+of to-day--had allured his mind. The art of Greece had beckoned to him;
+its ancient shrines had had their strong summons for his brain; but
+he had scarcely expected to love the country. He had imagined it as
+certainly beautiful but with an austere and desolate beauty that would
+be, perhaps, almost repellent to his nature. He had conceived of it as
+probably sad in its naked calm, a country weary with the weight of a
+glorious past.
+
+But he had been deceived, and he was glad of that. Because he had been
+able to love Greece so much he felt a greater confidence in himself.
+Without any ugly pride he said to himself: "Perhaps my nature is a
+little bit better, a little bit purer than I had supposed."
+
+As the breeze in the public garden touched his bare head, slightly
+lifting his thick dark hair, he remembered the winds of Greece; he
+remembered his secret name for Greece, "the land of the early morning."
+It was good to be able to delight in the early morning--pure, delicate,
+marvelously fresh.
+
+He at down on a bench under a chestnut tree. The children's voices had
+died away. Silence seemed to be drawing near to the garden. He saw a
+few moving figures in the shadows, but at a distance, fading towards the
+city.
+
+The line of the figure, the poise of the head of that girl with whom he
+had driven from the station, came before Dion's eyes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+One winter day in 1895--it was a Sunday--when fog lay thickly over
+London, Rosamund Everard sat alone in a house in Great Cumberland Place,
+reading Dante's "Paradiso." Her sister, Beatrice, a pale, delicate
+and sensitive shadow who adored her, and her guardian, Bruce Evelin, a
+well-known Q.C. now retired from practice, had gone into the country to
+visit some friends. Rosamund had also been invited, and much wanted, for
+there was a party in the house, and her gaiety, her beauty, and her fine
+singing made her a desirable guest; but she had "got out of it." On this
+particular Sunday she specially wished to be in London. At a church not
+far from Great Cumberland Place--St. Mary's, Welby Street--a man was
+going to preach that evening whom she very much wanted to hear. Her
+guardian's friend, Canon Wilton, had spoken to her about him, and had
+said to her once, "I should particularly like _you_ to hear him." And
+somehow the simple words had impressed themselves upon her. So, when
+she heard that Mr. Robertson was coming from his church in Liverpool to
+preach at St. Mary's, she gave up the country visit to hear him.
+
+Beatrice and Bruce Evelin had no scruples in leaving her alone for a
+couple of days. They knew that she, who had such an exceptional faculty
+for getting on with all sorts and conditions of men and women, and
+who always shed sunshine around her, had within her a great love of,
+sometimes almost a thirst for, solitude.
+
+"I need to be alone now and then," they had heard her say; "it's like
+drinking water to me."
+
+Sitting quietly by the fire with her delightful edition of Dante, her
+left hand under her head, her tall figure stretched out in a low chair,
+Rosamund heard a bell ring below. It called her from the "Paradiso." She
+sprang up, remembering that she had given the butler no orders about not
+wishing to be disturbed. At lunch-time the fog had been so dense that
+she had not thought about possible visitors; she hurried to the head of
+the staircase.
+
+"Lurby! Lurby! I'm not at--"
+
+It was too late. The butler must have been in the hall. She heard the
+street door open and a man's voice murmuring something. Then the door
+shut and she heard steps. She retreated into the drawing-room, pulling
+down her brows and shaking her head. No more "Paradiso," and she loved
+it so! A moment before she had been far away.
+
+The book was lying open on the arm-chair in which she had been sitting.
+She went to close it and put it on a table. For an instant she looked
+down on the page, and immediately her dream returned. Then Lurby's dry,
+soft voice said behind her:
+
+"Mr. Leith, ma'am."
+
+"Oh!" She turned, leaving the book.
+
+Directly she looked at Dion Leith she knew why he had come.
+
+"I'm all alone," Rosamund said. "I stayed here, instead of going to
+Sherrington with Beattie and my guardian, because I wanted to hear a
+sermon this evening. Come and sit down by the fire."
+
+"What church are you going to?"
+
+"St. Mary's, Welby Street."
+
+"Shall I go with you?"
+
+Rosamund had taken up the "Paradiso" and was shutting it.
+
+"I think I'll go alone," she said gently but quite firmly.
+
+"What are you reading?"
+
+"Dante's 'Paradiso.'"
+
+She put the book down on a table at her elbow.
+
+"I don't believe you meant me to be let in," he said bluntly.
+
+"I didn't know it was you. How could I know?"
+
+"And if you had known?"
+
+She hesitated. His brows contracted till he looked almost fierce.
+
+"I'm not sure. Honestly I'm not sure. I've been quite alone since
+Friday, when they went. And I'd got it into my head that I wasn't going
+to see any one till to-morrow, except, of course, at the church."
+
+Dion felt chilled almost to the bone.
+
+"I can't understand," he almost burst out, in an uncontrolled way that
+surprised himself. "Are you completely self-sufficing then? But it isn't
+natural. Could you live alone?"
+
+"I didn't say that."
+
+She looked at him steadily and calmly, without a hint of anger.
+
+"But could you?"
+
+"I don't know. Probably not. I've never tried."
+
+"But you don't hate the idea?"
+
+His voice was almost violent.
+
+"No; if--if I were living in a certain way."
+
+"What way?"
+
+But she did not answer his question.
+
+"I dare say I might dislike living alone. I've never done such a thing,
+therefore I can't tell."
+
+"You're an enigma," he exclaimed. "And you seem so--so--you have this
+extraordinary, this abnormal power of attracting people to you. You are
+friends with everybody."
+
+"Indeed I'm not."
+
+"I mean you're so cordial, so friendly with everybody. Don't you care
+for anybody?"
+
+"I care very much for some people."
+
+"And yet you could live alone! Shut in here for days with a book"--at
+that moment he was positively jealous of old Dante, gone to his rest
+five hundred and seventy-four years ago--"you're perfectly happy."
+
+"The 'Paradiso' isn't an ordinary book," she said, very gently,
+and looking at him with a kind, almost beaming expression in her
+yellow-brown eyes.
+
+"I don't believe you ever read an ordinary book."
+
+"I like to feed on fine things. I'm half afraid of the second-rate."
+
+"I love you for that. Oh, Rosamund, I love you for so many things!"
+
+He got up and stood by the fire, turning his back to her for a moment.
+When he swung round his face was earnest but he looked calmer. She
+saw that he was making a strong effort to hold himself in, that he was
+reaching out after self-control.
+
+"I can't tell you all the things I love you for," he said, "but your
+independence of spirit frightens me. From the very first, from that
+evening when I saw you in the omnibus at the Milan Station over a year
+ago, I felt your independence."
+
+"Did I manifest it in the omnibus to poor Beattie and my guardian?" she
+asked, smiling, and in a lighter tone.
+
+"I don't know," he said gravely. "But when I saw you the same evening
+walking with your sister in the public garden I felt it more strongly.
+Even the way you held your head and moved--you reminded me of the
+maidens of the Porch on the Acropolis. I connected you with Greece and
+all my--my dreams of Greece."
+
+"Perhaps if you hadn't just come from Greece--"
+
+"Wasn't it strange," he said, interrupting her but quite unconscious
+that he did so, "that almost the first words I heard you speak were
+about Greece? You were telling your sister abut the Greek divers who
+come to Portofino to find coral under the sea. I was sitting alone in
+the garden, and you passed and I heard just a few words. They made me
+think of the first Greek Island I ever saw, rising out of the sunset
+as I voyaged from Constantinople to the Piraeus. It was wonderfully
+beautiful and wonderfully calm. It was like a herald of all the beauty
+and purity I found in Greece. It was--like you."
+
+"How you hated Constantinople!" she said. "I remember you denouncing its
+noise and its dirt, and the mongrel horrors of Pera, to my guardian in
+the hotel where we made friends. And he put in a plea for Stamboul."
+
+"Yes, I exaggerated. But Constantinople stood to me for all the uproar
+of life, and Greece for the calm and beauty and happiness, the great
+Sanity of the true happiness."
+
+He looked at her with yearning in his dark eyes.
+
+"For all I want in my own life," he added.
+
+He paused; then an expression of strong, almost hard resolution made his
+face look suddenly older.
+
+"You told me at Burstal, on the Chilton Downs, after your debut in
+'Elijah,' that you would give me an answer soon. I have waited a good
+while--some weeks----"
+
+"Why did you ask me just that day, after 'Woe unto them'?"
+
+"I felt I must," he answered, but with a slight awkwardness, as if he
+were evading something and felt half-guilty. "To-day I decided I would
+ask you again, for the last time."
+
+"You would never----"
+
+"No, never. If you say 'Wait, and come later on and ask me,' I shall not
+come."
+
+She got up restlessly. She was obviously moved.
+
+"Dion, I can't tell you to-day."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I don't know. I just feel I can't. It's no use."
+
+"When did you mean to tell me?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Did you mean ever to allude to the matter again, if I hadn't?"
+
+"Yes, I should have told you, because I knew you were waiting.
+I--I--often I have thought that I shall never marry any one."
+
+She looked into the fire. Her face had become almost mysterious.
+
+"Some women don't need--that," she murmured.
+
+The fire played over her pale yellow hair.
+
+"Abnormal women!" he exclaimed violently.
+
+She turned.
+
+"Hush! You don't know what you are saying. It isn't abnormal to wish to
+dedicate----"
+
+She stopped.
+
+"What?" he said.
+
+"Don't let us talk of these things. But you must not judge any woman
+without knowing what is in her heart. Even your own mother, with whom
+you have lived alone ever since your father's death--do you know very
+much of her? We can't always show ourselves plainly as we are. It may
+not be our fault."
+
+"You will marry. You must marry."
+
+"Why--must?"
+
+He gazed at her. As she met his eyes she reddened slightly,
+understanding his thought, that such a woman as she was ought not to
+avoid the great vocation of woman. But there was another vocation, and
+perhaps it was hers. She felt confused. Two desires were struggling
+within her. It was as if her nature contained two necessities which were
+wholly irreconcilable the one with the other.
+
+"You can't tell me?" he said, at last.
+
+"Not now."
+
+"Then I am going, and I shall never ask you again. But I shall never be
+able to love any one but you."
+
+He said nothing more, and went away without touching her hand.
+
+Words of Dante ran in Rosamund's head, and she repeated them to herself
+after Dion had gone.
+
+"_La divina volontate_!" She believed in it; she said to herself that
+she trusted it absolutely. But how was she to know exactly what it
+was? And yet, could she escape from it even if she wished to? Could she
+wander away into any path where the Divine Will did not mean her to set
+foot? Predestination--free will. "If only I were not so ignorant," she
+thought.
+
+Soon after six she went up to her bedroom to put on her things for
+church.
+
+Her bedroom was very simple, and showed plainly an indifference to
+luxury, a dislike of show and of ostentation in its owner. The walls and
+ceiling were white. The bed, which stood against the wall in one corner,
+was exceptionally long. This fact, perhaps, made it look exceptionally
+narrow. It was quite plain, had a white wooden bedstead, and was covered
+with a white bedspread of a very ordinary type. There was one arm-chair
+in the room made of wickerwork with a rather hard cushion on the seat,
+the sort of cushion that resolutely refuses to "give" when one sits
+down on it. On the small dressing-table there was no array of glittering
+silver bottles, boxes and brushes. A straw flagon of eau-de-Cologne was
+Rosamund's sole possession of perfume. She did not own a box of powder
+or a puff. But it must be acknowledged that she never looked "shiny."
+She had some ivory hair-brushes given to her one Christmas by Bruce
+Evelin. Beside them was placed a hideous receptacle for--well, for
+anything--pins, perhaps, buttons, small tiresomenesses of that kind.
+It was made of some glistening black material, and at its center there
+bloomed a fearful red cabbage rose, a rose all vulgarity, ostentation
+and importance. This monstrosity had been given to Rosamund as a
+thank-offering by a poor charwoman to whom she had been kind. It had
+been in constant use now for over three years. The charwoman knew this
+with grateful pride.
+
+Upon the mantelpiece there were other gifts of a similar kind: a
+photograph frame made of curly shells, a mug with "A present from
+Greenwich" written across it in gold letters, a flesh-colored glass
+vase with yellow trimmings, a china cow with its vermilion ears cocked
+forward, lying down in a green meadow which just held it, and a toy
+trombone with a cord and tassels. There were also several photographs of
+poor people in their Sunday clothes. On the walls hung a photograph of
+Cardinal Newman, a good copy of a Luini Madonna, two drawings of heads
+by Burne-Jones, a small painting--signed "G. F. Watts"--of an old tree
+trunk around which ivy was lovingly growing, and one or two prints.
+
+The floor was polished and partially covered by three good-sized mats.
+There was a writing-table on one side of the room with an ebony-and-gold
+crucifix standing upon it. Opposite to it, on the other side of the
+room near the fireplace, was a bookcase. On the shelves were volumes of
+Shakespeare, Dante, Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Christina Rossetti,
+Newman's "Dream of Gerontius" and "Apologia," Thomas a Kempis, several
+works on mystics and mysticism, a life of St. Catherine of Genoa,
+another of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius Loyola's "Spiritual
+Exercises," Pascal's "Letters," etc., etc. Over the windows hung
+gray-blue curtains.
+
+Into this room Rosamund came that evening; she went to a wardrobe and
+began to take down a long sealskin coat. Just then her maid appeared--an
+Italian girl whom she had taken into her service in Milan when she had
+studied singing there.
+
+"Shan't I come with you, Signorina?" she asked, as she took the jacket
+from her mistress and held it for Rosamund to put on.
+
+"No, thank you, Maria. I'm going to church, the Protestant church."
+
+"I could wait outside or come back to fetch you."
+
+"It's not far. I shall be all right."
+
+"But the fog is terrible. It's like a wall about the house."
+
+"Is it as bad as that?"
+
+She went to one of the windows, pulled aside the curtains, lifted the
+blind and tried to look out. But she could not, for the fog pressed
+against the window panes and hid the street and the houses opposite.
+
+"It is bad."
+
+She dropped the blind, let the curtains fall into place and turned
+round.
+
+"But I'd rather go alone. I can't miss the way, and I'm not a nervous
+person. You'd be far more frightened than I." She smiled at the girl.
+
+Apparently reassured, or perhaps merely glad that her unselfishness was
+not going to be tested, Maria accompanied her mistress downstairs and
+let her out. It was Lurby's "evening off," and for once he was not
+discreetly on hand.
+
+Church bells were chiming faintly in this City of dreadful night as
+Rosamund almost felt her way onward. She heard them and thought they
+were sad, and their melancholy seemed to be one with the melancholy of
+the atmosphere. Some one passed by her. She just heard a muffled sound
+of steps, just discerned a shadow--that was all.
+
+To-morrow she must give an answer to Dion Leith. She went on slowly in
+the fog, thinking, thinking. Two vertical lines showed in her usually
+smooth forehead.
+
+It was nearly half-past six when she turned into Welby Street. The
+church was not a large one and there was no parish attached to it. It
+was a proprietary chapel. The income of the incumbent came from pew
+rents. His name was Limer, and he was a first-rate preacher of the
+sensational type, a pulpit dealer in "actualities." He was also an
+excellent musician, and took great pains with his choir. In consequence
+of these talents, and of his diligent application of them, St. Mary's
+was generally full, and all its pews were let at a high figure.
+To-night, however, because of the fog, Rosamund expected to find few
+people.
+
+One bell was mournfully ringing as she drew near and presently saw a
+faint gleaming of light through long narrow windows of painted glass.
+"Ping, ping, ping!" It was a thin little summons to prayer. She passed
+through a gateway in some railings of wrought ironwork, crossed a
+slippery pavement and entered the church.
+
+It was already more than three parts full, and there was a large
+proportion of men in the congregation. A smart-looking young man,
+evidently a gentleman, who was standing close to the door, nodded to
+Rosamund and whispered:
+
+"I'll put you into Lady Millingham's seat. You'll find Mrs. Chetwinde
+and Mr. Darlington there."
+
+"Oh, I'd rather--" began Rosamund.
+
+But he had already begun to move up the aisle, and she was obliged to
+follow him to a pew close to the pulpit, in which were seated a smartly
+dressed woman with a vague and yet acute expression, pale eyes and
+a Burne-Jones throat; and a thin, lanky and immensely tall man of
+uncertain age, with pale brown, very straight hair, large white ears,
+thick ragged eyebrows, a carefully disarranged beard and mustache, and
+an irregular refined face decorated with a discreet but kind expression.
+These were Mrs. Willie Chetwinde, who had a wonderful house in Lowndes
+Square, and Mr. Esme Darlington, bachelor, of St. James's Square, who
+was everybody's friend including his own.
+
+Rosamund just recognized them gravely; then she knelt down and prayed
+earnestly, with her face hidden against her muff. She still heard the
+little bell's insistent "Ping, ping, ping!" She pressed her shut eyes
+so hard against the muff that rings of yellow light floated up in her
+darkness, forming, retreating, melting away.
+
+The bell ceased; the first notes of the organ sounded in a voluntary by
+Mendelssohn, amiable and charming; the choir filed in as Rosamund rose
+from her knees. In the procession the two last figures were Mr. Limer
+and Mr.--or, as he was always called in Liverpool, Father--Robertson.
+
+Mr. Limer was a short, squat, clean-shaven but hairy dark man, with
+coal-black hair sweeping round a big forehead, a determined face and
+large, indignant brown eyes. The Liverpool clergyman was of middle
+height, very thin, with snow-white hair, dark eyes and eyebrows, and a
+young almost boyish face, with straight, small features, and a luminous,
+gentle and yet intense look. He seemed almost to glow, quietly,
+definitely, like a lamp set in a dark place, and one felt that his glow
+could not easily be extinguished. He walked tranquilly by the side of
+Mr. Limer, and looked absolutely unselfconscious, quietly dignified and
+simple.
+
+When he went into the pulpit the lights were lowered and a pleasant
+twilight prevailed. But the preacher's face was strongly illuminated.
+
+Mr. Robertson preached on the sin of egoism, and took as the motto of
+his sermon the words--"_Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat_." His method
+of preaching was quiet, but intense; again the glow of the lamp. Often
+there were passages which suggested a meditation--a soul communing with
+itself fearlessly, with an unyielding, but never violent, determination
+to arrive at the truth. And Rosamund, listening, felt as if nothing
+could keep this man with the snow-white hair and the young face away
+from the truth.
+
+He ranged over a wide field--egoism being wide as the world--he exposed
+many of the larger evils brought about by egoism, in connexion with the
+Arts, with politics, with charity, with religious work in great cities,
+with missionary enterprises abroad; he touched on some of the more
+subtle forms of egoism, which may poison even the sources of love; and
+finally he discussed the gains and the losses of egoism. "For," he said,
+"let us be honest and acknowledge that we often gain, in the worldly
+sense, by our sins, and sometimes lose by our virtues." Power of a kind
+can be, and very often is, obtained by egoists through their egoism.
+He discussed that power, showed its value and the glory of it. Then
+he contrasted with it the power which is only obtained by those who,
+completely unselfish, know not how to think of themselves. He enlarged
+on this theme, on the Kingdom which can belong only to those who are
+selfless. And then he drew to the end of his sermon.
+
+"One of the best means I know," he said, "for getting rid of egoism is
+this: whenever you have to take some big decision between two courses
+of action--perhaps between two life courses--ask yourself, 'Which can I
+share?'--which of these two paths is wide enough to admit of my treading
+it with a companion, whose steps I can help, whose journey I can
+enliven, whose weariness I can solace, and whose burden I can now and
+then bear for a little while? And if only one of the paths is wide
+enough, then choose that in preference to the other. I believe
+profoundly in 'sharing terms.'"
+
+He paused, gazing at the congregation with his soft and luminous eyes.
+Then he added:
+
+"_Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat_. When the insistent _I_ sleeps, only
+then perhaps can the heart be truly awake, be really watchful. Then let
+us send the insistent I to sleep, and let us keep it slumbering."
+
+He half-smiled as he finished. There had been something slightly
+whimsical about his final words, about his manner and himself when he
+said them.
+
+Silence and the fog, and Rosamund walking homewards with her hands deep
+in her muff. All those bodies and minds and souls which had been in the
+church had evaporated into the night. Mrs. Chetwinde and Esme Darlington
+had wanted to speak to Rosamund, but she had slipped out of the church
+quickly. She did not wish to talk to any one.
+
+"_Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat_."
+
+What an odd little turn, or twist, the preacher had given to the meaning
+of those words! "Whenever you have to take some big decision between
+two life courses, ask yourself, 'Which can I share?' and if you can only
+share one, choose that."
+
+Very slowly Rosamund walked on, bending a little above the big muff,
+like one pulled forward by a weight of heavy thoughts. She turned a
+corner. Presently she turned another corner and traversed a square,
+which could not be seen to be a square. And then, quite suddenly, she
+realized that she had not been thinking about her way home and that she
+was lost in the impenetrable fog.
+
+She stood still and listened. She heard nothing. Traffic seemed stopped
+in this region. On her left there were three steps. She went up them and
+was under the porch of a house. Light shone dully from within, and by it
+she could just make out on the door the number "8." At least it seemed
+to her that probably it was an "8." She hesitated, came down the steps,
+and walked on. It was impossible to see the names of the streets and
+squares. But presently she would come across a policeman. She went on
+and on, but no policeman bulked shadowy against the background of night
+and of the fog which at last seemed almost terrible to her.
+
+Rosamund was not timid. She was constitutionally incapable of timidity.
+Nor was she actively alarmed in a strong and definite way. But gradually
+there seemed to permeate her a cold, almost numbing sensation of
+loneliness and of desolation. For the first time in her life she felt
+not merely alone but solitary, and not merely solitary but as if she
+were condemned to be so by some power that was hostile to her.
+
+It was a hideous feeling. Something in the fog and in the night made
+an assault upon her imagination. Abruptly she was numbered among the
+derelict women whom nobody wants, whom no man thinks of or wishes to be
+with, whom no child calls mother. She felt physically and morally, "I
+am solitary," and it was horrible to her. She saw herself old and alone,
+and she shuddered.
+
+How long she walked on she did not know, but when at last she heard
+a step shuffling along somewhere in front of her, she had almost--she
+thought--realized Eternity.
+
+The step was not coming towards her but was going onwards slowly before
+her. She hastened, and presently came up with an old man, poorly dressed
+in a dreadful frock-coat and disgraceful trousers, wearing on his long
+gray locks a desperado of a top hat, and carrying, in a bloated and
+almost purple hand, a large empty jug.
+
+"Please!" said Rosamund.
+
+The old gentleman shuffled on.
+
+"Could you tell me--_please_--can you tell me where we are?"
+
+She had grasped his left coat-sleeve. He turned and, bending, she peered
+into the face of a drunkard.
+
+"Close to the 'Daniel Lambert,'" said an almost refined old voice.
+
+And a pair of pathetic gray eyes peered up at her above a nose that was
+like a conflagration.
+
+"Where's that? What is it?"
+
+"Don't you know the 'Daniel Lambert'?"
+
+The voice sounded very surprised and almost suspicious.
+
+"No."
+
+"It's well known, very well known. I'm just popping round there to get a
+little something--eh!"
+
+The voice died away.
+
+"I want to find Great Cumberland Place."
+
+"Well, you're pretty close to it. The 'Daniel Lambert's' in the Edgware
+Road."
+
+"Could you find it?--Great Cumberland Place, I mean?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"I wish you would. I should be so grateful."
+
+The gray eyes became more pathetic.
+
+"Grateful to me--would you, miss? I'll go with you and very glad to do
+it."
+
+The old gentleman took Rosamund home and talked to her on the way.
+When they parted she asked for his name and address. He hesitated for
+a moment and then gave it: "Mr. Thrush, 2 Albingdon Buildings, John's
+Court, near Edgware Road."
+
+"Thank you. You've done me a good turn."
+
+At this moment the front door was opened by the housemaid.
+
+"Oh--miss!" she said.
+
+Her eyes left Rosamund and fastened themselves, like weapons, on the
+old gentleman's nose. He lifted his desperado of a hat and immediately
+turned away, trying to conceal his jug under his left arm, but
+inadvertently letting it protrude.
+
+"Good night, and thank you very much indeed!" Rosamund called after him
+with warm cordiality.
+
+"I'm glad you've got back, miss. We were in a way. It's ever so late."
+
+"I got lost in the fog. That dear old man rescued me."
+
+"I'm very thankful, miss, I'm sure."
+
+The girl seemed stiffened with astonishment. She shut the street door
+automatically.
+
+"He used to be a chemist once."
+
+"Did he, miss?"
+
+"Yes, quite a successful one too; just off Hanover Square, he told me.
+He was going round to get something for his supper when we met."
+
+"Indeed, miss?"
+
+Rosamund went upstairs.
+
+"Yes, poor old man," she said, as she ascended.
+
+Like most people in perfect health Rosamund slept well; but that night
+she lay awake. She did not want to sleep. She had something to decide,
+something of vital importance to her. Two courses lay open to her. She
+might marry Dion Leith, or she might resolve never to marry. Like most
+girls she had had dreams, but unlike most girls, she had often dreamed
+of a life in which men had no place. She had recently entered upon the
+career of a public singer, not because she was obliged to earn money but
+because she had a fine voice and a strong temperament, and longed for
+self-expression. But she had always believed that her public career
+would be a short one. She loved fine music and enjoyed bringing its
+message home to people, but she had little or no personal vanity, and
+the life of a public performer entailed a great deal which she already
+found herself disliking. Recently, too, her successful career had
+received a slight check. She had made her festival debut at Burstal in
+"Elijah," and no engagements for oratorio had followed upon it. Some
+day, while she was still young, she meant to retire, and then----
+
+If she married Dion Leith she would have to give up an old dream. On the
+other hand, if she married him, perhaps some day she would be a mother.
+She felt certain--she did not know why--that if she did not marry Dion
+Leith she would never marry at all.
+
+She thought, she prayed, she thought again. Sometimes in the dark hours
+of that night the memory of her sensation of loneliness in the fog
+returned to her. Sometimes Mr. Robertson's "Which can I share?" echoed
+within her, in the resonant chamber of her soul. He had been very quiet,
+but he had made an enormous impression upon her; he had made her hate
+egoism much more than she had hated it hitherto.
+
+Even into the innermost sanctuary of religion egoism can perhaps find
+a way. The thought of that troubled Rosamund in the dark. But when the
+hour of dawn grew near she fell asleep. She had made up her mind, or,
+rather, it had surely been made up for her. For a conviction had come
+upon her that for good or for evil it was meant that her life should
+be linked with Dion Leith's. He possessed something which she valued
+highly, and which, she thought, was possessed by very few men. He
+offered it to her. If she refused it, such an offering would probably
+never be made to her again.
+
+To be a lonely woman; to be a subtle and profound egoist; to be loved,
+cherished, worshiped; to be a mother.
+
+Many lives of women seemed to float before her eyes.
+
+Just before she lost consciousness it seemed to her, for a moment, that
+she was looking into the pathetic eyes of the old man whom she had met
+in the fog.
+
+"Poor old man!" she murmured.
+
+She slept.
+
+On the following morning she sent this note to Dion Leith:
+
+
+"MY DEAR DION,--I will marry you.
+
+"ROSAMUND."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+In the following spring, Rosamund and Dion were married, and Dion took
+Rosamund "to the land of the early morning."
+
+They arrived in Greece at the beginning of May, when the rains were over
+and the heats of summer were at hand. The bed of Ilissus was empty. Dust
+lay white in the streets of Athens and along the road to Phaleron and
+the sea. The low-lying tracts of country were desert-dry, and about
+Athens the world was arrayed in the garb of the East. Nevertheless there
+was still a delicate freshness in the winds that blew to the little city
+from the purple Aegean or from the mountains of Argolis; stirring the
+dust into spiral dances among the pale houses upon which Lycabettos
+looks down; shaking the tiny leaves of the tressy pepper trees near the
+Royal Palace; whispering the antique secrets of the ages into the ears
+of the maidens who, unwearied and happily submissive, bear up the Porch
+of the Erechtheion; stealing across the vast spaces and between the
+mighty columns of the Parthenon. The dawns and the twilights had not
+lost the pure savor of their almost frail vitality. The deepness of
+slumber still came with the nights.
+
+Greece was, perhaps, at her loveliest. And Greece was almost deserted by
+travelers. They had come and gone with the spring, leaving the land to
+its own, and to those two who had come there to drink deep at the wells
+of happiness. And, a little selfish as lovers are, Rosamund and Dion
+took everything wonderful and beautiful as their possession.
+
+The yellow-green pines near the convent of Daphni threw patches of shade
+on the warm earth because they wanted to rest there; the kingfisher
+rose in low and arrow-like flight from the banks of Khephissus to make a
+sweet diversion for them; they longed for brilliance, and the lagoons of
+Salamis were dyed with a wonder of emerald; they asked for twilight, and
+the deep and deserted glades of Academe gave it them in full measure.
+All these possessions, and many others, they enjoyed almost as children
+enjoy a meadow full of flowers when they have climbed over the gate
+that bars it from the high road. But the Acropolis was the stronghold
+of their joy. Only when their feet pressed its silvery grasses, and trod
+its warm marble pavements, did they hold the world within their grasp.
+
+For some days after their arrival in Greece they almost lived among the
+ruins. The long-coated guardians smiled at them, at first with a sort
+of faint amusement, at last with a friendly pleasure. And they smiled
+at themselves. Each evening they said, "To-morrow we will do this--or
+that," and each morning they said nothing, just looked at each other
+after breakfast, read in each other's eyes the repetition of desire, and
+set out on the dear dusty road with which they were already so familiar.
+
+Had there ever before been a honeymoon bounded by the precipices of the
+Acropolis? They sometimes discussed that important question, and always
+decided against the impertinent possibility. "What we are doing has
+never been done before." Dion went further than this, to "What I am
+feeling has never been felt before." His youth asserted itself in
+silent, determined statements which seemed to him to ring with authentic
+truth.
+
+It was a far cry from the downs of Chilton to the summit of the
+Acropolis. Dion remembered the crowd assembled to hear "Elijah"; he felt
+the ugly heat, the press of humanity. And all that was but the prelude
+to this! Even the voice crying "Woe unto them!" had been the prelude
+to the wonderful silence of Greece. He felt marvelously changed. And
+Rosamund often seemed to him changed, too, because she was his own. That
+wonderful fact gave her new values, spread about her new mysteries. And
+some of these mysteries Dion did not attempt to fathom at first. Perhaps
+he felt that some silences of love are like certain ceremony with a
+friend--a mark of the delicacy which is the sign-manual of the things
+that endure. In the beginning of that honeymoon there was a beautiful
+restraint which was surely of good augury for the future. Not all
+the doors were set violently open, not all the rooms were ruthlessly
+visited.
+
+Dion found that he was able to reverence the woman who had given herself
+to him more after he had received the gift than before. And this was
+very wonderful to him, was even, somehow, perplexing. For Rosamund
+had the royal way of bestowing. She was capable of refusal, but not of
+half-measures or of niggardliness. There was something primitive in
+her which spoke truth with a voice that was fearless; and yet that
+very primitiveness seemed closely allied with her purity. Dion only
+understood what that purity was when he was married to her. It was like
+the radiant atmosphere of Greece to him. Had not Greece led him to it,
+made him desire it with all that was best in his nature? Now he had
+brought it to Greece. Actually, day after day, he trod the Acropolis
+with Rosamund.
+
+Greece had already, he believed, put out a hand and drawn them more
+closely together.
+
+"Love me, love the land I love."
+
+Laughingly, yet half-anxiously too, Dion had said that to Rosamund when
+they left Brindisi and set sail for Greece. With her usual sincerity she
+had answered:
+
+"I want to love it. Do you wish me to say more than that, to make
+promises I may not be able to keep?"
+
+"No," he had answered. "I only want truth from you." And after a moment
+he had added, "I shall never want anything from you but your truth."
+
+She had looked at him rather strangely, like one moved by conflicting
+feelings, and after a slight hesitation she had said:
+
+"Dion, do you realize all the meaning in those words of yours?"
+
+"Of course I do."
+
+"Then if you really mean them you must be one of the most daring of
+human beings. But I shall try a compromise with you. I shall try to give
+you my best truth, never my worst. You deserve that, I think. Indeed, I
+know you do."
+
+And he had left it to her. Was he not wise to do that? Already he
+trusted her absolutely, as he had never thought to trust any one.
+
+"I could face any storm with you," he once said to Rosamund.
+
+Rosamund had wanted to love Greece, and from the first moment of seeing
+the land she had loved it.
+
+In the beginning of their stay she had scarcely been able to believe
+that she was really in Athens. A great name had aroused in her
+imagination a conception of a great city. The soft familiarity, the
+almost rustic simplicity and intimacy, the absolutely unpretentious
+brightness and homely cheerfulness of the small capital of this unique
+land had surprised, had almost confused her.
+
+"Is this really Athens?" she had said, wondering, as they had driven
+into what seemed a village set in bright bareness, sparsely shaded here
+and there by small pepper-trees.
+
+And the question had persisted in her mind, had almost trembled upon
+her lips, for two or three days. But then had come a mysterious change,
+brought about, perhaps, by affection. Quickly she had learnt to love
+Athens, and then she had the feeling that if it had been in any way
+different from what it was she could not have loved it. Its very
+smallness delighted her, and she would not permit its faults to be
+mentioned in her presence. Once, when Dion said that it was a great pity
+the Athenians did not plant more trees, and a greater pity they so often
+lopped off branches from the few trees they had, she exclaimed:
+
+"You mustn't run down my Athens. It likes to give itself to the sun
+generously. It's grateful, as it well may be, for all the sun has done
+for it. Look at the color of that marble."
+
+And Dion looked at the honey color, and the wonderful reddish-gold, and,
+laughing, said:
+
+"Athens is the one faultless city, and the dogs tell us so every night
+and all night long."
+
+"Dogs always bark when the moon is up," she answered, with a
+semi-humorous gravity.
+
+"As they bark in Athens?" he queried.
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+"If I am ever criticized," he asked, "will you be my defender?"
+
+"I shan't hear you criticized."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"I do know it," she said, looking at him with her honest brown eyes;
+"nobody will criticize you when I am there."
+
+He caught hold of her hand.
+
+"And you? Don't you often criticize me silently? I'm sure you do. Why
+did you marry me, Rosamund?"
+
+They were sitting on the Acropolis when he put that question. It was
+a shining day. The far-off seas gleamed. There was a golden pathway to
+Aegina. The brilliant clearness, not European but Eastern, did not
+make the great view spread out beneath and around them hard. Greece
+lay wrapped in a mystery of sunlight, different from, yet scarcely less
+magical than, the mystery of shadows and the moon. Rosamund looked out
+on the glory. She had taken off her hat, and given her yellow hair
+to the sunlight. Without any head-covering she always looked more
+beautiful, and, to Dion, more Greek than when her hair was concealed.
+He saw in her then more clearly than at other times the woman of all the
+ages rather than the woman of an epoch subject to certain fashions.
+As he looked at her now, resting on a block of warm marble above the
+precipice which is dominated by the little temple of Athena Nike, he
+wondered, with the concealed humility of the great lover, how it was
+that she had ever chosen to give herself to him. He had sworn to marry
+her. He had not been weak in his wooing, had not been one of those men
+who will linger on indefinitely at a woman's feet, ready to submit to
+unnumbered refusals. But now there rose up in the depths of him the cry,
+"What am I?" and the answer, "Only a man like thousands of other men, in
+no way remarkable, in no way more worthy than thousands of others of the
+gift of great happiness."
+
+Rosamund turned from the shining view. There was in her eyes an unusual
+vagueness.
+
+"Why did you?"
+
+"Why did I marry you, Dion?"
+
+"Yes. When I found you with your 'Paradise' I don't think you meant ever
+to marry me."
+
+"I always liked you. But at first I didn't think of you in that way."
+
+"But you had known for ages before Burstal----"
+
+"Yes, of course. I knew the day I sang at Mr. Darlington's, at that
+party he gave to introduce me as a singer. I knew first from your
+mother. She told me."
+
+"My mother?"
+
+"By the look she gave me when you introduced me to her."
+
+"Was it an----How d'you mean?"
+
+"I can scarcely explain. But it was a look that asked a great many
+questions. And they wouldn't have been asked if you hadn't cared for me,
+and if she hadn't known it."
+
+"What did you think when you knew?"
+
+"That it was kind of you to care for me."
+
+"Kind?"
+
+"Yes. I always feel that about people who like me very much."
+
+"And did you just go on thinking me kind until that day at Burstal?"
+
+"I suppose so. But I felt very much at home with you."
+
+"I don't know whether that's a compliment to a man who's still young, or
+not?"
+
+"Nor do I. But that's just how it was."
+
+He said nothing for a little while. When he spoke again it was with some
+hesitation, and his manner was almost diffident.
+
+"Rosamund, that day at Burstal, were you at all inclined to accept me?"
+
+"Yes; I think, perhaps, I was. Why?"
+
+"Sometimes I have fancied there was a moment when----"
+
+He looked at her and then, for once, his eyes fell before hers almost
+guiltily. They sat in silence for a moment. Behind them, on a bench set
+in the shadow of a mighty wall, was a guardian of the Acropolis, a thin
+brown man with very large ears sticking out from his head. He had been
+dozing, but now stirred, shuffled his feet, and suddenly cleared his
+throat. Then he sighed heavily.
+
+"And if there was, why did you think it came, Dion?" said Rosamund
+suddenly, with an almost startling swiftness of decision.
+
+Dion reddened.
+
+"Why don't you like to tell me?"
+
+"Oh, well--things go through the mind without our wishing them to. You
+must know that, Rosamund. They are often like absurd little intruders.
+One kicks them out if one can."
+
+"What kind of intruder did you kick out, or try to kick out, at
+Burstal?"
+
+She spoke half-laughingly, but half-challengingly.
+
+He drew a little nearer to her.
+
+"Sometimes I have fancied that perhaps, that day at Burstal, you
+suddenly realized that love might be a more powerful upholder of life
+than ambition ever could be."
+
+"Sometimes? And you thought it first on the downs, or at any rate after
+the concert?"
+
+"I think I did."
+
+"Do you realize," she said slowly, and as if with an effort, "that you
+and I have never discussed my singing in 'Elijah'?"
+
+"I know we never have."
+
+"Let us do it now," she continued, still seeming to make a strong
+effort.
+
+"But why should we?"
+
+"I want to. Didn't I sing well?"
+
+"I thought you sang wonderfully well."
+
+"Then what was it that went wrong? I've never understood."
+
+"Why should you think anything went wrong? The critics said it was a
+remarkable performance. You made a great effect."
+
+"I believe I did. But I felt for the first time that day that I was out
+of sympathy with my audience. And then"--she paused, but presently added
+with a certain dryness--"I was never offered any engagement to sing in
+oratorio after Burstal."
+
+"I believe a good many people thought your talent would show at its best
+in opera."
+
+"I shall never go on the stage. The idea is hateful to me, and always
+has been. Would you like me to sing on the stage?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Dion, why don't you tell me what happened that day at Burstal?"
+
+"I scarcely could."
+
+"I wish you would try."
+
+"Well--I think it was a mistake for you to begin your public career in
+oratorio by singing 'Woe unto them.'"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"It's an unsympathetic thing. It's a cruel sort of thing."
+
+"Cruel? But it's one of the best-known things in oratorio."
+
+"You made it quite new."
+
+"How?"
+
+"It sounded fanatical when you sang it. I never heard it sound like that
+before."
+
+"Fanatical?" she said, and her voice was rather cold.
+
+"Rosamund," he said, quickly and anxiously, "you asked me to tell you
+exactly what I meant, what I felt, that is----"
+
+"Yes, I know. Go on, Dion. Well? It sounded fanatical----"
+
+"To me. I'm only telling you my impression. When I've heard 'Woe unto
+them' before it has always sounded sad, piteous if you like, a sort of
+wailing. When you sang it, somehow it was like a curse, a tremendous
+summoning of vengeance."
+
+"Why not? Are not the words 'Destruction shall fall upon them'?"
+
+"I know. But you made it sound--to me, I mean--almost as if you were
+rejoicing personally at the thought of the destruction, as if you were
+longing almost eagerly for it to overwhelm the faithless."
+
+"I see. That is what you meant by fanatical?"
+
+"Yes, I suppose so."
+
+After a long pause she said:
+
+"Nobody has told me that till now."
+
+"Perhaps others didn't feel it as I did."
+
+"I don't know. What does one know about other people? Not even my
+guardian said anything. I never could understand----"
+
+She broke off, then continued steadily:
+
+"So you think I repelled people that day?"
+
+"It seems impossible that you--"
+
+But she interrupted him.
+
+"No, Dion, it isn't at all impossible. I think if we are absolutely
+sincere we repel people very often."
+
+"But you are the most sincere person I have ever seen, and you must know
+how beloved you are, how popular you are wherever you go."
+
+"When I'm being sincere with the part of me that's feeling kind or
+affectionate. Let us go to the Parthenon."
+
+She got up, opened her white sun-umbrella and turned round, keeping her
+hat in her left hand. As she stood there in that setting of marble, with
+the sun caught in her hair, and the mighty view below and beyond her,
+she looked wonderfully beautiful, Dion thought, but almost stern. He
+feared perhaps he had hurt her. But was it his fault? She had told him
+to speak.
+
+Rosamund did not return to the subject of her debut at Burstal, but
+in the late afternoon of that day she spoke of her singing, and of the
+place it might have in their married life. Dion believed she did this
+because of their conversation near the Temple of Nike.
+
+They had spent most of the day on the Acropolis. Both had brought books:
+she, Mahaffy's "History of Greek Literature"; he, a volume of poems
+written by a young diplomat who loved Greece and knew her well. Neither
+of them had read many pages, but as the strong radiance began to soften
+about them on the height, and the breeze from the Saronic Gulf came to
+them with a more feathery warmth and freshness over the smiling bareness
+of the Attic Plain, Dion, who had been half-dreamily turning the leaves
+of his little book, said:
+
+"Rosamund."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Look at the sea and the mountains of Trigania, those far-off
+mountains"--he pointed--"and the outpost of Hydra."
+
+She looked and said nothing. Then he read to her these lines of the
+young diplomat-poet:
+
+     "A crescent sail upon the sea,
+     So calm and fair and ripple free
+     You wonder storms can ever be;
+
+     A shore with deep indented bays,
+     And o'er the gleaming water-ways
+     A glimpse of Islands in the haze;
+
+     A face bronzed dark to red and gold,
+     With mountain eyes that seem to hold
+     The freshness of the world of old;
+
+     A shepherd's crook, a coat of fleece,
+     A grazing flock;--the sense of peace,
+     The long sweet silence,--this is Greece!"
+
+Rosamund gazed before her at Greece in the evening light.
+
+"'The freshness of the world of old,'" she repeated, and her voice had
+a thrill in it. "'The sense of peace, the long sweet silence,--this is
+Greece.' If there was music with the music of those words I should love
+to sing them."
+
+"And how you could sing them. Like no other."
+
+"At any rate my heart would be in them. 'The freshness of the world of
+old--the sense of peace, the long sweet silence.'"
+
+She was standing now near the edge of the sacred rock, looking out over
+the tawny plain flanked by gray Hymettos, and away to the sea. There
+were no voices rising from below. There was no sound of traffic on
+the white road which wound away down the slope to the hidden city. Her
+contralto voice lingered on the words; her lips drew them out softly,
+lengthening the sounds they loved.
+
+"Freshness, that which belonged to the early world, long sweet silence,
+peace. Oh, Dion, if you know how something in me cares for freshness and
+for peace!"
+
+Her glad energies were strangely stilled; yet there was a kind of force
+in her stillness, the force that is in all deep truths of whatever
+nature they may be. He felt that he was near to perhaps the most
+essential part of her, to that which was perhaps more truly her than
+even the radiant and buoyant humanity by means of which she drew people
+to her.
+
+"Could you live always out of the world?" he asked her.
+
+"But it wouldn't be out of the world."
+
+"Away from people--with me?"
+
+"With you?"
+
+She looked at him for a moment almost as if startled. Then there came
+into her brown eyes a scrutiny that seemed half-inward, as if it were
+partially applied to herself.
+
+"It's difficult to be certain what one could do. I suppose one has
+several sides."
+
+"Ah! And your singing side?"
+
+"I want to speak about that."
+
+Her voice was suddenly more practical, and her whole look and manner
+changed, losing in romance and strangeness, gaining in directness and
+energy.
+
+"We've never discussed it."
+
+She sat down on a slab of rock at the edge of the precipice, and went
+on:
+
+"You don't mind your wife being a public singer, do you, Dion?"
+
+"Suppose I do?"
+
+"Do you?"
+
+"You're so energetic I doubt if you could be happy in idleness."
+
+"I couldn't in England."
+
+"And in Greece? But we are only here for such a short time."
+
+He took her hand in his.
+
+"Learning the lessons of happiness."
+
+"Good lessons for us!" she said, smiling.
+
+"The best there are. I believe in the education of joy. It opens the
+heart, calls up all the generous things. But your singing; can I bear
+your traveling about perpetually all over England?"
+
+"If I get engagements."
+
+"You will. You had a good many for concerts last winter. You've got
+several for June and July. You'll get many more. But who's to go with
+you on your travels?"
+
+"Beattie, of course. Why do you look at me like that?"
+
+"How do we know Beatrice won't marry?"
+
+Rosamund looked grave.
+
+"Why shouldn't she?" asked Dion.
+
+"She may, of course."
+
+"D'you think she'll remain your apanage now?" he asked, with a hint of
+smiling sarcasm that could not hurt her.
+
+"My apanage?"
+
+"Hasn't she been something like that?"
+
+"Perhaps she has. But Beattie always sinks herself in others. She
+wouldn't be happy if she didn't do that. Of course, your friend Guy
+Daventry's in love with Beattie."
+
+"Deeply."
+
+"But I'm not at all sure that Beattie--"
+
+She paused abruptly. After a moment she continued:
+
+"You asked me to-day why I married you. I didn't answer you and I'm not
+going to answer you now--entirely. But you're not like other men, most
+other men."
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"A way that means very much to me," she answered, with a delicious
+purity and directness. "Women feel such things very soon when they know
+men. I could easily have never married, but I could never, never have
+married a man who had lived, as I believe most men have lived."
+
+"I think I always knew that from the first moment I saw you."
+
+"Did you? I'm glad. I care tremendously for _that_ in you, Dion--more
+than you will ever know."
+
+"That's my great, too great reward," he said soberly, almost with a
+touch of deep awe. Then, reddening and looking away, he added, "You were
+the very first."
+
+"Was I?"
+
+"Yes, but--but you mustn't think that it was a religious feeling,
+anything of that kind, which kept me back from--from certain things. It
+was more the desire to be strong, healthy, to have the sane mind in the
+sane body, I think. I was mad about athletics, all that sort of thing.
+Anyhow, you know now. You were the first. You will be the only one in my
+life."
+
+There was a long silence between them. Then Rosamund said, with a change
+of manner to practical briskness:
+
+"If Beattie ever should marry, I could take a maid about with me."
+
+"Yes. An hotel in Liverpool with a maid! In Blackpool, in Huddersfield,
+in Wolverhampton, in Glasgow, when there's a heavy thaw on, with a maid!
+Oh, how delightful it will be! Manchester on a wet day in early spring
+with a--"
+
+"Hush!" she put one hand on his lips gently, and looked at him with a
+sort of smiling challenge in her eyes. "Do you mean to forbid me?"
+
+"I don't think I could ever forbid you to do anything."
+
+"We shall see in England."
+
+"But, Rosamund"--there was no one in sight, and he slipped one arm round
+her--"if something came to fill your life, both our lives, to the brim?"
+
+"Ah, then,"--a very remote expression came into her eyes,--"then it
+would all be different."
+
+"All?"
+
+"Yes. Everything would be quite different then."
+
+"Not our relation to each other?"
+
+"Yes, even that. Perhaps that most of all."
+
+"I--I hardly like to hear you say that," he said, struggling against
+a perhaps stupid, or even hateful, feeling of depression mingled with
+something else.
+
+"But wouldn't it? Think!"
+
+"I don't want that to change. I should hate any change in that."
+
+"What we want, and what we hate, doesn't affect what has to be. And I
+expect at the end we shall be thankful for that. But, Dion, yes, _if_
+what you say, I could give it all up. Public singing! What would it
+matter then? I'm a woman, not a singer. But perhaps it will never come."
+
+"Who knows?" he said.
+
+And he sighed.
+
+She turned towards him, leaned one hand on the stone and looked at him
+almost anxiously.
+
+"What is the matter, Dion?"
+
+"Why? There is nothing the matter."
+
+"Would you rather we never had that in our lives?"
+
+"A child?"
+
+"Yes, a child."
+
+"I thought I longed for that," he answered.
+
+"Do you meant that you have changed and don't long any more?"
+
+"I suppose it's like this. When a man's very happy, perfectly happy, he
+doesn't--perhaps he can't--want any change to come. If you're perfectly
+happy instinctively you almost fear any change. Till to-day, till this
+very minute perhaps, I thought I wanted to have a child--some day.
+Perhaps I still do really, or perhaps I shall. But--you must forgive me,
+I can't help it!--this evening, sitting here, I don't want anything to
+come between us. It seems to me that even a child of ours would take
+some of you away from me. Don't you see that?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"That's a man's feeling. I can't share it."
+
+"But think--all the attention you would have to give to a child, all the
+thoughts you would fasten on it, all the anxieties you'd have about it!"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"One only has a certain amount of time. You'd have to take away a good
+deal, a great deal, of the time you can now give to me. Oh, it sounds
+too beastly, I know! Perhaps I scarcely mean it! But surely you can see
+how a man who loves a woman very much might, without being the least
+bit unnatural, think, 'I'd like to keep every bit of her for myself.
+I'd like to have her all to myself!' I dare say this feeling will pass.
+Remember, Rose, we're only just married, and we're in Greece, right away
+from every one. Don't think me morbidly jealous, or a beast. I'm not. I
+expect lots of men have felt as I do, perhaps even till the first child
+came."
+
+"Ah, then it would be all right," she said. "The natural things, the
+things nature intends, are always all right."
+
+"How blessedly sane and central you are!"
+
+"If we had a child--Dion, you must believe me!--we should be drawn ever
+so much nearer together by it. If we ever do have one, we shall look
+back on this time--you will--and think 'We were much farther apart then
+than we are now.'"
+
+"I don't like to hear you say that," he said gravely, almost with pain.
+
+Could a woman like Rosamund be driven by an instinct blindly? She
+was such a perfect type of womanhood. It would be almost a tragedy if
+she--such a woman--died childless. Perhaps instinct had obscurely warned
+her of that, had taught her where to look for a mate. He, Dion, had
+always lived purely. That day she had acknowledged that she had divined
+it. Was that, perhaps, her real, her instinctive reason for marrying
+him? But a man wants to be married for one thing only, because the
+woman longs for him. And Dion was just an ordinary man with very strong
+feelings.
+
+"Let's take one more stroll before we go down," he said.
+
+"Yes, to the maidens," she answered.
+
+Her voice sounded relieved. She pushed her arm gently through his as
+they moved away, and he felt all his body thrill. The mystery of love
+was almost painful to him at that moment. He realized that a great love
+might grow to have an affinity with a disease. "I must be careful. I
+must take great care with this love of mine," he thought.
+
+They went slowly over the slabs of marble and the gray rocks and passed
+before the west front of the Parthenon. Dion felt slight resistance in
+Rosamund's arm, and stopped. In the changing light the marble was full
+of warm color, was in places mysterious and translucent almost as amber.
+The immense power, the gigantic calm of the temple, a sort of still
+breathing of Eternity upon Time, confronted a glory which was beginning
+to change in the face of its changelessness. Soon the seas that held
+their dream under the precipices of Sunion, and along the shores of
+Aegina, where the tall shepherd boys in their fleeces of white lead home
+the flocks in the twilight, would lose the wonder of their shining, and
+the skies the rapture of their diffused light. In the quietly austere
+Attic Plain, through the whispering groves of Academe, and along the
+sacred way to Eleusis, a very delicate vagueness was beginning to
+travel, like a wanderer setting forth to greet the coming of the night.
+The ranges of hills and mountains, Hymettos and Pentelicus, Parnes
+stretching to the far distance, Mount Corydallus, the peak of Salamis,
+the exquisitely long mountains of Trigania--"the greyhounds of their
+tribe," Rosamund loved to call them--were changing almost from moment
+to moment, becoming a little softer, a little more tender, putting off
+their distinct hues of the day for the colors of sleep and forgetting.
+But the great Doric columns fronting them, the core of the heart of this
+evening splendor, seemed not to defy, but to ignore, all the processes
+of change. In its ruin the Parthenon seemed to say, "I have not
+changed." And it was true. For the same soul which had confronted
+Pericles confronted the two lovers who now stood at the foot of the
+temple.
+
+"I wonder how many thousands of people of all nations have learnt the
+same lesson here," Rosamund said at last.
+
+"The Doric lesson, you mean?"
+
+"Yes, of strength, simplicity, endurance, calmness."
+
+"And I wonder how many thousands have forgotten the lesson."
+
+"Why do you say that, Dion?"
+
+"I don't know. Great art is a moral teacher, I'm sure of that. But men
+are very light-minded as a rule, I think. If they lived before these
+columns they might learn a great deal, they might even develop in a
+splendid direction, I believe. But an hour, even a few hours, is that
+enough? Impressions fade very quickly in most people."
+
+"Not in you. You never forget the Parthenon, and I shall never forget
+it."
+
+She stood for some minutes quite still gazing steadily up at the
+temple, gaining--it seemed to her--her own stillness from its tremendous
+immobility.
+
+"The greatest strength is in silence," she thought. "The greatest power
+is in motionlessness."
+
+She thought of the raging of the great sea. But no! There was more of
+the essence of strength, of the stern inwardness of power, in that which
+confronted life and Time in absolute stillness; in a mountain, in
+this temple. And the temple spoke to something far down within her; to
+something which desired long silences and deep retirement, to something
+mystic which she did not understand. The temple was Pagan and she knew
+that. But that in her to which it spoke was not Pagan. Before she left
+Athens she meant to realize that the soul of man, when it speaks through
+mighty and pure effort, of whatever kind, always speaks to the same
+Listener, to but one, though man may not know it.
+
+"Doric!" she said at last. "I have always known that for me that would
+be the greatest. The simplest thing is the most sublime thing. That
+temple is like the Sermon on the Mount to me. Didn't you bring me here
+because it meant so much to you?"
+
+"Not entirely. No, Rosamund, I think I brought you here because I felt
+that you belonged here."
+
+"This satisfies me."
+
+She sighed deeply, still gazing at the temple.
+
+"You aren't only in Greece, you are of Greece. Come to the maidens."
+
+As they went on slowly the acid voices of the little birds which fly
+perpetually among the columns of the Parthenon followed them, bidding
+them good night.
+
+They descended over the uneven ground and came to the famous Porch of
+the Caryatides, jutting out from the little Ionic temple which is the
+handmaid of the Parthenon. Not far from the Porch, and immediately
+before it, was a wooden bench. Already Rosamund and Dion had spent many
+hours here, sometimes sitting on the bench, more often resting on the
+warm ground in the sunshine, among the fragments of ruin and the speary,
+silver-green grasses. Now Rosamund sat down and Dion stood by her side.
+
+"Rosamund, those maidens are my ideal of womanhood shown in marble," he
+said.
+
+"They are almost miraculously beautiful. And one scarcely knows why. But
+I know that every time I see them the mystery of their beauty seems more
+ineffable to me, and the meaning of it seems more profound. How did men
+get so much meaning into marble?"
+
+"By caring so much for what is beautiful in womanhood, I suppose."
+
+He sat down close beside her.
+
+"I sometimes wonder whether women have any idea what some men, many men,
+I believe, seek in women."
+
+"What do they seek?"
+
+"What do those maidens that hold up the Porch suggest to you?"
+
+"All that's calm without a touch of coldness, and strong without a touch
+of hardness, and noble without a touch of pride, and obedient without a
+touch of servility."
+
+"Brave sweetness, too, and protectiveness. They are wonderful, and so
+are some women. When I saw you in the omnibus at Milan I thought of
+these maidens immediately."
+
+"How strange!"
+
+"Why strange?"
+
+"Isn't it?" she said, gazing at the six maidens in their flowering
+draperies of marble, who, upon their uncovered heads, bore tranquillity
+up the marble architrave. "How wonderfully simple and unpretending they
+are!"
+
+"Are not you?"
+
+"I don't know. I don't believe I think about it."
+
+"I do. Rosamund, sometimes I feel that I am an unique man--just think of
+a fellow in a firm on the Stock Exchange being unique!--because I have
+had an ideal, and I have attainted to it. When I was here alone, I
+conceived for the first time an ideal of woman. I said to myself, 'In
+the days of ancient Greece there must have been such women in the flesh
+as these maidens in marble. If I could have lived and loved then!' And I
+came away from Greece carrying a sort of romantic dream with me. And now
+I sit here with you; I can't think why I, a quite ordinary man, should
+be picked out for perfect happiness."
+
+"Is it really perfect?" she asked, turning to him.
+
+"I think so. In such a place with you!"
+
+As the evening drew on, a little wind came and went over the rocky
+height, but it had no breath of cold in it. Two Greek soldiers passed
+by slowly behind them--short young men with skins almost as dark as
+the skins of Arabs of the South, black eyes and faces full of active
+mentality. They were talking eagerly, but stopped for a moment to look
+at the English, and beyond them at the six maidens on their platform of
+marble. Then they went on talking again, but presently hesitated, came
+back, and stood not far off, gazing at the Porch with a mixture of
+reverence and quiet wistfulness. Dion drew Rosamund's attention to them.
+
+"They feel the beauty," he said.
+
+"Yes, I like that."
+
+She looked at the two young men with a smile. One of them noticed it,
+and smiled back at her almost boyishly, and with a sort of confidential
+simplicity.
+
+The light began to fail. The six maidens were less clearly seen, but the
+deep meaning of them did not lessen. In the gathering darkness they and
+their sweet effort became more touching, more lovable. Their persistence
+was exquisite now that they confronted with serenity the night.
+
+"They are beautiful by day, but at night they are adorable," said
+Rosamund.
+
+"Don't you know why I thought of them when I met you?" he whispered.
+
+She got up slowly. The Greek soldiers moved, turned, and went down the
+slope towards the Propylae. Their quick voices were heard again. Then
+there was the sound of a bell.
+
+"Time to go," said Rosamund.
+
+As they followed the soldiers she again put her arm through her young
+husband's.
+
+"Dion," she said, "I think I'm a little afraid of your ideals. I
+understand them. I have ideals too. But I think perhaps mine are less in
+danger of ever being shattered than yours are."
+
+"Why? But I know mine are not in danger."
+
+"How can you say that?"
+
+"It's no use trying to frighten me. But what about your ideals? What is
+the nature of the difference between yours and mine, which makes yours
+so much less vulnerable than mine?"
+
+But she only said:
+
+"I don't believe I could explain it. But I feel it, and I shall go on
+feeling it."
+
+They went down the steep marble steps, gave the guardian at the foot of
+them good night, and walked almost in silence to Athens.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+After that day Rosamund and Dion often talked of the child who might
+eventually come into their lives to change them. Rosamund indeed, now
+that such a possibility had been discussed between them, returned to it
+with an eagerness which she did not seek to conceal. She was wonderfully
+frank, and her frankness seemed to belong naturally to her transparent
+purity, to be an essential part of it. Dion's momentary depression that
+evening on the Acropolis had evidently stirred something in her which
+would not let her rest until it had expressed itself. She had detected
+for the first time in her husband a hint of something connected with his
+love for her which seemed to her morbid. She could not forget it and she
+was resolved to destroy it if possible. When they next stood together on
+their beloved height she said to him:
+
+"Dion, don't you hate anything morbid?"
+
+"Yes, loathe it!" he answered, with hearty conviction. "But surely you
+know that. Why d'you ask me such a thing? How dare you?"
+
+And he turned to her his brown face, bright this morning with good
+spirits, his dark eyes sparkling with hopefulness and energy.
+
+It was a pale morning, such as often comes to Athens even at the edge
+of the summer. They were standing on the little terrace near to the
+Acropolis Museum, looking down over the city and to helmet-shaped
+Lycabettos. The wind, too fond of the Attic Plain, was blowing, not
+wildly, but with sufficient force to send the dust whirling in light
+clouds over the pale houses and the little Byzantine churches. Long
+and narrow rivulets of dust marked the positions of the few roads
+which stretched out along the plain. The darkness of the groves which
+sheltered the course of the Kephisos contrasted strongly with the flying
+pallors and seemed at enmity with them. The sky was milky white and
+gray, broken up in places by clouds of fantastic shapes, along the
+ruffled edges of which ran thin gleams of sunshine like things half
+timorous and ashamed. Upon the flat shores near Phaleron the purple
+seas broke in spray, and the salty drops were caught up by the wind and
+mingled with the hurrying grains of dust. It was not exactly a sad day,
+but there was an uneasiness abroad. The delicate calm of Greece was
+disturbed. Nevertheless Dion was feeling gay and light-hearted, inclined
+to enjoy everything the world about him offered to him. Even the
+restlessness beneath and around them accorded with his springing
+spirits. The whirling spirals of dust suggested to him the gaiety of a
+dance. The voice of the wind was a joyous music in his ears.
+
+"How dare you?" he repeated with a happy pretense of indignation.
+
+"Because I think you were almost morbid yesterday."
+
+"I? When?"
+
+"When we spoke of the possibility of our some day having a child."
+
+"I had a moment of thinking that too," he agreed. "Yes, Rose, the
+thought went through my mind that a great love, such as mine for you,
+might become almost a disease if one didn't watch it, hold it in."
+
+"If it ever did become like that, do you know what would happen?"
+
+"What, Rose?"
+
+"Instead of rejoicing in it I should shrink from it."
+
+"That's enough for me!"
+
+He spoke gaily, confidently.
+
+"Besides, I don't really believe I'm a man to love like that. I
+only imagined I might for a moment, perhaps because it was twilight.
+Imaginings come with the twilight."
+
+"I could never bear to think, if a child came, that you didn't want it,
+that you wished it out of the way."
+
+"I never should. But I expect lots of young married people have queer
+thoughts and feelings which they keep entirely to themselves--I blurted
+mine out. You've got a dangerously sincere husband, Rose. The whole
+matter lies in your own hands. If we ever have a child, love it, but
+don't love it more than me."
+
+"I should love it so differently! How could maternal love interfere with
+the love of woman for man?"
+
+"No, I don't suppose it could."
+
+"Of course it never could."
+
+"Then that's settled. Where shall we go to get out of the wind? It seems
+to be rising."
+
+After searching for a place of shelter in vain they eventually took
+refuge in the Parthenon, under the shadow of the great western wall.
+Perhaps in consequence of the wind the Acropolis was entirely deserted.
+Only the guardians were hidden somewhere, behind columns, in the Porch
+of the Museum, under the roof of their little dwelling at the foot of
+the marble staircase which leads up to the Propylae. The huge wall of
+the Parthenon kept off the wind from the sea, and as Rosamund and Dion
+no longer saw the whirling dust clouds in the plain they had, for the
+moment, almost an illusion of peace. They sat down on the guardian's
+bench, just beneath some faint fragments of paintings which dated
+from the time when the temple was made use of as a church by Greek
+Christians; and immediately Rosamund went on talking about the child.
+She spoke very quietly and earnestly, with the greatest simplicity, and
+by degrees Dion came to see her as a mother, to feel that perhaps only
+as a mother could she fulfil herself. The whole of her beauty would
+never be revealed unless she were seen with a child of her own. Hitherto
+he had thought of her chiefly in relation to himself, as the girl he
+longed to win, then as the girl he most wonderfully had succeeded in
+winning. She put herself before him now in a different light, and he
+saw in her new and beautiful possibilities. While she was talking his
+imagination began to play about the child, and presently he realized
+that he was thinking of it as a boy. Then, in a moment, he realized that
+on the previous evening he had thought of a male, not of a female child.
+With this in his mind he said abruptly:
+
+"What sort of a child do you wish to have, Rosamund?"
+
+"What sort?" she said, looking at him with surprise in her brown eyes.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What do you mean? A beautiful, strong, healthy child, of course, the
+sort of child every married woman longs to have, and imagines having
+till it comes."
+
+"Beautiful, strong, healthy!" he repeated, returning her look. "Of
+course it could only be that--your child. But I meant, do you want it to
+be a boy or a girl?"
+
+"Oh!"
+
+She paused, and looked away from him and down at the uncemented marble
+blocks which form the pavement of the Parthenon.
+
+"Well?" he said, as she kept silence.
+
+"If it were to be a girl I should love it."
+
+"You wish it to be a girl?"
+
+"I didn't say that. The fact is, Dion"--and now she again looked at him,
+"I have always thought of our child as a boy. That's why your question
+almost startled me. I have never even once thought of having a girl. I
+don't know why."
+
+"I think I do."
+
+"Why then?"
+
+"The thought was born of the desire. You wanted our child to be a son
+and so you thought of it as a son."
+
+"Perhaps that was it."
+
+"Wasn't it?"
+
+He spoke with a certain pressure. She remained silent for a moment, and
+two little vertical lines appeared in her forehead. Then she said:
+
+"Yes, I believe it was. And you?"
+
+"I confess that when yesterday we spoke of a child I was thinking all
+the time about a boy."
+
+She gazed at him with something visionary in her eyes, which made them
+look for a moment like the eyes of a woman whom he had not seen till
+now. Then she said quietly:
+
+"It will be a boy, I think. Indeed, if it weren't perhaps absurd, I
+should say that I know it will be a boy."
+
+He said nothing more just then, but at that moment he felt as if he,
+too, knew, not merely hoped, or guessed, something about their joint
+future, knew in the depths of him that a boy-child would some day be
+sent to Rosamund and to him, to influence and to change their lives.
+
+The wind began to fail almost suddenly, the sky grew brighter, a shaft
+of sun lay on the marble at their feet.
+
+"It's going to be fine," Dion said. "Let's be active for once. The wind
+has made me restless. Suppose we get a couple of horses and ride out to
+the convent of Daphni!"
+
+She got up at once.
+
+"Yes. I've brought my habit, and haven't had it on once."
+
+As they left the Great Temple she looked up at the mighty columns and
+said;
+
+"Doric! If we have a boy let us bring him up to be Doric."
+
+"Yes, Rosamund," he said quietly and strongly. "We will."
+
+Afterward he believed that it was then, and only then, that he caught
+something of her deep longing to have a child. He began to see how a
+man's child might influence him and affect his life, might even send him
+upwards by innocently looking up to him. It would be bad, very bad, to
+fail as a husband, but, by Jove! it would be one of the great tragedies
+to fail as a father. Mentally Dion measured the respective heights
+of himself and a very small boy; saw the boy's trusting eyes looking,
+almost peering, up at him. Such eyes could change, could become very
+attentive. "It wouldn't do to be adversely criticized by your boy," he
+thought. And one day he said to Rosamund, but in almost a casual way:
+
+"If we ever do have a boy, Rose, and want him to be Doric, we shall have
+to start in by being Doric ourselves, eh?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, "I've thought that, too."
+
+"D'you think I could ever learn to be that?"
+
+"I know you could. You are on the way already, I think. I noticed
+in London that you were never influenced by all the affectations and
+absurdities, or worse, that seem to have taken hold of so many people
+lately."
+
+"There has been a wave of something rather beastly passing over London
+certainly. But I almost wonder you knew it."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Can your eyes see anything that isn't good?"
+
+"Yes. But I don't want ever to look long on what I hate."
+
+"You aren't afraid you might cease from hating it!"
+
+"Oh, no. But I believe in feeding always on wholesome food."
+
+"Modern London doesn't."
+
+"I shall never be modern, I'm afraid," she said, half laughing, and with
+a soft touch of apparently genuine deprecation.
+
+"Be eternal, that's better!" he almost whispered. "Listen to that
+nightingale. It's singing a song of all the ages. You have a message
+like that for me."
+
+They had strolled out after dinner in the warm May night, and had walked
+a little way up the steep flank of Lycabettos till they reached a wooden
+bench near which were a few small fir trees. Somewhere among these trees
+there was hidden a nightingale, which sang with intensity to Athens
+spread out below, a small maze of mellow lights and of many not
+inharmonious voices. Even in the night, and at a distance, they felt the
+smiling intimacy of the little city they loved. Its history was like
+a living thing dwelling among the shadows, hallowed and hallowing, its
+treasures, like night flowers, breathed out a mysterious message to
+them. They received it, and felt that they understood it. Had the
+nightingale been singing to any city its song must have seemed to them
+beautiful. But it was singing to Athens, and that fact gave to its
+voice, in their ears, a magical meaning.
+
+They sat for a while in silence. Nobody passed on the winding path.
+Their impulse to solitude was unshared by the dwellers in Athens.
+Neither knew exactly what thoughts were passing through the other's
+mind, what aspirations were flaming up in the heart of the other. But
+they knew that they were close bound in sympathy just then, voyaging
+towards a common future. That future lay over the sea in gray England.
+Their time in Greece was but an interlude. But in it they were
+gathering up impressions, were laying in stores for their journey. The
+nightingale's song was part of their provision. It had to sing to just
+them for some hidden reason. And to Dion it seemed that the nightingale
+knew the reason while they did not, that it comprehended all the under
+things of love and of sorrow of which they were ignorant. When he spoke
+again he said:
+
+"A bird's song always makes me feel very unlearned. Do you know what I
+mean?"
+
+"Yes. We've got to learn so much."
+
+"Together."
+
+"Yes--partly."
+
+"Partly?" he said quickly.
+
+"I think there's a great deal that can only be learnt quite alone."
+
+Again, as sometimes before, Dion trod on the verges of mystery, felt as
+if something in Rosamund chided him, and was chilled for a moment.
+
+"I dare say you are right," he said. "But I believe I could learn any
+lesson more easily with you to help me."
+
+"No, I don't think so."
+
+"Perhaps we shall know which is right, you or I, when we've been much
+longer together," he said, with an effort to speak lightly.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Rosamund, sometimes you make me feel as if you thought I didn't know
+you, I mean didn't know you thoroughly."
+
+"Do I?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Again silence fell between them. As Dion listened once more to the
+persistent nightingale he felt that there was pain somewhere at the back
+of its ecstasy. He looked down at the soft lights of little Athens, and
+suddenly knew that much sorrow lay in the shadows of all the cities of
+the earth. There was surely a great reserve in the girl who had given
+herself to him. That was natural, perhaps. But to-night he felt that she
+was aware of this reserve and was consciously guarding it like a sacred
+thing. Presently they got up and went slowly down the hill.
+
+"Suppose you had never married," he said, as they drew near to the city,
+"how would you have lived, do you think?"
+
+"Perhaps for my singing, at first," she answered.
+
+"And afterwards?"
+
+"Afterwards? Very quietly, I think."
+
+"You won't tell me."
+
+"I don't know for certain, and what does it matter? I have married. If I
+hadn't, perhaps I should have been very selfish and thought myself very
+self-sacrificing."
+
+"I wonder in what way selfish."
+
+"There are so many ways. I heard a sermon once on a foggy night in
+London."
+
+"Ah--that evening I called on you."
+
+"I didn't say so. It made me understand egoism better than I had
+understood it before. Perhaps it's the unpardonable sin."
+
+"Then it could never be your sin."
+
+"Hush!"
+
+They no longer heard the nightingale. The voices and the houses of
+Athens were about them.
+
+As the days slipped by, Dion felt that Rosamund and he grew closer
+together. He knew, though he could not perhaps have said how, that he
+would be the only man in her intimate life. Even if he died she would
+never--he felt sure of this--yield herself to another man. The tie
+between them was to her a bond for eternity. Her body would never be
+given twice. That he knew. But sometimes he asked himself whether her
+whole soul would ever be given even once. The insatiable greed of a
+great and exclusive love was alive within him, needing always something
+more than it had. At first, after their marriage, he had not been aware
+of this greed, had not realized that nothing great is content to
+remain just as it is at a given moment. His love had to progress, and
+gradually, in Greece, he became conscious of this fact.
+
+His inner certainty, quite unshakable, that Rosamund would never belong
+to another man in the physical sense made jealousy of an ordinary kind
+impossible to him. The lowness, the hideous vulgarity of the jealousy
+which tortures the writhing flesh would never be his. Yet he wanted more
+than he had sometimes, stretched out arms to something which did not
+come to nestle against him.
+
+There was a great independence in Rosamund, he thought, which set
+her apart from other women, Not only could she bear to be alone, she
+sometimes wished to be alone. Dion, on the contrary, never wished to be
+away from her. It might be necessary for him to leave her. He was not
+a young doting fool who could not detach himself even for a moment from
+his wife's apron strings. But he knew very well that at all times he
+preferred to be with her, close to her, that he relished everything
+more when he was in her company than when he was alone. She added to his
+power of enjoyment, to his faculty of appreciation, by being beside
+him. The Parthenon even was made more sublime to him by her. That was
+a mystery. And the mystery of her human power to increase penetrated
+everywhere through their life in common, like a percolating flood that
+could not be gainsaid. She manifested her influence upon him subtly
+through the maidens of the Porch, through the almost neat perfection
+of the Theseion, through the detached grandeur of those columns in the
+waste place, that golden and carved Olympieion which acts as an outpost
+to Athens. It was as if she had the power to put something of herself
+into everything that he cared for so that he might care for it more,
+whether it were a golden sunset on the sea over which they drifted in
+a sailing-boat off the coast of old Phaleron, or a marble figure in a
+museum. She dwelt in the stones of a ruined temple; she set her feet
+upon the dream of the distant mountains; she was in the dawn, the
+twilight, and in all the ways of the moon, because he loved her and
+found her in all things when they were together.
+
+He did not know whether she, in a similar mysterious way, found him in
+all that she enjoyed. He did not ask her the question. Perhaps, really,
+in that truth of apprehension which lives very far down in a man, he had
+divined the answer, although he told himself that he did not know.
+
+He found always something new to enjoy and to worship in Rosamund.
+
+They had many tastes in common. At first, of deliberate choice, they had
+bounded their honeymoon with the precipices of the Acropolis, learning
+the Doric lesson on that height above the world. Then one day they had
+made a great sacrifice and gone to pass their hours in the pine woods
+of Kephissia. They had returned to the Acropolis quite athirst. But by
+degrees the instinct to wander a little farther afield took greater hold
+upon them, their love of physical exercise asserted itself. They began
+to take long rides on horseback, carrying food in their saddle-bags. The
+gently wild charm of Greece laid its spell upon them. They both loved
+Athens, but now they began to love, too, escaping from Athens.
+
+Directly they were out of the city they were in a freedom that appealed
+to the gipsy in both. Dion's strong boyishness, which had never yet
+been cast off, was met and countered by the best of good fellowship
+in Rosamund. Though she could be very serious, and even what he called
+"strange," she was never depressed or sad. Her good spirits were
+unfailing and infectious. She reveled in a "jaunt" or a "day out," and
+her physical strength kept fatigue far from her. She could ride for many
+hours without losing her freshness and zest. Every little episode of the
+wayside interested and entertained her. Everything comic made her laugh.
+She showed an ardor almost like an intelligent child's in getting to
+understand all she saw. Scenery, buildings, animal life, people, every
+offering of Greece was eagerly accepted, examined and discussed by her.
+She was the perfect comrade for the wilds. Their common joy in the wilds
+drew her and Dion more closely together. Never before had Rosamund been
+quite away from civilization, from the hitherto easily borne trammels of
+modern complicated life. She "found herself" in the adventure. The pure
+remoteness of Greece came to her like natal air. She breathed it in with
+a sort of rapture. It was as Dion had said. She was not merely in, she
+was of, Greece.
+
+They rode one day to Eleusis; on another day to Tatoi, buried in
+oak-woods on the slope of Parnes; on another through noisy and mongrel
+Piraeus, and over undulating wrinkled ground, burnt up by the sun and
+covered with low scrub and bushes of myrtle, to the shore of the gulf
+opposite to Salamis; on yet another to Marathon, where they lunched on
+the famous mound beneath which the bodies of the Athenians who fell in
+the battle were buried. They took no companion with them. Dion carried
+a revolver in his hip pocket, but never had reason to show or to use
+it. When they dismounted they tethered the horses to a bush or tree, or
+sometimes hobbled their forelegs, and turned them loose for a while.
+
+Such days were pure joy to them both. In them they went back to the
+early world. They did not make the hard and self-conscious imaginative
+effort of the prig to hurl themselves into an historic past. They just
+let the land and its memories take them. As, sitting on the warm ground
+among the wild myrtle bushes, they looked across the emerald green
+unruffled waters to Salamis, that very long isle with its calm gray and
+orange hills and its indented shores, perhaps for a moment they talked
+of the Queen of Halicarnassus, and of the deception of Xerxes watching
+from his throne on Mount Aegaleos. But the waters were now so solitary,
+the peace about them was so profound, that the memory of battles soon
+faded away in the sunshine. Terror and death had been here once. A queen
+had destroyed her own people in that jeweled sea, a king had fled from
+those delicate mountains. But now sea and land were for lovers. A fly
+with shining wings journeyed among the leaves of the myrtles, a beetle
+crept over the hot sandy ground leaving a minute pattern behind it;
+and Rosamund and Dion forgot all about Artemisia, as they brooded,
+wide-eyed, over the activities of the dwellers in the waste. At such
+moments they realized the magic of life, as they had never realized it
+in the turmoil of London. The insect with its wings that caught the
+sun, the intent and preoccupied little traveler whose course could be
+deflected by a twig, revealed the wonder that is lost and forgotten in
+the crowded highways of men.
+
+It was when they were at Marathon that Rosamund told Dion she loved
+Greece partly because of its emptiness. The country was not only rather
+bare of vegetation, despite its groves of glorious old olives, its woods
+of oaks round Tatoi, its delicious curly forests of yellow-green pines,
+which looked, Rosamund declared, as if they had just had their dainty
+heads perfectly dressed by an accomplished coiffeur, it was also almost
+strangely bare of men.
+
+"Where are the Greeks?" Rosamund had often asked during their first few
+rides, as they cantered on and on, scarcely ever meeting a human being.
+
+"In the towns to be sure!" Dion had answered.
+
+"And where are the towns?"
+
+"Ah! That's more than I can tell you!" he had said, laughing.
+
+To one hitherto accustomed to England, the emptiness of the country,
+even quite near to Athens, was at first surprising. Soon it became
+enchanting.
+
+"This is a country I can thoroughly trust," Rosamund declared at
+Marathon.
+
+Dion had just finished hobbling the two horses, and now lifted himself
+up. His brown face was flushed from bending. His thin riding-clothes
+were white with dust, which he beat off with hands that looked almost as
+if they wore gloves, so deeply were they dyed by the sun. As the cloud
+dispersed he emerged carrying their lunch in a straw pannier.
+
+"Why trust--specially?" he said. "Ah," he threw himself down by her
+side with a sigh of happiness, "this is good! The historic mound, and
+we think of it merely as a resting-place, vandals that we are. But--why
+trust?"
+
+"I mean that Greece never keeps any unpleasant surprises up her sleeve,
+surprises such as other countries have of noisy, intruding people. It's
+terrible how accustomed I'm getting to having everything all to myself,
+and how I simply love it."
+
+He began slowly unpacking the pannier, and laying its contents out on
+the mound.
+
+"You're a puzzle, Rosamund," he said.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You have a greater faculty for making yourself delightful to all sorts
+of people than I have found in any other person, woman or man. And yet
+you are developing a perfect passion for solitude."
+
+"Do you want people here?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then you agree with me."
+
+"But you have an absolute lust for an empty world."
+
+"Look!"
+
+She stretched out her right arm--she was leaning on the other with her
+cheek in her hand--and pointed to the crescent-shaped plain which
+lay beyond them, bounded by a sea which was a wonder of sparkling and
+intense blue, and guarded by a curving line of low hills. There were
+some clouds in the sky, but the winds were at rest, and the clouds were
+just white things dreaming. In the plain there were no trees. Here and
+there some vague crops hinted at the languid labors of men. No human
+beings were visible, but in the distance, not very far from the sea
+edge, a few oxen were feeding. Their dark slow-moving bodies intersected
+the blue. There were no ships or boats upon the stretch of sea which
+Rosamund and Dion gazed at. Behind them the bare hills showed no sign of
+life. The solitude was profound but not startling. It seemed in place,
+necessary and beautiful. In the emptiness there was something touching,
+something reticently satisfying. It was a land and seascape delicately
+purged.
+
+"Greece and solitude," said Rosamund. "I shall always connect them
+together. I shall always love each for the other's sake."
+
+In the silence which followed the words the far-off lowing of oxen came
+to them over the flats. Rosamund shut her eyes, Dion half shut his, and
+the empty world was a shining dream.
+
+When they had lunched, Rosamund said:
+
+"I am going to climb up into that house. The owner will never come, I'm
+sure."
+
+Near them upon the mound was a dwelling of Arcady, in which surely a
+shepherd sometimes lay and piped to the sun and the sea god. It was
+lifted upon a tripod of poles, and was deftly made of brushwood, with
+roof, floor and two walls all complete. A ladder of wood, from which the
+bark had been stripped, led up to it.
+
+"You want to sleep?" Dion asked.
+
+She looked at him.
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+He helped her up to her feet. Quickly she mounted the ladder and stepped
+into the room.
+
+"Good-by!" she said, looking down at him and smiling.
+
+"Good-by!" he answered, looking up.
+
+She made a pretense of shutting a door and withdrawing into privacy. He
+lit his pipe, hesitated a moment, then went to lie down under her room.
+Now he no longer saw her, but he heard her movements overhead. The dry
+brushwood crackled as she lay down, as she settled herself. She was
+lying surely at full length. He guessed that she had stretched out her
+arms and put her two hands under her head. She sighed. Below he echoed
+her sigh with a long breath of contentment. Then they both lay very
+still.
+
+Marathon!
+
+He remembered his schoolbooks. He remembered beginning Greek. He had
+never been very good at Greek. His mother, if she had been a man and had
+gone to Oxford or Cambridge, would have made a far better classic than
+he. She had helped him sometimes during the holidays when he was
+quite small. He remembered exactly how she had looked when he had been
+conjugating--half-loving and half-satirical. He had made a good many
+mistakes. Later he had read Greek history with his mother, he had read
+about the battle of Marathon.
+
+"Marathon"--it was written in his school history, "became a magic
+word at Athens . . . the one hundred and ninety-two Athenians who had
+perished in the battle were buried on the field, and over their remains
+a tumulus or mound was erected, which may still be seen about half
+a mile from the sea." As a small boy he had read that with a certain
+inevitable detachment. And now here he lay, a man, on that very tumulus,
+and the brushwood creaked above his head with the movement of the woman
+he loved.
+
+How wonderful was the weaving of the Fates!
+
+And if some day he should sit in the place of his mother, and should
+hear a small boy, his small boy, conjugating. By Jove! He would have to
+rub up his classics! Not for ten years old; he wasn't so bad as that;
+but for twenty, when the small boy would be going up to Oxford, and
+would, perhaps, be turning out alarmingly learned.
+
+Rosamund the mother of a young man!
+
+But Dion shied away from that. He could imagine her as the mother of a
+child, beautiful mother of a child almost as beautiful; but he could not
+conceive of her as the "mater" of a person with a mustache.
+
+Their youth, their youth--must it go?
+
+Again she moved slightly above him. The twigs crackled, making an almost
+irritable music of dryness. Again the lowing of cattle came over that
+old battlefield from the edge of the sea. And just then, at that very
+moment, Dion knew that his great love could not stand still, that, like
+all great things, it must progress. And the cry, that intense human cry,
+"Whither?" echoed in the deep places of his soul. Whither were he and
+his great love going? To what end were they journeying? For a moment
+sadness invaded him, the sadness of one who thinks and is very ignorant.
+Why cannot a man think deeply without thinking of an end? "All things
+come to an end!" That cruel saying went through his mind like footsteps
+echoing on iron, and a sense of fear encompassed him. There is something
+terrible in a great love, set in the little life of a man like a vast
+light in a tiny attic.
+
+Did Rosamund ever have such thoughts? Dion longed to ask her. Was she
+sleeping perhaps now? She was lying very still. If they ever had a child
+its coming would mark a great step onwards along the road, the closing
+of a very beautiful chapter in their book of life. It would be over,
+their loneliness in love, man and woman in solitude. Even the sexual tie
+would be changed. All the world would be changed.
+
+He lay flat on the ground, stretched out, his elbows firmly planted, his
+chin in his palms, his face set towards the plain and the sea.
+
+What he looked at seemed gently to chide him. There were such a
+brightness and simplicity and such a delicious freedom from all
+complication in this Grecian landscape edged by the wide frankness of
+the sea that he felt reassured. Edging the mound there were wild aloes
+and the wild oleander. A river intersected the plain which in many
+places was tawny yellow. Along the river bank grew tall reeds, sedges
+and rushes. Beyond the plain, and beyond the blue waters, rose the
+Island of Euboea, and ranges of mountains, those mountains of Greece
+which are so characteristic in their unpretentious bareness, which
+neither overwhelm nor entice, but which are unfailingly delicate,
+unfailing beautiful, quietly, almost gently, noble. In the distance,
+when he turned his head, Dion could see the little Albanian village of
+Marathon, a huddle of tiny houses far off under the hills. He looked at
+it for a moment, then again looked out over the plain, rejoicing in
+its emptiness. Along the sea edge the cattle were straying, but their
+movements were almost imperceptible. Still they were living things and
+drew Dion's eyes. The life in them sent out its message to the life in
+him, and he earnestly watched them grazing. Their vague and ruminating
+movements really emphasized the profound peace which lay around Rosamund
+and him. To watch them thus was a savoring of peace. For every contented
+animal is a bearer of peaceful tidings. In the Garden of Eden with the
+Two there were happy animals. And Dion recalled the great battle which
+had dyed red this serene wilderness, a battle which was great because
+it had been gently sung, lifted up by the music of poets, set on high
+by the lips of orators. He looked over the land and thought: "Here
+Miltiades won the name which has resounded through history. To that
+shore, where I see the cattle, the Persians were driven." And it
+seemed to him that the battle of Marathon had been fought in order that
+Rosamund and he, in the nineteenth century, might be drawn to this place
+to meet the shining afternoon. Yes, it was fought for that, and to make
+this place the more wonderful for them. It was their Garden of Eden
+consecrated by History.
+
+What a very small animal that was which had strayed away from its kind
+over the tawny ground where surely there was nothing to feed upon! The
+little dark body of it looked oddly detached as it moved along. And
+now another animal was following it quickly. The arrival of the second
+darkness, running, made Dion know that the first was human, the guardian
+of the beasts, no doubt.
+
+So Eden was invaded already! He smiled as he thought of the serpent. The
+human being came on slowly, always moving in the direction of the mound,
+and always accompanied by its attendant animal--a dog, of course. Soon
+Dion knew that both were making for the mound. It occurred to him
+that Rosamund was in the private room of him who was approaching, was
+possibly sound asleep there.
+
+"Rosamund!" he almost whispered.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"Rosamund!" he murmured, looking upward to his roof, which was her
+floor.
+
+"Hush!" came down to him through the brushwood. "I'm willing it to come
+to us."
+
+"What--the guardian of the cattle?"
+
+"Guardian of the ----! It's a child!"
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"I do know. Now you're not to frighten it."
+
+"Of course not!"
+
+He lay very still, his chin in his palms, watching the on-comers. How
+had she known? And then, seeing suddenly through her eyes, he knew that
+of course it was a child, that it could not be anything else. All its
+movements now proclaimed to him its childishness, and he watched it with
+a sort of fascination.
+
+For he had never seen Rosamund with a child. That would be for him a new
+experience with something, perhaps, prophetic in it.
+
+Child and animal approached steadily, keeping an undeviating course, and
+presently Dion saw a very small, but sturdy, Greek boy of perhaps ten
+years old, wearing a collarless shirt, open at a deep brown throat,
+leggings of some thin material, boots, and a funny little patched brown
+coat and pointed hood made all in one, and hanging down with a fulness
+almost of skirts about the small determined legs. The accompanying dog
+was a very sympathetic, blunt-nosed, round-headed, curly-coated type,
+whose whiteness, which positively invited the stroking hand, was broken
+by two great black blotches set all askew on the back, and by a black
+patch which ringed the left eye and completely smothered the cocked-up
+left ear. The child carried a stick, which nearly reached to his
+shoulder, and which ended in a long and narrow crook. The happy dog,
+like its master, had no collar.
+
+When these two reached the foot of the tumulus they stood still and
+stared upwards. The dog uttered a short gruff bark, looked at the boy,
+wagged a fat tail, barked again, abruptly depressed the fore part of its
+body till its chin was against the ground between its paws, then jumped
+into the air with a sudden demeanor of ludicrously young, and rather
+uncouth, waggishness, which made Dion laugh.
+
+The small boy replied with a smile almost as sturdy as his legs, which
+he now permitted to convey him with decisive firmness through the wild
+aloes and oleanders to the summit of the tumulus. He stood before Dion,
+holding his crooked staff tightly in his right hand, but his large dark
+eyes were directed upwards. Evidently his attention was not to be
+given to Dion. His dog, on the contrary, after a stare and two muffled
+attempts at a menacing bark, came to make friends with Dion in a way
+devoid of all dignity, full of curves, wrigglings, tail waggings and
+grins which exposed rows of smiling teeth.
+
+"Dion!" came Rosamund's voice from above.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Do show him the way up. He wants to come up."
+
+Dion got up, took the little Greek's hand firmly, led him to the foot
+of the ladder, and pointed to Rosamund who leaned from her brushwood
+chamber and held out inviting hands, smiling, and looking at the child
+with shining eyes. He understood that he was very much wanted, gravely
+placed his staff on the ground, laid hold of the ladder, and slowly
+clambered up, with the skirts of his coat sticking out behind him. His
+dog set up a loud barking, scrambled at the ladder, and made desperate
+efforts to follow him.
+
+"Help him up, Dion!" came the commanding voice from above.
+
+Dion seized the curly coat of the dog--picked up handfuls of dog. There
+was a struggle. The dog made fierce motions as if swimming, and whined
+in a thin and desperate soprano. Its body heaved upwards, its forepaws
+clutched the edge of the brushwood floor, and it arrived.
+
+"Bravo!" cried Rosamund, as she proceeded to settle down with her
+guests. "But why don't I know Greek?"
+
+"It doesn't matter," Dion murmured, standing with his hands on the
+ladder. "You know their language."
+
+Rosamund was sitting now, half-curled up, with her back against the
+brushwood wall. Her light sun-helmet lay on the floor. In her ruffled
+hair were caught two or three thin brown leaves, their brittle edges
+curled inwards. The little boy, slightly smiling, yet essentially
+serious, as are children tested by a great new experience, squatted
+close to her and facing her, with one leg under him, the other leg
+stretched out confidentially, as much as to say, "Here it is!" The dog
+lay close by panting, smiling, showing as much tongue and teeth as
+was caninely possible in the ardor of feeling tremendously uplifted,
+important, one of the very few.
+
+And Rosamund proceeded to entertain her guests.
+
+What did she do? Sometimes, long afterwards in England, Dion, recalling
+that day--a very memorable day in his life--asked himself the question.
+And he could never remember very much. But he knew that Rosamund showed
+him new aspects of tenderness and fun. What do women who love and
+understand little boys do to put them at their ease, to break down their
+small shynesses? Rosamund did absurd things with deep earnestness and
+complete concentration. She invented games, played with twigs and straws
+which she drew from the walls of her chamber. She changed the dog's
+appearance by rearrangements of his ears, to which he submitted with
+a slobbering ecstasy, gazing at her with yellow eyes which looked
+flattened in his head. Turned quite back, their pink insides exposed
+to view, the ears changed him into a brand-new dog, at which his master
+stared with an amazement which soon was merged in gratification. With a
+pocket-handkerchief she performed marvels of impersonation which the boy
+watched with an almost severe intentness, even putting out his tongue
+slowly, and developing a slight squint, when the magician rose to the
+top of her powers. She conjured with a silver coin, and of course let
+the child play with her watch. She had realized at a glance that those
+things which would be considered as baby nonsense by an English boy of
+ten, to this small dweller on the plain of Marathon were full of the
+magic of the unknown. And at last:
+
+"Throw me up an orange, Dion!" she cried. "I know there are two or three
+left in the pannier."
+
+Dion bent down eagerly, rummaged and found an orange.
+
+"Here!" he said. "Catch!"
+
+He threw it up. She caught it with elaboration to astonish the boy.
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked Dion.
+
+"Throw me up your pocket-knife and you'll see."
+
+Again he threw and she caught, while the boy's mouth gaped.
+
+"Now then!" cried Rosamund.
+
+She set to work, and almost directly had introduced her astounded guest
+of the Greek kingdom to the famous "Crossing the Channel" tragedy.
+
+So great was the effect of this upon little Miltiades,--so they both
+always called the boy when talking of him in after times,--that he began
+to perspire, and drops of saliva fell from the corners of his small and
+pouting mouth in imitation of the dreadfully human orange by which he
+was confronted. Thereupon Rosamund threw off all ceremony and frankly
+played the mother. She drew the boy, smiling, sideways to her, wiped his
+mouth with her handkerchief, gently blew his small nose and gave him a
+warm kiss.
+
+"There!" she said.
+
+And upon this the child made a remark.
+
+Neither of them ever knew what it meant. It was long, and sounded
+like an explanation. Having spoken, Miltiades suddenly looked shy. He
+wriggled towards the top of the ladder. Dion thought that Rosamund would
+try to stop him from leaving her, but she did not. On the contrary,
+she drew up her legs and made way for him, carefully. The child deftly
+descended, picked up his staff and turned. The dog, barking joyously,
+had leaped after him, and now gamboled around him. For a moment the
+child hesitated, and in that moment Dion popped the remains of their
+lunch into his coat pockets; then slowly he walked to the side of the
+tumulus by which he had come up. There he stood for two or three minutes
+staring once more up at Rosamund. She waved a friendly hand to him,
+boyishly, Dion thought. He smiled cautiously, then confidentially,
+suddenly turned and bolted down the slope uttering little cries--and so
+away once more to the far-off cattle on the old battlefield, followed by
+his curly dog.
+
+When Dion had watched him into the distance, beyond which lay the
+shining glory of the sea, and looked up to Rosamund again, she was
+pulling the little dry leaves from her undulating hair.
+
+"I'm all brushwood," she said, "and I love it."
+
+"So do I."
+
+"I ought to have been born a shepherdess. Why do you look at me like
+that?"
+
+"Perhaps because I'm seeing a new girl who's got even more woman in her
+than I knew till to-day."
+
+"Most women are like that, Dion, when they get the chance."
+
+"To think you knew all those tricks and never told me!"
+
+"Help me down."
+
+He stretched out his arms to her. When she was on the ground he still
+held her for a moment.
+
+"You darling!" he whispered. "Never shall I forget this day at Marathon,
+the shining, the child, and you--you!"
+
+They did not talk much on the long ride homeward. The heat was great,
+but they were not afraid of it, for the shining fires of this land on
+the edge of the east cherished and did not burn them. The white dust lay
+deep on the road, and flew in light clouds from under the feet of their
+horses as they rode slowly upwards, leaving the blue of their pastoral
+behind them, and coming into the yellow of the pine woods. Later, as
+they drew nearer to Athens, the ancient groves of the olives, touched
+with a gentle solemnity, would give them greeting; the fig trees and
+mulberry trees would be about them, and the long vineyards watched over
+by the aristocratic cypress lifting its dark spire to the sun. But now
+the kingdom of the pine trees joyously held them. They were in the happy
+woods in which even to breathe was sheer happiness. Now and then they
+pulled up and looked back to the crescent-shaped plain which held a
+child instead of armies. They traced the course of the river marked
+out by the reeds and sedges. They saw the tiny dark specks, which were
+cattle grazing, with the wonder of blue beyond them. In these moments,
+half-unconsciously, they were telling memory to lay in its provision
+for the future. Perhaps they would never come back; never again would
+Rosamund rest in her brushwood chamber, never again would Dion hear the
+dry music above him, and feel the growth of his love, the urgency of
+its progress just as he had felt them that day. They might be intensely
+happy, but exactly the same happiness would probably not be theirs again
+through all the years that were coming. The little boy and his dog had
+doubtless gone out of their lives for ever. Their good-by to Marathon
+might well be final. They looked back again and again, till the blue
+of the sea was lost to them. Then they rode on, faster. The horses
+knew they were going homeward, and showed a new liveliness, sharing the
+friskiness of the little graceful trees about them. Now and then the
+riders saw some dusty peasants--brown and sun-dried men wearing the
+fustanella, and shoes with turned-up toes ornamented with big black
+tassels; women with dingy handkerchiefs tied over their heads;
+children who looked almost like the spawn of the sun in their healthy,
+bright-eyed brownness. And these people had cheerful faces. Their rustic
+lot seemed enviable. Who would not shed his sorrows under these pine
+trees, in the country where the solitudes radiated happiness, and even
+bareness was like music? Here was none of the heavy and exotic passion,
+none of the lustrous and almost morbid romance of the true and distant
+East, drowsy with voluptuous memories. That setting was not for
+Rosamund. Here were a lightness, a purity and sweetness of Arcadia, and
+people who looked both intelligent and simple.
+
+At a turn of the road they met some Vlachs--rascally wanderers, lean as
+greyhounds, chicken-stealers and robbers in the night, yet with a sort
+of consecration of careless cheerfulness upon them. They called out.
+In their cries there was the sound of a lively malice. Their brown feet
+stirred up the dust and set it dancing in the sunshine, a symbol surely
+of their wayward, unfettered spirits. A little way off, on a slope among
+the trees, their dark tents could be partially seen.
+
+"Lucky beggars!" murmured Dion, as he threw them a few small coins,
+while Rosamund smiled at them and waved her hand in answer to their
+greetings. "I believe it's the ideal life to dwell in the tents."
+
+"It seems so to-day."
+
+"Won't it to-morrow? Won't it when we are in London?"
+
+"Perhaps more than ever then."
+
+Was she gently evading an answer? They had reached the brow of the hill
+and put their horses to a canter. The white dust settled over them. They
+were like millers on horseback as they left the pine woods behind them.
+But the touch of the dust was as the touch of nature upon their faces
+and hands. They would not have been free of it as they rode towards
+Athens, and came to the region of the vineyards, of the olive groves and
+the cypresses. Now and then they passed ramshackle cafes made of boards
+roughly nailed together anyhow, with a straggle of vine sprawling over
+them, and the earth for a flooring. Tables were set out before them,
+or in their shadows; a few bottles were visible within; on benches or
+stools were grouped Greeks, old and young, busily talking, no doubt
+about politics. Carts occasionally passed by the riders, sending out
+dust to mingle with theirs. Turkeys gobbled at them, dogs barked in
+front of one-storied houses. They saw peasants sitting sideways on
+pattering donkeys, and now and then a man on horseback. By thin runlets
+of water were women, chattering as they washed the clothes of their
+households. Then again, the horses came into the bright and solitary
+places where the cheerful loneliness of Greece held sway.
+
+And so, at last they cantered into the outskirts of Athens when the
+evening was falling. Another day had slipped from them. But both felt it
+was a day which they had known very well, had realized with an unusual
+fulness.
+
+"It's been a day of days!" Dion said that evening.
+
+And Rosamund nodded assent.
+
+A child had been in that day, and, with a child's irresistible might,
+had altered everything for them. Now Dion knew how Rosamund would be
+with a child of her own, and Rosamund knew that Dion loved her more
+deeply because he had seen her with a child. A little messenger had
+come to them over the sun-dried plain of Marathon bearing a gift of
+knowledge.
+
+The next day they spent quietly. In the morning they visited the
+National Museum, and in the late afternoon they returned to the
+Acropolis.
+
+In the Museum Rosamund was fascinated by the tombs. She, who always
+seemed so remote from sorrow, who, to Dion, was the personification of
+vitality and joyousness, was deeply moved by the record of death, by
+the wonderfully restrained, and yet wonderfully frank, suggestion of the
+grief of those who, centuries ago, had mingled their dust with the dust
+of the relations, the lovers, the friends, whom they had mourned for.
+
+"What a lesson this is for me!" she murmured at last, after standing for
+a long while wrapped in silence and contemplation.
+
+"Why for you, specially?" he asked.
+
+She looked up at him. There were tears in her eyes. He believed she
+was hesitating, undecided whether to let him into a new chamber of her
+being, or whether to close a half-opened door against him.
+
+"It's very difficult to submit, I think, for some of us," she answered,
+after a pause, slowly. "Those old Greeks must have known how to do it."
+
+"To submit to sorrow?"
+
+"Yes, to a great sorrow. Such a thing is like an attack in the dark. If
+I am attacked I want to strike back and hurt."
+
+"But whom could you reasonably hurt on account of a death that came in
+the course of nature? That's what you mean, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+After a slight hesitation she said:
+
+"Do you mean that you don't think we can hurt God?"
+
+"I wonder," Dion answered.
+
+"I don't. I know we can."
+
+She looked again at the tomb before which they were standing. It showed
+a woman seated and stretching out her right arm, which a woman friend
+was touching. In the background was another, contemplative, woman and
+a man wearing a chaplet of leaves, his hand lifted to his face. For
+epitaph there was one word cut in marble.
+
+"It means farewell, doesn't it?" asked Rosamund.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Perhaps you'll smile, but I think these tombs are the most beautiful
+things I have seen in Greece. It's a miracle--their lack of violence.
+What a noble thing grief could be. That little simple word. It's great
+to be able to give up the dearest thing with that one little word. But I
+couldn't--I couldn't."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"I know, because I didn't."
+
+She said nothing more on the subject that morning, but when they were
+on the Acropolis waiting, as so often before, for the approach of the
+evening, she returned to it. Evidently it was haunting her that day.
+
+"I believe giving up nobly is a much finer thing than attaining nobly,"
+she said. "And yet attaining wins all the applause, and giving up, if it
+gets anything, only gets that ugly thing--pity."
+
+"But is pity an ugly thing?" said Dion.
+
+He had a little stone in his hand, and, as he spoke, he threw it gently
+towards the precipice, taking care not to send it over the edge.
+
+"I think I would rather have anything on earth from people than their
+pity."
+
+"Suppose I were to pity you because I loved you?"
+
+He picked up another stone and held it in his hand.
+
+"I should hate it."
+
+He had lifted his hand for the throw, but he kept hold of the stone.
+
+"What, pity that came straight out of love?"
+
+"Any sort of pity."
+
+"You must be very proud--much prouder than I am then. If I were unhappy
+I should wish to have pity from you."
+
+"Perhaps you have never been really unhappy."
+
+Dion laid the stone down. He thought hard for a moment.
+
+"Without any hope at all of a change back to happiness--no, actually I
+never have."
+
+"Ah, then you've never had to brace up and see if you could find a
+strong voice to utter your 'farewell'!"
+
+She spoke with firmness, a firmness that rang like true metal struck
+with a hammer and giving back sincerity.
+
+"That sounds tremendously Doric," he said.
+
+His lips were smiling, but there was an almost surprised expression in
+his eyes.
+
+"Dion, do you know you're intuitive to-day?"
+
+"Ah, your training--your training!"
+
+"Didn't you say we should have to be Doric ourselves if----?"
+
+"Come, Rosamund, it's time for the Parthenon."
+
+Once more they went over the uneven ground to stand before its solemn
+splendor.
+
+"Shall we have learnt before we go?" said Dion.
+
+"It's strange, but I think the tombs teach me more. They're more within
+my reach. This is so tremendous that it's remote. Perhaps a man, or--or
+a boy----"
+
+She looked at him.
+
+"A boy?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He drew her down. She clasped her hands, that looked to him so capable
+and so pure, round her knees.
+
+"A boy? Go on, Rose."
+
+"He might learn his lesson here, with a man to help him. The Parthenon's
+tremendously masculine. Perhaps women have to learn from the gentleness
+of those dear tombs."
+
+Never before had she seemed to him so soft, so utterly soft of nature.
+
+"You've been thinking a great deal to-day of our boy, haven't you?" he
+said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Suppose we did have a boy and lost him?"
+
+"Lost him?"
+
+Her voice sounded suddenly almost hostile.
+
+"Such a thing has happened to parents. It might happen to us."
+
+"I don't believe it would happen to me," Rosamund said, with a sort of
+curious, almost cold decision.
+
+"But why not?"
+
+"What made you think of such a thing?"
+
+"I don't know. Perhaps it was because of what you said this morning
+about grief, and then about bracing up and finding a firm voice to utter
+one's 'farewell.'"
+
+"You don't understand what a woman would feel who lost her child."
+
+"Are you sure that you do?"
+
+"Partly. Quite enough to----Don't let us speak about it any more."
+
+"No. There's nothing more futile than imagining horrors that are never
+coming upon us."
+
+"I never do it," she said, with resolute cheerfulness. "But we shall
+very soon have to say one 'farewell.'"
+
+"To the Parthenon?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Say it to-night!"
+
+She turned round to face him.
+
+"To-night? Why?"
+
+"For a little while."
+
+A sudden happy idea had come to him. A shadow had fallen over her for
+a moment. He wanted to drive it away, to set her again in the full
+sunshine for which she was born, and in which, if he could have his
+will, she should always dwell.
+
+"You wanted to take me away somewhere."
+
+"Yes. You must see a little more of Greece before we go home. Say your
+'farewell,' Rosamund."
+
+She did not know what was in his mind, but she obeyed him, and, looking
+up at the great marble columns, glowing with honey-color and gold in the
+afternoon light, she murmured:
+
+"Farewell."
+
+On the following day they left Athens and set out on the journey to
+Olympia.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+"Why are you bringing me to Olympia?"
+
+That question, unuttered by her lips, was often in Rosamund's eyes as
+they drew near to the green wilds of Elis. Of course they had always
+meant to visit Olympia before they sailed away to England, but she knew
+very well that Dion had some special purpose in his mind, and that it
+was closely connected with his great love of her. She had understood
+that on the Acropolis, and her "farewell" had been an act of submission
+to his will not wholly unselfish. Her curiosity was awake.
+
+What was the secret of Olympia?
+
+They had gone by train to Patras, slept there, and thence rode
+on horseback to Pyrgos through the vast vineyards of the
+Peloponnesus--vineyards that stretched down to the sea and were dotted
+with sentinel cypresses. The heat was much greater than it had been in
+Athens. Enormous aloes hedged gardens from which came scents that seemed
+warm. The sandy soil, turned up by the horses' feet, was hot to the
+touch. The air quivered, and was shot with a music of insects faint but
+pervasive.
+
+Pyrgos was suffocating and noisy, but Rosamund was amused by democracy
+at close quarters, showing its naked love of liberty. Her strong
+humanity rose to the occasion, and she gave herself with a smiling
+willingness to the streets, in which men, women, children and animals,
+with lungs of leather, sent forth their ultimate music. Nevertheless,
+she was glad when she and Dion set out again, and followed the banks of
+the Alpheus, leaving the cries of the city behind them. It seemed to her
+that they were traveling to some hidden treasure, secluded in the folds
+of a green valley where the feet of men seldom, if ever, came. Dion's
+eyes told her that they were drawing nearer and nearer to the secret he
+knew of, and was going to reveal to her. She often caught him looking
+at her with an almost boyish expression of loving anticipation; and more
+than once he laughed happily when he saw her question, but he would not
+give her an answer.
+
+Peasants worked in the vineyards, shoulder-high in the plants, brown and
+sweating in the glare. Swarthy children, with intelligent eyes, often
+with delicate noses, and those pouting lips which are characteristic of
+many Greek statues, ran to stare at them, and sometimes followed them a
+little way, but without asking for alms. Then the solitudes took them,
+and they wound on and on, with their guide as their only companion.
+
+He was a gentle, even languid-looking youth, called Nicholas Agathoulos,
+who was a native of Patras, but who had lived a good deal in Athens,
+who spoke a few words of English and French, and who professed a deep
+passion for Lord Byron. Nicholas rode on a mule, leading, or not leading
+as the case might be--for he was a charmingly careless person--a
+second mule on which was fastened Rosamund's and Dion's scanty luggage.
+Rosamund, like a born vagabond, was content to travel in this glorious
+climate with scarcely any impedimenta. When Nicholas was looked at he
+smiled peacefully under his quiet and unpretending black mustache. When
+he was not looked at he seemed to sleep with open eyes. He never sang
+or whistled, had no music at all in him; but he could quote stanzas from
+"Don Juan" in Greek, and, when he did that, he woke up, sparks of fire
+glowed in his eyes, and his employers realized that he shared to the
+full the patriotism of his countrymen.
+
+Did he know the secret of Olympia which Dion was concealing so
+carefully, and enjoying so much, as the little train of pilgrims wound
+onwards among fruit trees and shrubs of arbutus, penetrating farther and
+ever farther into a region sweet and remote? Of course he must know it.
+
+"I shall ask Nicholas," Rosamund said once to Dion, perversely.
+
+"What?"
+
+"You know perfectly well what."
+
+His face was a map of innocence as he touched his thin horse with the
+whip and rode forward a little faster.
+
+"What is there to see at Olympia, Nicholas?" she said, speaking rather
+loudly in order that Dion might hear.
+
+Nicholas woke up, and hastily, in a melodious voice, quoted some scraps
+of guide-book. Rosamund did not find what she wanted among them. She
+knew already about the ruins, about the Nike of Paeonius and the Hermes
+of Praxiteles. So she left the young Greek to his waking dream, and
+possessed her soul in a patience that was not difficult. She liked to
+dwell in anticipation. And she felt that any secret this land was about
+to reveal to her would be, must be, beautiful. She trusted Greece.
+
+"We aren't far off now," said Dion presently, as they rode up the
+valley--a valley secluded from the world, pastoral and remote, shaded by
+Judas trees.
+
+"How peaceful and lovely it is."
+
+"And full of the echoes of the Pagan feet which once trod here."
+
+"I don't hear them," said Rosamund, "and I am listening."
+
+"Perhaps you could never hear Pagan echoes. And yet you love Greece."
+
+"Yes. But I have nothing Pagan in me. I know that."
+
+"It doesn't matter," he said. "You are the ideal woman to be in Greece
+with. If I don't come back to Greece with you, I shall never come back."
+
+They rode on. Her horse was following his along the windings of the
+river. Presently she said:
+
+"Where are we going to sleep? Surely there isn't a possible inn in
+this remoteness?--or have they build one for travelers who come here in
+winter and spring?"
+
+"Our inn will be a little above Olympia."
+
+The green valley seemed closing about them, as if anxious to take them
+to itself, to keep them in its closest intimacy, with a gentle jealousy.
+Rosamund had a sensation, almost voluptuous, of yielding to the pastoral
+greenness, to the warm stillness, to the hush of the delicate wilds.
+
+"Elis! Elis!" she whispered to herself. "I am riding up into Elis, where
+once the processions passed to the games, where Nero built himself a
+mansion. And there's a secret here for me."
+
+Then suddenly there came into her mind the words in the "Paradiso" which
+she had been dreaming over in London on the foggy day when Dion had
+asked her to marry him.
+
+The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence from warm love and living hope
+which conquereth the Divine will.
+
+It was strange that the words should come to her just then. She could
+not think why they came. But, repeating them to herself, she felt how
+very far off she was from Paganism. Yet she had within her warm love
+surely and living hope. Could such things, as they were within her, ever
+do violence to the Kingdom of Heaven? She looked between her horse's
+perpetually moving ears at the hollow athletic back of her young
+husband. If she had not married she would have given rein to deep
+impulses within her which now would never be indulged. They would not
+have led her to Greece. If she had been governed by them she would never
+have been drawn on by the secret of Olympia. How strange it was that,
+within the compass of one human being, should be contained two widely
+differing characters. Well, she had chosen, and henceforth she must live
+according to the choice she had made. But how would she have been in
+the other life of which she had dreamed so often, and so deeply, in her
+hours of solitude? She would never know that. She had chosen the warm
+love and the living hope, but the Kingdom of Heaven should never suffer
+violence from anything she had chosen. There are doubtless many ways of
+consecrating a life, of rendering service.
+
+They came into a scattered and dingy hamlet. Hills rose about it, but
+the narrowing valley still wound on.
+
+"We are close to the ruins," said Dion.
+
+"Already! Where are we going to sleep?"
+
+"Up there!"
+
+He pointed to a steep hill that was set sheer above the valley.
+
+"Go on with the mules, Nicholas."
+
+Nicholas rode on, smiling.
+
+"What's that building on the hump?"
+
+"The Museum."
+
+"I wonder why they put the inn so far away."
+
+"It isn't really very far, not many minutes from here. But the way's
+pretty steep. Now then, Rosamund!"
+
+They set their horses to the task. Nicholas and the mules were out of
+sight. A bend of the little track had hidden them.
+
+"Why, there's a village up here!" said Rosamund, as they came to a
+small collection of houses with yards and rough gardens and scattered
+outbuildings.
+
+"Yes--Drouva. Our inn is just beyond it, but quite separated from it."
+
+"I'm glad of that. They don't bother very much about cleanliness here, I
+should think."
+
+He was smiling at her now. His lips were twitching under his mustache,
+and his eyes seemed trying not to tell something to her.
+
+"Surely the secret isn't up here?"
+
+He shook his head, still smiling, almost laughing.
+
+They were now beyond the village, and emerged on a plateau of rough
+short grass which seemed to dominate the world.
+
+"This is the top of the hill of Drouva," said Dion, with a ring of joy,
+and almost of pride, in his voice. "And there's our inn, the Inn of
+Drouva."
+
+Rosamund pulled up her horse. She did not say a word. She just looked,
+while her horse lowered his head and sniffed the air in through his
+twitching nostrils. Then he sent forth a quivering neigh, his welcome to
+the Inn of Drouva. The view was immense, but Rosamund was not looking
+at it. A small dark object not far off in the foreground of this great
+picture held her eyes. For the moment she saw little or nothing else.
+
+She saw a dark, peaked tent pitched in the middle of the plateau. Smoke
+from a fire curled up behind it. Two or three figures moved near it.
+Beyond, Nicholas was unloading the mules.
+
+She dropped the cord by which she had been guiding her horse and slipped
+down to the ground. Her legs were rather stiff from riding. She held on
+to the saddle for a moment.
+
+"A camp?" she said at last.
+
+Dion was beside her.
+
+"An awfully rough one."
+
+"How jolly!"
+
+She said the words almost solemnly.
+
+"Dion, you are a brick!" she added, after a pause. "I've never stayed in
+camp before. A real brick! But you always are."
+
+"Aren't you coming into the camp?"
+
+She put her hand on his arm and kept him back.
+
+"No--wait! What did you mean by shaking your head when I asked you if
+the secret was up here?"
+
+"This isn't the real secret. It wasn't because of this that I asked you
+suddenly on the Acropolis to say 'farewell' to the Parthenon."
+
+"There's another secret?"
+
+"There's another reason, the real reason, why I hurried you to Olympia.
+But I'm going to let you find it out for yourself. I shan't tell you
+anything."
+
+"But how shall I know when----?"
+
+"You will know."
+
+"To-day?"
+
+"Don't you think we might stay on our hill-top till to-morrow?"
+
+"Yes, all right. It's glorious here; I won't be impatient. But how could
+you manage to get the tent here before we came?"
+
+"We've been two nights on the way, Patras and Pyrgos. That gave plenty
+of time to the magician to work the spell. Come along."
+
+This time she did not hold him back. Her eagerness was as great as his.
+Certainly it was a very ordinary camp, scarcely, in fact, a camp at all.
+The tent was small and of the roughest kind, but there were two neat
+little camp-beds within it, with their toes planted on the short dry
+grass. In the iron washhand stand were a shining white basin and a jug
+filled with clear water. There was a cake of remarkable pink soap with a
+strange and piercing scent; there was a "tooth glass"; there was a straw
+mat.
+
+"What isn't there?" cried Rosamund, who was almost as delighted as a
+child.
+
+A grave and very handsome gentleman from Athens, Achilles Stavros
+by name, received her congratulations with a classical smile of
+satisfaction.
+
+"He's even got a genuine Greek nose for the occasion!" Rosamund said
+delightedly to Dion, when Achilles retired for a moment to give some
+instructions about tea to the cook. "Where did you find him?"
+
+"That's my secret."
+
+"I never realised how delicious a camp was before. My wildest dreams are
+surpassed."
+
+As they looked at the two small, hard chairs with straw bottoms which
+were solemnly set out side by side facing the view, and upon which
+Achilles expected them to sink voluptuously for the ritual of tea, they
+broke into laughter at Rosamund's exaggerated expressions of
+delight. But directly she was able to stop laughing she affirmed with
+determination:
+
+"I don't care what anybody says, or thinks; I repeat it"--she glanced
+from the straw mat to the cake of anemic pink soap--"my wildest dreams
+are surpassed. To think"--she spread out her hands--"only to think of
+finding a tooth glass here! It's--it's admirable!"
+
+She turned upon him an almost fanatical eye, daring contradiction; and
+they both laughed again, long and loud like two children who, suddenly
+aware of a keen physical pleasure, prolong it beyond all reasonable
+bounds.
+
+"What are we going to have for tea?" she asked.
+
+"Tea," Dion cried.
+
+"You ridiculous creature!"
+
+From a short distance, Achilles gazed upon the merriment of theses
+newly-married English travelers. Nobody had told him they were newly
+married; he just knew it, had known it at a glance. As he watched, the
+laughter presently died away, and he saw the two walk forward to the
+edge of the small plateau, then stand still to gaze at the view.
+
+The prospect from the hill of Drouva above Olympia is very great, and
+all Rosamund's inclination to merriment died out of her as she looked
+upon it. Even her joy in the camp was forgotten for a moment.
+
+Upon their plateau, sole guests of the bareness, stood two small olive
+trees, not distorted by winds. Rosamund leaned against one of them
+as she gazed, put her arms round it with a sort of affectionate
+carelessness that was half-protective, that seemed to say, "You dear
+little tree! How nice of you to be here. But you almost want taking care
+of." Then the tree was forgotten, and the Hellenic beauty reigned over
+her spirit, as she gazed upon the immense pastoral bounded by mountains
+and the sea; a green wilderness threaded by a serpentine river of
+silver--a far-flung river which lingered on its way, journeying hither
+and thither, making great curves as if it loved the wilderness
+and wished to know it well, to know all of it before being merged
+irrevocably with the sea.
+
+"Those are the valleys of the Kladeos and the Alpheios."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And that far-off Isle is the Island of Zante."
+
+"Of Zante," she repeated.
+
+After a long pause she said:
+
+"You know those words somewhere in the Bible--'the wilderness and the
+solitary places'?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I've always loved them, just those words. Even when I was quite a
+child I liked to say them. And I remember once, when I was staying at
+Sherrington, we drove over to the cathedral. Canon Wilton took us into
+the stalls. It was a week-day and there were very few people. The anthem
+was Wesley's 'The Wilderness.' I had never heard it before, and when I
+heard those words--my words--being sung, I had such a queer thrill. I
+wanted to cry and I was startled. To most people, I suppose, the word
+wilderness suggests something dreary and parched, ugly desolation."
+
+"Yes. The scapegoat was driven out into the wilderness."
+
+"I think I'd rather take _my_ sin into the wilderness than anywhere
+else. Purification might be found there."
+
+"_Your_ sin!" he said. "As if----" He was silent.
+
+Zante seemed sleeping in the distance of the Ionian Sea, far away as
+the dream from which one has waked, touched with a dream's mystic
+remoteness. The great plain, stretching to mountains and sea, vast and
+green and lonely--but with the loneliness that smiles, desiring nothing
+else--seemed uninhabited. Perhaps there were men in it, laboring among
+the vineyards or toiling among the crops, women bending over the earth
+by which they lived, or washing clothes on the banks of the river.
+Rosamund did not look for them and did not see them. In the green
+landscape, over which from a distance the mountains kept their quiet and
+deeply reserved watch, she detected no movement. Even the silver of
+the river seemed immobile, as if its journeyings were now stilled by an
+afternoon spell.
+
+"It's as empty as the plain of Marathon, but how much greater!" she said
+at last.
+
+"At Marathon there was the child."
+
+"Yes, and here there's not even a child."
+
+She sighed.
+
+"I wonder what one would learn to be if one lived on the hill of
+Drouva?" she said.
+
+"It will be much more beautiful at sunset. We are looking due west. Soon
+we shall have the moon rising behind us."
+
+"What memories I shall carry away!"
+
+"And I."
+
+"You were here before alone?"
+
+"Yes. I walked up from the village just before sunset after a long day
+among the ruins. I--I didn't know then of your existence. That seems
+strange."
+
+But she was gazing at the view, and now with an earnestness in which
+there seemed to him to be a hint of effort, as if she were, perhaps,
+urging imagination to take her away and to make her one with that on
+which she looked. It struck him just then that, since they had been
+married, she had changed a good deal, or developed. A new dreaminess had
+been added to her power and her buoyancy which, at times, made her very
+different from the radiant girl he had won.
+
+"The Island of Zante!" she said once more, with a last look at the sea,
+as they turned away in answer to the grave summons of Achilles. "Ah,
+what those miss who never travel!"
+
+"And yet I remember your saying once that you had very little of the
+normal in you, and even something about the cat's instinct."
+
+"Probably I meant the cat's instinct to say nasty things. Every woman--"
+
+"No, what you meant--"
+
+He began actually to explain, but her "Puss, Puss, Puss!" stopped him.
+Her dream was over and her laugh rang out infectiously as they returned
+to the tent.
+
+The tea was fairly bad, but she defended its merits with energy, and
+munched biscuits with an excellent appetite. Afterwards she smoked a
+cigarette and Dion his pipe, sitting on the ground and leaning against
+the tent wall. In vain Achilles drew her attention to the chairs.
+Rosamund stretched out her long limbs luxuriously and shook her head.
+
+"I'm not a school-teacher, Achilles," she said.
+
+And Dion had to explain what she meant perhaps--only perhaps, for he
+wasn't sure about it himself,--to that classical personage.
+
+"These chairs fight against the whole thing," she said, when Achilles
+was gone.
+
+"I'll hide them," said Dion.
+
+He was up in a moment, caught hold of the chairs, gripping one in each
+hand, and marched off with them. When he came back Rosamund was no
+longer sitting on the ground by the tent wall. She had slipped away. He
+looked round. She must have gone beyond the brow of the hill, for she
+was not on the plateau. He hesitated, pulling hard at his pipe. He knew
+her curious independence, knew that sometimes she wanted to be alone.
+No doubt she had gone to look at the great view from some hidden place.
+Well, then, he ought not to try to find her, he ought to respect her
+wish to be by herself. But this evening it hurt him. As he stood there
+he felt wounded, for he remembered telling her that the great view would
+be much more beautiful at sunset when the moon would be rising behind
+them. The implication of course had been, "Wait a little and I'll
+show you." It was he who had chosen the place for the camp, he who had
+prepared the surprise. Perhaps foolishly, he had thought of the whole
+thing, even of the plain, the river, the mountains, the sea and the
+Island of Zante, as a sort of possession which he was going gloriously
+to share with her. And now----! He felt deprived, almost wronged. The
+sky was changing. He turned and looked to the east. Above Olympia, in
+a clear and tremulous sky, a great silver moon was rising. It was his
+hour, and she had hidden herself.
+
+Again, at that moment, Dion felt almost afraid of his love.
+
+His pipe had gone out. He took it from his lips, bent, and knocked out
+the tobacco against the heel of his boot. He was horribly disappointed,
+but he was not going to search for Rosamund; nor was he ever going to
+let her know of his disappointment. Perhaps by concealing it he would
+kill it. He thrust his pipe into his pocket, hesitated, then walked a
+little way from the camp and sat down on the side of the hill. What rot
+it was his always wanting to share everything now. Till he met Rosamund
+he had always thought only women could never be happy unless they shared
+their pleasures, and preferably with a man. Love apparently could
+play the very devil, bridge the gulf between sexes, make a man who was
+thoroughly masculine in all his tastes and habits have "little feelings"
+which belonged properly only to women.
+
+Doric! Suddenly the word jumped up in his mind, and a vision of the
+Parthenon columns rose before his imagination, sternly glorious, almost
+with the strength of a menace. He set his teeth together and cursed
+himself for a fool and a backslider.
+
+Rosamund and he were to be Doric. Well, this evening he didn't know
+exactly what he was, but he certainly was not Doric.
+
+Just then he heard the sound of a shot. He did not know what direction
+it came from, but, fantastically enough, it seemed to be a comment on
+his thought, a brusk, decisive exclamation flung at him from out of the
+silent evening. "Sentimentalist! Take that, and get out of your mush
+of feeling!" As he recognized it--he now forced himself to that
+sticking-point--to be a mush, the shot's comment fell in, of course,
+with his own view of the matter.
+
+He sat still for a moment, thinking of the shot, and probably expecting
+it to be repeated. It was not repeated. A great silence prevailed, the
+silence of the Hellenic wild held in the hand of evening. And abruptly,
+perhaps, from that large and pervasive silence, Dion caught a coldness
+of fear. All his perceptions rushed upon him, an acute crowd. He sprang
+up, put his hand to his revolver. Rosamund out alone somewhere in the
+loneliness of Greece--evening--a shot!
+
+He was over the brow of the hill towards the west in a moment. All
+respect for Rosamund's evening whim, all remembrance of his own proper
+pride, was gone from him.
+
+"Rosamund!" he called; "Rosamund!"
+
+"Here!" replied her strong voice from somewhere a little way below him.
+
+And he saw her standing on the hillside and looking downwards. He thrust
+his revolver back into his pocket quickly. Already his pride was pushing
+its head up again. He stood still, looking down on her.
+
+"It's all right, it is?"
+
+This time she lifted her head and turned her face up to him.
+
+"All right?"
+
+"I heard a shot."
+
+He saw laughter dawning in her face.
+
+"You don't mean to say----?"
+
+She laughed frankly.
+
+"Come down here!"
+
+He joined her.
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"Did you, or didn't you, think I'd been attacked by Greek brigands?"
+
+"Of course not! But I heard a shot, and it just struck me----"
+
+At that moment he was almost ashamed of loving her so much.
+
+"Well, there's the brigand, and I do believe he's going to shoot again.
+The ruffian! Yes, he's taking aim! Oh, Dion, let's seek cover."
+
+Still laughing, she shrank against him. He put one arm round her
+shoulder bruskly, and his hand closed on her tightly. A little way below
+them, relieved with a strange and romantic distinctness against the
+evening light, in which now there was a strong suggestion of gold, was
+a small figure, straight, active--a figure of the open air and the wide
+spaces--with a gun to its right shoulder. A shot rang out.
+
+"He's got it," said Rosamund.
+
+And there was a note of admiring praise in her voice.
+
+"That child's a dead shot," she added. "It's quail he's after, I
+believe. Look! He's picking it up."
+
+The small black figure bent quickly down, after running forward a little
+way.
+
+"He retrieves as well as he shoots. Shall we go to him and see whether
+it's quail?"
+
+"Another child," said Dion.
+
+He still had his arm round her shoulder.
+
+"Why did you come here?" he asked.
+
+"To look at the evening coming to me over the wilderness. But he made me
+forget it for a moment."
+
+Dion was staring at her now.
+
+"I believe a child could make you forget anything," he said.
+
+"Let's go to him."
+
+The gold of the evening was strengthening and deepening. The vast view,
+which was the background to the child's little figure, was losing its
+robe of green and of blue, green of the land, blue of the sea, was
+putting on velvety darkness and gold. The serpentine river was a long
+band of gold flung out, as if by a careless enchanter, towards the
+golden sea in which Zante was dreaming. Remote and immense this land
+had seemed in the full daytime, a tremendous pastoral deserted by
+men, sufficient to itself and existing only for its own beauty. Now it
+existed for a child. The human element had caused nature, as it were,
+to recede, to take the second place. A child, bending down to pick up a
+shot quail, then straightening up victoriously, held the vast panorama
+in submission, as if he had quietly given out the order, "Make me
+significant." And Rosamund, who had stolen away to meet the evening, was
+now only intent on knowing whether the shot bird was a quail or not.
+
+It was a quail, and a fat one.
+
+When they came to the boy they found him a barefooted urchin, with
+tattered coarse clothes and densely thick, uncovered black hair growing
+down almost to his fiery young eyes, which stared at them proudly. There
+was a wild look in those eyes never to be found in the eyes of a dweller
+in cities, a wild grace in his figure, and a complete self-possession in
+his whole bearing. The quail just shot he had in his hand. Another was
+stuffed into the large pocket of his jacket. He pulled it out and showed
+it to them, reading at a glance the admiration in Rosamund's eyes. Dion
+held out a hand to the boy's gun, but at this his manner changed, he
+clutched it tightly, moved a step or two back, and scowled.
+
+"He's a regular young savage," said Dion.
+
+"I like him as he is. Besides, why should he give his gun to a stranger?
+He knows nothing about us."
+
+"You're immense!" said Dion, laughing.
+
+"Let's have the quail for our dinner."
+
+"D'you expect him to give them to us without a stand-up fight and
+probably bloodshed? For he's armed, unfortunately!"
+
+"Don't be ridiculous. Look here, Dion, you go off for a minute, and
+leave him with me. I think you get on his nerves."
+
+"Well, I'm----!"
+
+But he went. He left the two figures together, and presently saw them
+both from a distance against the vastness of the gold. Bushes and
+shrubs, and two or three giant pine trees, between the summit of Drouva
+and the plain, showed black, and the figures of woman and child were
+almost ebon. Dion watched them. He could not see any features. The
+two were now like carved things which could move, and only by their
+movements could they tell him anything. The gun over the boy's shoulder
+was like a long finger pointing to the west where a redness was creeping
+among the gold. The great moon climbed above Drouva. Bluish-gray smoke
+came from the camp-fire at a little distance. It ascended without
+wavering straight up in the windless evening. Far down in the hidden
+valley, behind Dion and below the small village, shadows were stealing
+through quiet Elis, shadows were coming to shroud the secret that was
+held in the shrine of Olympia. A slight sound of bells stole up on the
+stillness from somewhere below, somewhere not far from those two ebon
+figures. And this sound, suggestive of moving animals coming from
+pasture to protected places for the night, put a heart in the breast of
+this pastoral. Thin was the sound and delicate, fit music for Greece
+in the fragile evening. As Dion listened to it, he looked at that black
+finger below him pointing to the redness in the west. Then he remembered
+it was a gun, and, for an instant, looking at the red, he thought of the
+color of fresh blood.
+
+At this moment the tall figure, Rosamund, took hold of the gun, and the
+two figures moved away slowly down the winding track in the hill, and
+were hidden at a turning of the path.
+
+Almost directly a third shot rang out. The young dweller in the
+wilderness was allowing Rosamund to give a taste of her skill with the
+gun.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Rosamund came back to the camp that evening with Dirmikis,--so the boy
+of the wilderness was called,--and five quail, three of them to her gun.
+She was radiant, and indeed had an air almost of triumph. Her eyes
+were sparkling, her cheeks were glowing; she looked like a beautiful
+schoolgirl as she walked in over the plateau with the sunset flushing
+scarlet behind her, and the big moon coming to meet her. Dirmikis, at
+her side, carried the quail upside down in his brown hands. Rosamund had
+the gun under her right arm.
+
+"It's a capital gun," she called out to Dion. "I got three. Here,
+Dirmikis,"--she turned to the boy,--"show them."
+
+"Does he understand English?"
+
+"No, but he understands me!" she retorted with pride. "Look there!"
+
+Dirmikis held up the birds, smiling a savage smile.
+
+"Aren't they fat? Feel them, Dion! The three fattest ones fell to my
+gun, but don't tell _him_."
+
+She sketched a delicious wink, looking about sixteen.
+
+"I really have a good eye," she added, praising herself with gusto.
+"It's no use being over-modest, is it? If one has a gift, well one just
+has it. Here, Dirmikis!"
+
+She gave his gun carefully to the barefooted child.
+
+"He's a little stunner, and so chivalrous. I never met a boy I liked
+more. Do give him a nice present, Dion, and let him feed in the camp if
+he likes."
+
+"Well, what next? What am I to give him?"
+
+"Nothing dressy. He isn't a manikin, he's a real Doric boy."
+
+She slapped Dirmikis on the back with a generous hand. He smiled
+radiantly, this time without any savagery.
+
+"The sort of boy who'll be of some use in the world."
+
+"I'll give him a tip."
+
+Rosamund seemed about to assent when an idea struck her, as she
+afterwards said, "with the force of a bomb."
+
+"I know what he'll like better than anything."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Your revolver, to be sure!"
+
+"My revolver to be suren't!" exclaimed Dion passionately, inventing a
+negative. "I bought it at great cost to defend you with, not for the
+endowment of a half-naked varmint from the wilderness under Drouva."
+
+"Be careful, Dion; you're insulting a Doric boy!"
+
+"Here--I'll insult him with a ten-lepta piece."
+
+"Don't be mean. Bribe him thoroughly if you're going to bribe him. We go
+shooting together again to-morrow evening."
+
+"Do you indeed?"
+
+"Yes, directly after tea. It's all arranged. Dirmikis suggested it with
+the most charming chivalry, and I gave yes for an answer. So we must
+keep on good terms with him at whatever cost."
+
+She cocked up her chin and walked exultantly into the tent. A minute
+afterwards there rang out to the evening a warm contralto voice singing.
+
+Dirmikis looked at the tent and then at Dion with an air of profound
+astonishment. The quail dropped from his hands, and he did not even
+snatch at them as he listened to the remarkable sounds which, he could
+not doubt, flowed from his Amazon. His brows came down over his fiery
+eyes, and he seemed to stand at gaze like an animal, half-fascinated
+and half-suspicious. The voice died away and was followed by a sound of
+pouring water. Then Dirmikis accepted two ten-lepta pieces and picked up
+the quail. Dion introduced him to the cook, and it was understood that
+he should be fed in the camp, and that the quail should form part of the
+evening meal.
+
+Very good they proved to be, cooked in leaves with the addition of
+some fried slices of fat ham. Rosamund exulted again as she ate them,
+recognizing the birds she had shot "by the taste."
+
+"This is one! Aren't mine different from Dirmikis's?" she exclaimed. "So
+much more succulent!"
+
+"Naturally, you great baby!"
+
+"Life is glorious!" she exclaimed resonantly. "To eat one's own bag on
+the top of Drouva under the moon! Oh!"
+
+She looked at the moon, then bent over her plate of metal-ware which
+was set on the tiny folding-table. In her joy she was exactly like a big
+child.
+
+"I wonder how many I shall get to-morrow. I got my eye in at the very
+start. Really, Dion, you know, I'm a gifted creature. It isn't every
+one----"
+
+And she ran on, laughing at herself, reveling in her whimsical pretense
+of conceit till dinner was over.
+
+"Now a cigarette! Never have I enjoyed any meal so much as this! It's
+only out of doors that one gets hold of the real _joie de vivre_."
+
+"You're never without it, thank God," returned Dion, striking a match
+for her.
+
+So still was the evening that the flame burned steadily even upon that
+height facing immensities. Rosamund leaned to it with the cigarette
+between her lips. Her face was browned to the sun. She looked rather
+like a splendid blonde gipsy, with loose yellow hair and the careless
+eyes of those who dwell under smiling heavens. She sent out a puff of
+cigarette smoke, directing it with ardor to the moon which now rode high
+above them.
+
+"I'd like to catch up nature in my arms to-night," she said. "Come,
+Dion, let's go a little way."
+
+She was up, and put her arm through his like a comrade. He squeezed her
+arm against his side and, strolling there in the night on the edge of
+the hill, she talked at first with almost tumultuous energy, with an
+energy as of an Amazon who cared for the things of the soul as much as
+for the things of the body. To-night her body and soul seemed on the
+same high level of intensity.
+
+At first she talked of the present, of their life in Greece and of what
+it had meant to her, what it had done for her; and then, always with her
+arm through Dion's, she began to talk of the future.
+
+"We've got to go away from all this, but let us carry it with us; you
+know, as one can carry things that one has really gathered up, really
+got hold of. It will mean a lot to us afterwards in England, in our
+regular humdrum life. Not that life's ever humdrum. We must take Drouva
+to England, and Marathon, and the view from the Acropolis, and the
+columns of the Parthenon above all those, and the tombs."
+
+"But they're sad."
+
+"We must take them. I'm quite sure the way to make life splendid, noble,
+what it is meant to be to each of us, is to press close against
+one's heart all that is sent to one, the sorrows as well as the joys.
+Everything one tries to keep at arm's length hurts one."
+
+"Sins?"
+
+"Sins, Dion? I said what is sent to us."
+
+"Don't you think----?"
+
+"Sins are never sent to us, we always have to go and fetch them. It's
+like that poor old chemist going round the corner in the fog with a jug
+for what is ruining his life."
+
+"What poor old chemist?" he asked.
+
+"A great friend of mine in London--Mr. Thrush. You shall know him some
+day. Oh--but London! Now, Dion, can we, you and I, live perpetually in
+London after all this?"
+
+"Well, dearest, I must stick close to business."
+
+"I know that. And we've got the little house. But later on?"
+
+"And your singing, your traveling all over the place with a maid!"
+
+"I wonder if I shall. To-night I don't feel as if I shall."
+
+She stood still abruptly, and was silent for a minute.
+
+"Don't you think," she said, in a different and less exuberant voice,
+and with a changed and less physical manner--"don't you think sometimes,
+in exceptional hours, one can feel what is to come, what is laid up for
+one? I do. This is an exceptional hour. We are on the heights and it's
+very wonderful. Well, perhaps to-night we can feel what is coming. Let's
+try."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Let's just be quiet, and give ourselves up to the hill of Drouva, and
+Greece, and the night, and--and what surrounds and permeates us and all
+this."
+
+With a big and noble gesture she indicated the sleeping world far below
+them, breathless under the moon; the imperceptible valleys merged in the
+great plain through which the river, silver once more, moved unsleeping
+between its low-lying banks to the sea; the ranges of mountains which
+held themselves apart in the night, a great company, reserved and almost
+austere, yet trodden with confidence by the feet of those fairies who
+haunt the ancient lands; the sea which drew down the moon as a lover
+draws down his mistress; Zante riding the sea like a shadow in harbor.
+
+And they were silent. Dion had a sensation of consciously giving
+himself, almost as a bather, to the sea. Did he feel what was coming to
+him and to this girl at his side, who was part of him, and yet who was
+alone, whose arm clasped his, yet whose soul dwelt far off in its own
+remoteness? Would the years draw them closer and closer together, knit
+them together, through greater knowledge, through custom, through shared
+joys and beliefs, through common beliefs, through children, till they
+were as branches growing out of one stem firmly rooted?
+
+He gave himself and gave himself, or tried to give himself in the
+silence. Yet he could not have said truly that any mystical knowledge
+came to him. Only one thing he seemed strangely to know, that they would
+never have children. The sleeping world and the sea, and, as Rosamund
+had said, "what surrounds and permeates us and all this" seemed to
+permit him mysteriously to get at that one bit of foreknowledge.
+Something seemed to say to him, "You will be the father of one child."
+And yet, when he came to think of it, he realized how probable, how
+indeed almost certain it was that the silent voice issued from within
+himself. Rosamund and he had talked about a child, a boy, had begun
+almost to sketch out mental plans for that boy's upbringing; they had
+never talked about children. He believed that he had penetrated to the
+secret of the voice. He said to himself, "All that sort of thing comes
+out of one's self. It doesn't reach one from the outside." And yet, when
+he looked out over the world, which seemed wrapped in ethereal garments,
+garments woven by spirit on looms no hand of woman or man might ever
+touch, he was vaguely conscious that all within him which was of any
+real value was there too. Surely he did not possess. Rather was he
+possessed of.
+
+He looked at Rosamund at last.
+
+"Have you got anything?"
+
+But she did not answer him. There was a great stillness in her big
+eyes. All the vital exuberance of body and spirit mingled together had
+vanished from her abruptly. Nothing of the Amazon who had captured the
+heart of Dirmikis remained. As Dion looked at her now, he simply could
+not see the beautiful schoolgirl of sixteen, the blonde gipsy who had
+bent forward, cigarette in mouth, to his match, who had leaned back and
+blown rings to the moon above Drouva. Had she ever set the butt of a gun
+against her shoulder? Something in this woman's eyes made him suddenly
+feel as if he ought to leave her alone. Yet her arm still lay on his,
+and she was his.
+
+Against the silver of the moon the twisted trunks of the two small
+olive trees showed black and significant. The red of the dying camp-fire
+glowed not far from the tent. Dogs were barking in the hamlet of Drouva.
+She neither saw details nor heard ugly sounds in the night. He knew
+that. And the rest? It seemed to him that something of her, the spirit
+of her, perhaps, or some part of it with which his had never yet had any
+close contact, was awake and at work in the night. But though he held
+her arm in his she was a long way from him. And there came to him this
+thought:
+
+"I felt as if I ought to leave her alone. But she has left me alone."
+
+Almost mechanically, and slowly, he straightened his arm, thus letting
+hers slip. She did not seem to notice his action. She gazed out towards
+Zante over a world that now looked very mystical. In the daylight it had
+been a green pastoral. Now there was over it, and even surely in it, a
+dim whiteness, a something pure and hushed, like the sound, remote and
+curiously final, of a quiet sleeper.
+
+That night, when they went to bed, Rosamund was full of the delight of
+a new experience. She insisted that the flap of the tent should not be
+kept shut down. She had never slept in a tent before, and was resolved
+to look out and see the stars from her pillow.
+
+"And my olive tree," she added.
+
+Obediently, as soon as she was in her camp-bed, Dion lifted the flap.
+A candle was still burning, set on a chair between the two beds. As the
+moonlight came in, Rosamund lifted herself on one arm, leaned over and
+blew it out.
+
+"How horrible moonlight makes candlelight," she said.
+
+Dion, in his pyjamas, was outside fastening back the flap, his bare feet
+on the short dry grass.
+
+"I can see the Pleiades!" she added earnestly.
+
+"There!" said Dion.
+
+He looked up at the sky.
+
+"The Pleiades, the Great Bear, Mars."
+
+"Oh!" she drew in her breath. "A shooting star!"
+
+She pressed her lips together and half-shut her eyes. By her contracted
+forehead Dion saw that she was wishing almost fiercely. He believed he
+read her wish. He had not seen the traveling star, and did not try to
+wish with her, lest he should cross the path of the Fates and throw his
+shadow on her desire.
+
+He came softly into the tent which was full of the whiteness of the
+moon. Sleeping thus with Rosamund in the bosom of nature was very
+wonderful to him. It was like a sort of re-marriage. The moon and the
+stars looking in made his relation to her quite new and more beautiful.
+
+"I shall never forget Olympia," he whispered, leaning over her.
+
+He kissed her very gently, not with any passion. He had the feeling that
+she would almost resent passion just then.
+
+He got into his bed and lay with his arm crooked, his cheek in his hand.
+Part of the Milky Way was visible to him, that dust of little stars
+powdering the deep of the sky. If he, too, should see a falling star
+to-night, dropping down towards the hidden sea, vanishing below the line
+of the hill! Would he echo her wish?
+
+"Are you sleepy, Rosamund?" he asked presently.
+
+"No I don't want to sleep. It would make me miss all the stars."
+
+"And if you're tired to-morrow?"
+
+"I shan't be. I shan't be tired while we are in camp. I should like
+never to go to bed in a room again. I should like always to dwell in the
+wilderness."
+
+He longed for the addition of just two words. They did not come. But
+of course they were to be understood. There is no need to state things
+known. The fact that she had let him bring her to the wilderness was
+enough. The last words he heard Rosamund say that night were these,
+almost whispered slowly to herself and to the stars:
+
+"The wilderness--and--the solitary places."
+
+Very early in the morning she awoke while Dion was sleeping. She slipped
+softly out of the little camp-bed, wrapped a cloak around her, and went
+out to gaze at the dawn.
+
+When they sat at breakfast she said:
+
+"And now are you going to tell me the secret?"
+
+"No. I'm going to let you find it out for yourself."
+
+"But if I can't?"
+
+"You will."
+
+They set off, about ten, down the hill on foot. The morning was very
+still and already very hot. As they descended towards the basin in which
+lies Olympia, heat ascended to meet them and to give them a welcome--a
+soft and almost enticing heat like a breath from some green fastness
+where strange marvels were secluded.
+
+"Elis even smells remote," Rosamund said.
+
+"Are you sorry to leave the hill-top?" he asked.
+
+"I was, but already I'm beginning to feel drawn on. There's something
+here--what is it?"
+
+She looked at him.
+
+"Something for you."
+
+"Specially for me?"
+
+"Specially for you."
+
+"Hidden in the folds of the green. Where are we going first?"
+
+"To the ruins."
+
+He was carrying their lunch in a straw pannier slung over his shoulder.
+
+"We'll lunch in the house of Nero, and rest there."
+
+"That sounds rather dreadful, Dion."
+
+"Wait till you see it."
+
+"I can't imagine that monster in Elis."
+
+"He was a very artistic monster, you remember."
+
+"Like some of the decadents in London. Why is it that those who hate
+moral beauty so often worship all the other beauties?"
+
+"D'you think in their hearts they actually hate moral beauty?"
+
+"Well, despise it, laugh at it, try to tarnish it."
+
+"Paganism!"
+
+"Good heavens, no!"
+
+And they both laughed as they went down the narrow path to the soft
+green valley that awaited them, hushed in the breathless morning,
+withdrawn among the hills, holding its memories of the athletic triumphs
+of past ages. Near the Museum they stopped for a moment to look down on
+the valley.
+
+"Is the Hermes in there?" Rosamund asked, glancing at the closed and
+deserted building.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What a strange and delicious home for him."
+
+"You shall visit him presently. There are jackals in this valley."
+
+"I didn't hear any last night."
+
+She looked again at the closed door of the Museum.
+
+"When do they open it?"
+
+"Probably the guardian's in there. That's where he lives."
+
+He pointed to a small dwelling close to the museum. Just then a tiny
+murmur of some far-away wind stirred the umbrella pines which stood
+sentinel over the valley.
+
+"Oh, Dion, what an exquisite sound!" she said.
+
+She held up one hand like a listening child. There was awe in her eyes.
+
+"This is a shrine," she said, when the murmur failed. "Dion, I know you
+planned to go first to the ruins."
+
+"Yes. They're just below us. Look--by the river!"
+
+"Let me see the Hermes first, just for a moment."
+
+Their eyes met. He thought she was reading his mind, though he tried to
+keep it closed against her just then.
+
+"Why are you in such a hurry?" he asked.
+
+"I feel I must see it," she answered, with a sort of sweet obstinacy.
+
+He hesitated.
+
+"Well, then--I'll see if I can find the guardian."
+
+In a moment he came back with a smiling Greek who was holding a key. As
+the man went to open the door, Dion said:
+
+"Rose, will you follow my directions?"
+
+"When?"
+
+"Now, when you go into the Museum."
+
+"But aren't you coming too?"
+
+"Not now. I will when we've seen the ruins. When you go into the Museum
+go straight through the vestibule where the Roman Emperors are. Don't
+turn to the right. In front of you you'll see a hall with a wooden roof
+and red walls. The 'Victory' is there. But don't stay there. Go into the
+small room beyond, the last room, and you mustn't let the guardian go
+with you."
+
+From behind came the sound of the big door being opened.
+
+"Then that is the secret, and I knew about it all the time!"
+
+"Knew about it--yes."
+
+She looked down on the green cup surrounded by hills, with its little
+river where now two half-naked men were dragging with a hand-net for
+fish. Again the tiny breath from the far-away wind stirred in the pine
+trees, evoking soft sounds of Eternity. She turned away and went into
+the Museum.
+
+Left alone, Dion lifted the lunch-pannier from his shoulder and laid it
+down on the ground. Then he sat down under one of the pine trees. A wild
+olive grew very near it. He thought of the crown of wild olive which the
+victors received in days when the valley resounded with voices and the
+trampling of the feet of horses. He took off his hat and laid it beside
+him on the ground by the lunch-pannier. One of the men in the river
+cried out to his companion. Sheep-bells sounded softly down the valley.
+Some peasants went by with a small train of donkeys on a path which
+wound away at the foot of the hill of Kronos.
+
+Dion was being unselfish. In staying where he was, beyond the outer
+door of the house of Hermes, he was taking the first firm step on a path
+which might lead him on very far. He had slept in the dawn when Rosamund
+slipped out of the tent, but till the stars waned he had been awake, and
+in the white light of the moon he had seen the beginning of the path.
+Men were said to be selfish. People, especially women, often talked
+as if selfishness were bred in the very fiber of men, as if it were
+ineradicable, and must be accepted by women. He meant to prove to one
+woman that even a man could be unselfish, moved by something greater
+than himself. Up there on Drouva he had definitely dedicated himself
+to Rosamund. His acute pain when, coming back to the place where he
+had left her by the tent before sunset, he had not found her, his
+sense almost of smoldering anger, had startled him. In the night he had
+thought things over, and then he had come to the beginning of the path.
+A really great love, if it is to be worthy to carry the torch, must
+tread in the way of unselfishness. He would conform to the needs,
+doubtless imperious, of Rosamund's nature, even when they conflicted
+with his.
+
+So now he sat outside under the pine tree, and she was within alone. A
+first step was taken on the path.
+
+Would she presently come through the hall of the Victory to call him in?
+
+He heard the guardian cough in the vestibule of the Emperors; the cough
+was that of a man securely alone with his bodily manifestations. The
+train of peasants had vanished. Still the sheep-bells sounded, but the
+chime seemed to come to him now from a greater distance.
+
+The morning was wearing on. When would she come back to him from the
+secret of Olympia?
+
+He heard again above his head the eternities whispering in the pine
+branches. The calmness and heat of the valley mingled together, and rose
+to him, and wanted to take him to themselves. But he was detached from
+them, terribly detached by his virtue--his virtue, which involved him in
+a struggle, pushed them off.
+
+Surely an hour had passed, perhaps even more. He began to tingle with
+impatience. The sound of the sheep-bells had died away beyond the
+colonnade of the echoes. A living silence was now about him.
+
+At last he put on his hat and got up. The Hermes was proving his power
+too mercilessly, was stealing the hours like a thief at work in the
+dark. The knowledge that Rosamund was his own for life did not help Dion
+at all at this moment. He had planned out this day as if they were never
+to have another. Their time in Greece was nearly over, and they could
+not linger for very long anywhere. Anyhow, just this day, once gone,
+could never be recaptured.
+
+He looked towards the doorway of the Museum, hesitating. He was devoured
+by impatience. Nevertheless he did not wish to step out of that path,
+the beginning of which he had seen in the night. Determined not to seek
+Rosamund, yet driven by restlessness, he did one of those meaningless
+things which, bringing hurt to nature, are expected by man to bring him
+at least a momentary solace. His eyes happened to rest on the olive tree
+which stood not far from the Museum. One branch of it was stretched out
+beyond the others. He walked up to the tree, pulled at the branch, and
+finally snapped it off, stripped it of its leaves and threw it on the
+ground.
+
+As he finished this stupid and useless act, Rosamund came out of the
+Museum, looking almost angry.
+
+"Oh, Dion, was it you?" she asked. "What could make you do such a
+thing?"
+
+"But--what do you mean?" he asked.
+
+She looked down at the massacred branch at his feet.
+
+"A branch of wild olive! If you only knew how it hurt me."
+
+"Oh--that! But how could you know?"
+
+She still looked at him with a sort of shining of anger in her eyes.
+
+"I saw from the room of the Hermes. The doorway of the Museum is the
+frame for such a picture of Elis! It's almost, in its way, as dream-like
+and lovely as the distant country one sees through the temple door in
+Raphael's 'Marriage of the Virgin' in Milan. And hanging partly across
+it was that branch of wild olive. I was looking at it and loving it in
+the room of the Hermes when a man's arm, your arm, was thrust into the
+picture, and the poor branch was torn away."
+
+She had spoken quite excitedly, still evidently under the impulse of
+something like anger. Now she suddenly pulled herself up with a little
+forced laugh.
+
+"Of course you didn't know; you couldn't. I suppose I was dreaming,
+and it--it looked like a sort of murder. But still I don't see why you
+should tear the branch off, and all the leaves too."
+
+"I'm sorry, I'm very sorry, Rosamund. It was idiotic. Of course I hadn't
+an idea what you were doing, I mean, that you were looking at it. One
+does senseless little things sometimes."
+
+"It looked so angry."
+
+"What did?"
+
+"Your hand, your arm. You can have no idea how----"
+
+She broke off again.
+
+"Let me come in with you. Let's go to the Hermes."
+
+"Oh no, not now."
+
+She spoke with almost brusk decision.
+
+"Very well, then, I'll just pay the man something, and we'll be off to
+the ruins."
+
+"Yes."
+
+Dion went to pay the guardian, whom he found standing up among the Roman
+Emperors in a dignified and receptive attitude. When he came back he
+picked up the lunch-basket, slung it over his shoulder, and they walked
+down the small hill and towards the ruins in silence. He felt involved
+in a tragedy, pained and discomforted. Yet it was all rather absurd,
+too. He did not know what to say, how to take it, and he looked straight
+ahead, seeking instinctively for some diversion. When they were on the
+river bank he found it in the fishermen who were wading in the shallows
+with their nets.
+
+"I wonder what they catch here," he said. "There's not much water."
+
+Rosamund took up the remark with her usual readiness and sympathetic
+cordiality, and soon they were chattering again much as usual.
+
+The great heat of the hour after noontide found them lunching among the
+ruins of Nero's house. By this time the spell of the place had fast
+hold of them both. Nature had long since taken the ruins to her gentle
+breast; she took Rosamund and Dion with them. In her green lap she
+sheltered them; with her green hills and her groves of pine trees she
+wrapped them round; with her tall grasses, her bushes, her wild flowers
+and her leaves she caught at and caressed them. A jackal whined in its
+lair near the huge limestone blocks of the temple of Zeus. Green lizards
+basked on the pavements which still showed the little ruts constructed
+to save the feet of contending athletes from slipping. All along the
+green valley the birds flew and sang; blackberry bushes climbed over
+the broken walls of the mansion of Nero, and red and white daisies and
+silvery grasses grew in every cranny where the kindly earth found a
+foothold.
+
+"Look at those butterflies, Dion!" Rosamund said.
+
+Two snow-white butterflies, wandering among the ruins, had found their
+way to the house of Nero, and seemed inclined to make it their home.
+Keeping close together, as if guided by some sweet and whimsical
+purpose, they flew from stone to stone, from daisy to daisy, often
+alighting, as if bent on a thorough investigation of this ancient
+precinct, then fluttering forward again, with quivering wings, not quite
+satisfied, in an airy search for the thing or place desired. Several
+times they seemed about to abandon the ruins of Nero's house, but,
+though they fluttered away, they always returned. And at last they
+alighted side by side on a piece of uneven wall, and rested, as if
+asleep in the sun, with folded wings.
+
+"That's the finishing touch," said Rosamund. "White butterflies asleep
+in the house of Nero."
+
+She looked round over the ruins, poetic and beautiful in their
+prostration, as if they had fallen to kiss the vale which, in return,
+had folded them in an eternal embrace.
+
+"Don't take me to Delphi this time, Dion; don't take me anywhere else,"
+she said.
+
+"I was thinking only to-day that our time's very short now. We lingered
+so long in Athens."
+
+"We'll say our good-by to Greece from the Acropolis. That's--of course!
+The grandeur and wonder are there. But the dream of Greece--that's here.
+This is a shrine."
+
+"For Pan?"
+
+"Oh no, not for Pan, though I dare say he often comes here."
+
+From the Kronos Hill, covered with little pines, came the mystical voice
+of the breeze, speaking to them in long and remote murmurs.
+
+"That's the most exquisite sound in the world," Rosamund continued. "But
+it has nothing to do with Pan. You remember that day we went into the
+Russian church in Athens, Dion?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"There was the same sort of sound in those Russian voices when they were
+singing very softly. It could never come from a Pagan world."
+
+"You find belief behind it?"
+
+"No--knowledge."
+
+He did not ask her to define exactly what she meant. It was not an hour
+for definition, but for dreaming, and he was happy again; the cloud of
+the morning had passed away; he had his love with untroubled eyes among
+the ruins. Thinking of that, realizing that with a sudden intensity, he
+took her warm hand from the warm stone on which it was resting, and held
+it closely in his.
+
+"Oh, Rosamund, shall I ever have another hour as happy as this?" he
+said.
+
+A little way off, in that long meadow in the breast of which the Stadium
+lay hidden, the sheep-bells sounded almost pathetically; a flock was
+there happily at pasture.
+
+"It's as if all the green doors were closing upon us to keep us in Elis
+forever, isn't it?" she said. "But----"
+
+She looked at him with a sort of smiling reproach:
+
+"You wouldn't be allowed to stay."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"You committed a crime this morning. Nature's taken possession of
+Olympia, and you struck at her."
+
+"D'you know why I did that?"
+
+"No."
+
+But she did not again ask him why, and he never told her. When the heat
+had lessened a little, they wandered once more through that garden of
+ruins, where scarcely a column is standing, where convulsions of nature
+have helped the hands of man to overthrow man's work, and where nature
+has healed every wound, and made every scar tender and beautiful. And
+presently Rosamund said:
+
+"I want to know exactly where Hermes was found."
+
+"Come, and I'll show you."
+
+He led her on among the wild flowers and the grasses, till they came to
+the clearly marked base of the Heraeon, the most ancient known temple
+of Greece. Two of its columns were standing, tremendously massive Doric
+columns of a warm golden-brown color.
+
+"The Hermes was found in this temple. It stood between two of the
+columns, but I believe it was lying down when it was found."
+
+"It's difficult to imagine him between such columns as these."
+
+"Yet you love Doric."
+
+"Yes, but I don't know----"
+
+She looked at the columns, even put her hands on them as if trying to
+clasp them.
+
+"It must have been right. The Greeks knew. Strength and grace, power and
+delicacy, that's the bodily ideal. So the Hermes stood actually here."
+
+She looked all round, she listened to the distant sheep-bells, she drew
+into her nostrils the green scents of the valley.
+
+"And left his influence here for ever," she added. "His quiet
+influence."
+
+"Let me come to see him with you on the way home."
+
+And this time she said, "Yes."
+
+
+
+At a little after four they left the sweet valley, and, passing over
+the river ascended the hill to the Museum. The door was open, and the
+guardian was sitting profoundly asleep in the vestibule of the Emperors.
+
+"You see, that's the picture-frame," Rosamund whispered, when they
+were inside, pointing to the doorway. "The branch came just there in my
+picture."
+
+She had lifted her hand. He took her by the wrist and gently pulled her
+hand down.
+
+"You mustn't show me that."
+
+"Don't let us wake him."
+
+A fly buzzed outside on the sunny threshold of the door, making a sleepy
+sound like the winding of a rustic horn in the golden stillness, as they
+went forward on tiptoe between the dull red walls of the hall of the
+Victory, and came into the room beyond, where the Hermes stood alone but
+for the little Dionysos on his arm.
+
+There a greater silence seemed to reign--the silence of the harmony
+which lies beyond music, as a blue background of the atmosphere lies
+beyond the verges of the vastest stretch of land that man's eyes have
+power to see; he sees the blue, but almost as if with his soul, and
+in like manner hears the harmony. Both Rosamund and Dion felt the
+difference in the silence directly they entered that sacred room.
+
+There was no room beyond it. Not very large, it was lighted by three
+windows set in a row under a handsome roof of wood. The walls were dull
+red like the walls in the hall of the Victory. On the mosaic pavement
+were placed two chairs. Rosamund went straight up to one of them, and
+sat down in front of the statue, which was raised on a high pedestal,
+and set facing the right-hand wall of the chamber. Dion remained
+standing a little way behind her.
+
+He remembered quite well his first visit to Olympia, his first sight
+of the Hermes. He had realized then very clearly the tragedy of large
+Museums in which statues stand together in throngs, enclosed within
+roaring cities. From its situation, hidden in the green breast of this
+valley in Elis, the Hermes seemed to receive a sort of consecration, a
+blessing from its shrine; and the valley received surely from the Hermes
+a gracious benediction, making it unlike any other valley, however
+beautiful, in any land of the earth. Nowhere else could the Hermes have
+been so serenely tender, so exquisitely benign in its contemplation; and
+no other valley could have kept it safe with such gentle watchfulness,
+such tranquilly unwearied patience. Surely each loved the other, and so
+each gained something from the other.
+
+Through all the months since his visit, Dion had remembered the unique
+quality of the peace of Olympia, like no other peace, and the strange
+and exquisite hush which greeted the pilgrim at the threshold of the
+chamber in which the Hermes stood. He had remembered, but now he felt.
+Again the silence seemed to come out of the marble to greet him, a
+remembered pilgrim who had returned to his worship bringing another
+pilgrim. He entered once more into the peace of the Hermes, and now
+Rosamund shared that peace. As he looked at her for a moment, he knew he
+had made a complete atonement; he had sent the shadow away.
+
+How could any shadow stand in the presence of the Hermes? The divine
+calm within this chamber had a power which was akin to the power of
+nature in the twilight of a windless evening, or of a beautiful soul at
+ease in its own simplicity. It purified. Dion could not imagine any
+man being able to look at the Hermes and feel the attraction of sin.
+Rosamund was right, he thought. Surely men have to go and fetch their
+sins. Their goodness is given to them. The mother holds it, and is aware
+of it, when her baby is put into her arms for the first time.
+
+For a long while these two watched Hermes and the child in the silence
+of Elis, bound together by an almost perfect sympathy. And they
+understood as never before the beauty of calm--calm of the nerves, calm
+of the body, calm of the mind, the heart and the soul; peace physical,
+intellectual and moral. In looking at the Hermes they saw, or seemed to
+themselves to see, the goal, what struggling humanity is meant for--the
+perfect poise, all faculties under effortless control, and so peace.
+
+"We must be meant for that," Dion said to himself. "Shall we reach that
+goal, and take a child with us?"
+
+Then he looked down at Rosamund, saw her pale yellow hair, the back of
+her neck, in which, somehow, purity was manifested, and thought:
+
+"I might perhaps get there through her, but only through her."
+
+She turned round, looked at him and smiled.
+
+"Isn't he divine? And the child's attitude!"
+
+Dion moved and sat down beside her.
+
+"If this is Paganism," she continued, "it's the same thing as
+Christianity. It's what God means. Men try to separate things that are
+all one. I feel that when I look at Hermes. Oh, how beautiful he is! And
+his beauty is as much moral as physical. You know the Antinous mouth?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Look at his mouth. Could any one, comparing the two, honestly say that
+purity doesn't shine like a light in darkness? Aren't those lips stamped
+with the Divine seal?"
+
+"Yes, they are."
+
+"Dion, I'm so thankful I have a husband who's kept the power to see that
+even physical beauty must have moral beauty behind it to be perfect.
+Many men can't see that, I think."
+
+"Is it their fault?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+After another long silence she said:
+
+"Spirit really is everything. Hermes tells me that almost as plainly as
+the New Testament. Lots of people we know in London would laugh at me
+for saying so, the people who talk of 'being Greek' and who never can be
+Greek. And he stood between Doric columns. I'm trying to learn something
+here."
+
+"What?"
+
+"How to bring _him_ up if he ever comes."
+
+Dion felt for her hand.
+
+
+
+They stayed on for a week at Drouva. Each evening Rosamund shot with
+the boy of the wilderness, and they ate any birds that fell, at their
+evening meal. The nights were given to the stars till sleep came. And
+all the days were dedicated to Hermes, the child, and the sweet green
+valley which served as a casket for the perfect jewel which the earth
+had given up after centuries of possession. Since Rosamund had told the
+dear secret of her heart, what she was trying to learn, Dion was able to
+see her go in alone to the inner chamber without any secret jealousy or
+any impatience. The given confidence had done its blessed work swiftly
+and surely; the spring behind the action, revealed so simply, was
+respected, was almost loved by Dion. Often he sat among the ruins alone,
+smoking his pipe; or he wandered away after the call of the sheep-bells,
+passing between the ruined walls overgrown with brambles and grasses and
+mosses, shaded here and there by a solitary tree, and under the low arch
+of the Athletes' entrance into the great green space where the contests
+had been held. Here he found the wearers of music feeding peacefully,
+attended by a dreaming boy. With the Two in the Garden of Eden there
+were happy animals. The sheep-bells ringing tranquilly in his ears made
+Eden more real to him, and also more like something in one of the happy
+dreams of a man.
+
+A world that had risen to great heights of emotion in this valley was
+dead, but that did not sadden him. He found it impossible to be sad in
+Olympia, because his own life was so happy.
+
+A delicious egoism, the birthright of his youth, had him safe in its
+grasp. But sometimes, when Rosamund was alone in the room of the Hermes,
+learning her lesson, and he was among the ruins, or walking above the
+buried Stadium where the flocks were at pasture, he recalled the great
+contests of the Athletes of ancient Greece; the foot-races which were
+the original competitions at the games, the races in armor, the long
+jumps, the wrestling matches, the discus and dart-throwing, the boxing
+and the brutal _pankration_. And he remembered that at the Olympic
+Games there were races for boys, for quite young boys. A boy had won at
+Olympia who was only twelve years old. When Dion recalled that fact one
+golden afternoon, it seemed to him that perhaps his lesson was to be
+learnt among the feeding sheep in the valley, rather even than on the
+hill where the Hermes dwelt. The father surely shapes one part of the
+sacred clay of youth, while on the other part, with a greater softness,
+a perhaps subtler care, the mother works.
+
+He would try to make his boy sturdy and strong and courageous, swift
+to the race of life; he would train his boy to be a victor, to be a boy
+champion among other boys. Her son must not fail to win the crown of
+wild olive. And when he was a man----! But at that point in his dreams
+of the future Dion always pulled up. He could not see Rosamund as the
+mother of a man, could not see Rosamund old. She would, of course, be
+beautiful in old age, with a perhaps more spiritual beauty than she had
+even now. He shut his eyes, tried to imagine her, to see her before him
+with snow-white hair, a face perhaps etherealized by knowledge of life
+and suffering; once he even called up the most perfect picture of old
+age he knew of--the portrait of Whistler's mother, calm, dignified,
+gentle, at peace, with folded hands; but his efforts were in vain; he
+simply could not see his Rosamund old. And so, because of that, he could
+only see their child as a very young boy, wearing a boy's crown of wild
+olive, such as had once been won by the boy of twelve in the games at
+Olympia.
+
+The last day of their visit to the green wilds and the hilltops dawned,
+still, cloudless and very hot. There was a light haze over Zante, and
+the great plain held a look of sleep--not the sleep of night but of the
+siesta, when the dreams come out of the sun, and descend through the
+deep-blue corridors to visit those who are weary in the gold. Rosamund,
+bareheaded, stood on the hill of Drouva and gazed towards the sea; her
+arm was round her olive tree; she looked marvelously well, lithe and
+strong, but her face was grave, held even a hint of sadness.
+
+"Our last day here!" she said to Dion. "One more night with the stars,
+only one! Dion, when you brought me here, you did a dangerous thing."
+
+"Gave you opportunities for regret? D'you mean that?"
+
+She nodded, still gazing towards Zante.
+
+"Such opportunities!"
+
+"It couldn't be helped. I had to bring you."
+
+"Of course. I know. If you had let me leave Greece without coming here,
+and I had ever come to understand what I had missed, I don't believe I
+could have forgiven even you."
+
+"I always meant to bring you here."
+
+"But you had a sudden impulse, didn't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why exactly did it come?"
+
+He hesitated. Suddenly he felt reserved; but he broke through his
+reserve and answered:
+
+"I saw I had made you feel sad."
+
+"Did you? Why was that?"
+
+"Don't you remember?"
+
+She was catching the dream of the plain, perhaps, for she replied, with
+an almost preoccupied air:
+
+"I don't think so."
+
+"I wanted to make you happy again, very happy, to give you a treat as
+quickly as possible. The idea of this"--he flung out a brown hand--"came
+to me suddenly. That's how it was. You--you don't know how I wish to
+keep every breath of sorrow out of your life."
+
+"I know you do; I feel it. But you've put a sorrow in."
+
+She spoke with a half-whimsical smile.
+
+"Have I?"
+
+"The sorrow of leaving all this, of leaving the Hermes. I didn't know
+it was possible to grow to care for a lifeless thing as I care for
+him. Sometimes I believe the marble has actually retained nothing of
+Praxiteles as a man. I mean as apart from a sculptor. But he must have
+been full of almost divine feelings and conceptions, or he could never
+have made my Hermes. No man can make the divine without having divinity
+in him. I've learnt more here in these few days than I have learnt in
+all my years."
+
+"From the statue of a Pagan. Isn't that strange?"
+
+"No, I don't think so. For I was able to see the Christianity in it. I
+know what Praxiteles was only able to feel mysteriously. Sometimes in
+London I've heard people--you know the sort of people I mean--regretting
+they didn't live in the old Greek world."
+
+"I've regretted that."
+
+"Have you? But not in their way. When I look at the Hermes I feel very
+thankful I have lived since."
+
+"Tell me just why."
+
+"Because I live in a world which has received definitely and finally the
+message the Hermes knew before it was sent down."
+
+She took away her arm from the olive tree and sighed.
+
+"Oh, Dion, I shall hate going away, leaving the tent and Drouva and him.
+But I believe whenever I think of Olympia I shall feel the peace that,
+thank God, doesn't pass all understanding."
+
+They went down to the valley that day to pay their final visit to the
+Hermes. Twilight had not yet come, but was not very far off when, for
+the last time, they crossed the threshold of his chamber. More silent
+than ever, more benignly silent, did the hush about him seem to Dion;
+more profound were his peace and serenity. He and the child had surely
+withdrawn a little farther from all that was not intended, but that, for
+some inscrutable reason, had come to be. His winged sandals had carried
+him still farther away. As Dion looked at him he seemed to be afar.
+
+"Rosamund!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"This evening I have a feeling about the Hermes I've never had before."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"That he's taking the child away, quite away."
+
+"But he's always been here, and not here. That's what I love so much."
+
+"I don't mean quite that. It's as if he were taking the child farther
+and farther away, partly because of us."
+
+"I don't like that. I don't feel that at all."
+
+"We belong to this world, you see, and are subject to all its
+conditions. We are in it and of it."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"He belongs to such a different world."
+
+"Yes, the released world, where no ugly passions can ever get in."
+
+"The way he looks at Dionysos tells one that. He hasn't any fear for the
+boy's future when he grows up and comes to know things. It just strikes
+me that no human being who thinks could ever look at a human child like
+that. There would always be the fear behind--'What is life going to do
+to the child?'"
+
+She looked at him, and her face was very grave.
+
+"D'you think we should feel that?"
+
+"Surely."
+
+"Unless we got the serene courage of the Hermes."
+
+"But he lived among gods, and we live among men."
+
+"Not always."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"Perhaps some day you will," she answered.
+
+Into her eyes there had come a strange look of withdrawal.
+
+At that moment the atmosphere in the room of the Hermes seemed to Dion
+more full of peace even than before, but the peace was like something
+almost tangible. It troubled him a little because he felt that the
+Hermes, the child and Rosamund were of it, while he was not. They were
+surrounded by the atmosphere necessary to them, and to which they were
+mysteriously accustomed, while he was for the first time in such an
+atmosphere. He felt separated from Rosamund by a gulf, perhaps very
+narrow, but probably very deep.
+
+Over Elis the twilight was falling, a green twilight sylvan and very
+ethereal, tremulous in its delicate beauty. It stole through the green
+doors, and down through the murmuring pine trees; it crossed the shallow
+river, and made its way to the garden of ruins where once the Hermes had
+stood between Doric Columns in the Heraeon. Through the colonnade of the
+echoes it passed, and under the arch of the Athletes. Over the crude and
+almost terrible strength of the ruins of the temple of Zeus it let its
+green garments trail down, as it felt its way softly but surely to the
+buried Stadium where once a boy of twelve had won the crown of wild
+olive. The sheep-bells were ringing softly; the flocks were going
+homeward from pasture. They were making their way up the valley now at
+the base of the Kronos Hill, and the chime of their little bells mingled
+with the wide whispering of the eternities among the summits of the pine
+trees. Music of earth mingled with the music from a distance that knew
+what the twilight knew.
+
+The tall oblong of the Museum doorway on the hill framed a tiny picture
+of Elis, bathed in green and tremulous light; a small section of
+hillside, a fragment of empty, poetic country--Pan's world rather hinted
+at than revealed--a suggestion of evening sky, remote, with infinity
+lost in its distance. But there was no branch of wild olive flickering
+across the picture.
+
+Rosamund missed it as she looked from the room of the Hermes out to the
+whispering evening and the quiet vale of Olympia. But she did not say
+so to Dion. He thought of it too, as he looked at her, and he tried to
+forget it. The picture framed by the doorway strangely grew dimmer and
+yet more full of greenish light; the country of Pan was fading in light.
+Presently details were entirely lost. Only an oblong of green, now
+almost emerald, light showed from the chamber of the Hermes. And in that
+chamber the two marble figures were gradually fading; the athletic, yet
+miraculously graceful, messenger of the gods with the winged sandals,
+the tiny child clinging to his shoulder with one little arm stretched
+out in an enchanting gesture of desire. Still the child nestled against
+Hermes, and still Hermes contemplated the child, with a celestial
+benignity, a half-smiling calmness of other worlds than this.
+
+In the vestibule of the Emperors the guardian waited patiently. He was
+not accustomed to visitors who lingered on like these two English,
+when the light was failing, and surely it must be difficult, if not
+impossible, to see the statues properly. But Rosamund, with her usual
+lack of all effort, had captivated him. He had grown accustomed to her
+visits; he was even flattered by them. It pleased him subtly to have in
+his care a treasure such as the Hermes, to see which beautiful women,
+the Rosamunds of the world, traveled from far-off countries. Rosamund's
+perpetual, and prolonged, visits had made him feel more important than
+he had ever succeeded in feeling before. Let the night come, she might
+stay on there, if she chose. He took very little account of Dion. But
+Rosamund was beginning to assume a certain vital importance in his quiet
+life.
+
+The green light faded into a very dim primrose; the music of the
+sheep-bells drew near and died away among the small houses of the
+hamlet at the foot of the hill of Drouva; Elis withdrew itself into the
+obscurity that would last till the late coming of the waning moon. Of
+Hermes and Dionysos now only the attitudes could be seen faintly. But
+even they told of a golden age, an age from which everything ugly,
+everything violent, everything unseemly, everything insincere,
+everything cruel was blotted out--an age of serenity of body and soul,
+the age of the long peace.
+
+"He's gone," said Dion at last.
+
+Rosamund got up slowly.
+
+"You think he's taken away the child because of us?"
+
+There was an almost pathetic sound in her voice, but there was a smile
+in it too.
+
+"You remember my stupid remark?"
+
+"Perhaps it wasn't stupid. I think those who dare to have a child ought
+to keep very near to the world Hermes walks in. They mayn't wear wings
+on their sandals, but the earth oughtn't to hold their feet too fast.
+Hermes has taught me."
+
+"No one could ever want to take a child away from you," he answered.
+
+In the vestibule of the Emperors they bade good-by to the guardian of
+the Museum, and made him understand that on the morrow they would be
+gone.
+
+As he looked at Dion's gift he felt for a moment almost depressed. He
+was accustomed to his constant visitor. Surely he would miss her. She
+smiled on him with her warm and very human cordiality for the last time,
+and went away, with her companion, into the dimness towards the hill of
+Drouva. Then the guardian pulled the great door. It closed with a final
+sound. The key was turned. And Hermes was left untroubled in that world
+where wings grow out of the sandals.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II -- ECHO
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Robin, whose other name was Gabriel, arrived at the "little house," of
+which Rosamund had spoken to Dion upon the hill of Drouva, early in the
+following year, on the last night of February to be exact. For a long
+time before his coming his future home had been subtly permeated by an
+atmosphere of expectancy.
+
+No. 5 Little Market Street was in Westminster, not far from the river
+and the Houses of Parliament, yet in a street which looked almost
+remote, and which was often very quiet although close to great arteries
+of life. Dion sometimes thought it almost too dusky a setting for his
+Rosamund, but it was she who had chosen it, and they had both become
+quickly fond of it. It was a house with white paneling, graceful
+ceilings and carved fireplaces, and a shallow staircase of oak. There
+was a tiny but welcoming hall, and the landing on the first floor
+suggested potpourri, chintz-covered settees, and little curtains of
+chintz moved by a country wind coming through open windows. There were,
+in fact, chintz-covered settees, and there was potpourri. Rosamund had
+taken care about that; she had also taken care about many other little
+things which most London housewives, perhaps, think unworthy of their
+attention. Every day, for instance, she burnt lavender about the house,
+and watched the sweet smoke in tiny wreaths curling up from the small
+shovel, as she gently moved it to and fro, with a half smile of what she
+called "rustic satisfaction." She laid lavender in the cupboards and in
+the chests of drawers, and, when she bought flowers, chose by preference
+cottage garden flowers, if she could get them, sweet williams, pansies,
+pinks, wallflowers, white violets, stocks, Canterbury bells. Sometimes
+she came home with wild flowers, and had once given a little dinner
+with foxgloves for a table decoration. An orchid, a gardenia, even a
+hyacinth, was never to be seen in the little house. Rosamund confessed
+that hyacinths had a lovely name, and that they suggested spring, but
+she added that they smelt as if they had always lived in hothouses, and
+were quite ready to be friends with gardenias.
+
+She opened her windows. In this she was almost too rigorous for her
+maid-servants, who nevertheless adored her. "Plenty of warmth but plenty
+of air," was her prescription for a comfortable and healthy house, "and
+not too much or too many of anything." Dust, of course, was not to be
+known of in her dwelling, but "blacks" were accepted with a certain
+resignation as a natural chastening and a message from London.
+"They aren't our fault, Annie," she had been known to observe to the
+housemaid. "And dust can't be anything else, however you look at it, can
+it?" And Annie said, "Well, no, ma'am!" and, when she came to think of
+it, felt she had not been a liar in the moment of speaking.
+
+Rosamund never "splashed," or tried to make a show in her house, and
+she was very careful never to exceed their sufficient, but not large,
+income; but the ordinary things, those things which of necessity come
+into the scheme of everyday life, were always of the very best when she
+provided them. Dion declared, and really believed, perhaps with reason,
+that no tea was so fragrant, no bread and butter so delicious, no toast
+so crisp, as theirs; no other linen felt so cool and fresh to the body
+as the linen on the beds of the little house; no other silver glittered
+so brightly as the silver on their round breakfast-table; no other
+little white window curtains in London managed to look so perennially
+fresh, and almost blithe, as the curtains which hung at their windows.
+Rosamund and Annie might have conversations together on the subject of
+"blacks," but Dion never saw any of these distressing visitants.
+The mere thought of Rosamund would surely keep them at a more than
+respectful distance.
+
+She proved to be a mistress of detail, and a housekeeper whose
+enthusiasm was matched by her competence. At first Dion had been rather
+surprised when he followed from afar, as is becoming in a man, this
+development. Before they settled down in London he had seen in Rosamund
+the enthusiastic artist, the joyous traveler, the good comrade, the gay
+sportswoman touched with Amazonian glories; he had known in her the deep
+lover of pure beauty; he had divined in her something else, a little
+strange, a little remote, the girl to whom the "Paradiso" was a
+door opening into dreamland, the girl who escaped sometimes almost
+mysteriously into regions he knew nothing of; but he had not seen in her
+one capable of absolutely reveling in the humdrum. Evidently, then, he
+had not grasped the full meaning of a genuine _joie de vivre_.
+
+To everything she did Rosamund brought zest. She kept house as she sang
+"The heart ever faithful," holding nothing back. Everything must be
+right if she could get it right; and the husband got the benefit,
+incidentally. Now and then Dion found himself mentally murmuring that
+word. A great love will do such things unreasonably. For Rosamund's
+_joie de vivre_, that gift of the gods, caused her to love and rejoice
+in a thing for the thing's own sake, as it seemed, rather than for the
+sake of some one, any one, who was eventually to gain by the thing.
+Thus she cared for her little house with a sort of joyous devotion and
+energy, but because it was "my little house" and deserved every care
+she could give it. Rather as she had spoken of the small olive tree on
+Drouva, of the Hermes of Olympia, even of Athens, she spoke of it, with
+a sort of protective affection, as if she thought of it as a living
+thing confided to her keeping. She possessed a faculty not very common
+in women, a delight in doing a thing for its own sake, rather than for
+the sake of some human being--perhaps a man. If she boiled an egg--she
+went to the kitchen and did this sometimes--she seemed personally
+interested in the egg, and keenly anxious to do the best by it; the
+boiling must be a pleasure to her, but also to the egg, and it must,
+if possible, be supremely well done. As the cook once said, after a
+culinary effort by Rosamund, "I never seen a lady care for cooking and
+all such-like as she done. If she as much as plucked a fowl, you'd swear
+she loved every feather of it. And as to a roast, she couldn't hardly
+seem to set more store by it if it was her own husband."
+
+Such a spirit naturally made for comfort in a house, and Dion had never
+before been so comfortable. Nevertheless--and he knew it with a keen
+savoring of appreciation--there was a Spartan touch to be felt in the
+little house. Comfort walked hand in hand with Rosamund, but so did
+simplicity; she was what the maids called "particular," but she was not
+luxurious; she even disliked luxury, connecting it with superfluity,
+for which she had a feeling amounting almost to repulsion. "I detest the
+sensation of sinking down in _things_," was a favorite saying of hers;
+and the way she lived proved that she spoke the sheer truth.
+
+All through the house, and all through the way of life in it, there
+prevailed a "note" of simplicity, even of plainness. The odd thing,
+perhaps, was that it pleased almost every one who visited the young
+couple. A certain well-known man, noted as a Sybarite, clever, decadent
+and sought after, once got into the house, he pretended by stealth,
+and spent half an hour there in conversation with Rosamund. He came way
+"acutely conscious of my profound vulgarity," as he explained later to
+various friends. "Her house revealed to me the hideous fact that all the
+best houses in London smack of cocotte-try; the trail of cushions and
+liqueurs is over them all. Mrs. Leith's house is a vestal, and its lamp
+is always trimmed." Daventry's comment on this was: "Trimmed--yes, but
+trimmings--no!"
+
+Even Esme Darlington highly approved of the "charming sobriety of No. 5
+Little Market Street," although he had had no hand in its preparation,
+no voice in the deciding of its colors, its stuffs, its rugs, or its
+stair-rods. He was even heard to declare that "our dear Rosamund is
+almost the only woman I know who has the precious instinct of reticence;
+an instinct denied, by the way, even to that delightful and marvelous
+creature Elizabeth Browning--_requiescat_."
+
+The "charming sobriety" was shown in various ways; in a lack of those
+enormous cushions which most women either love, or think necessary, in
+all sitting-rooms; in the comparative smallness of such sofas as were to
+be seen; in the moderation of depth in arm-chairs, and in the complete
+absence of footstools. Then the binding of the many books, scattered
+about here and there, and ranged on shelves, was "quiet"; there was no
+scarlet and gold, or bright blue and gold; pictures were good but few;
+not many rugs lay on the polished wooden floors, and there was no
+litter of ornaments or bibelots on cabinets or tables. A couple of small
+statuettes, copies of bronzes in the Naples Museum, and some bits of
+blue-and-white china made their pleasant effect the more easily because
+they had not to fight against an army of rivals. There was some good
+early English glass in the small dining-room, and a few fine specimens
+of luster ware made a quiet show in Dion's little den. Apart from the
+white curtains, and outer curtains of heavier material, which hung at
+all the windows, there were no "draperies." Overmantels, "cosy-corners,"
+flung Indian shawls, "pieces" snatched from bazaars, and "carelessly"
+hung over pedestals and divans found no favor in Rosamund's eyes.
+There was a good deal of homely chintz about which lit up the rather
+old-fashioned rooms, and colors throughout the house were rather soft
+than hard, were never emphatic or designed to startle or impress.
+
+Rosamund, indeed, was by far the most vivid thing in the house, and
+some people--not males--said she had taken care to supply for herself
+a background which would "throw her up." These people, if they believed
+what they said, did not know her.
+
+She had on the first floor a little sitting-room all to herself; in this
+were now to be found the books which had been in her bedroom in Great
+Cumberland Place; the charwoman's black tray with the cabbage rose,
+the mug from Greenwich, the flesh-colored vase, the china cow, the toy
+trombone, and other souvenirs of her girlhood to which Rosamund "held."
+On the brass-railed shelf of the writing-table stood a fine photogravure
+of the Hermes of Olympia with little Dionysos on his arm. Very often,
+many times every day, Rosamund looked up at Hermes and the Child from
+account books, letters or notes, and then the green dream of Elis fell
+about her softly again; and sometimes she gazed beyond the Hermes, but
+instead of the wall of the chamber she saw, set in an oblong frame, and
+bathed in green twilight, a bit of the world of Pan, with a branch of
+wild olive flickering across the foreground; or, now and then, she saw
+a falling star, dropping from its place in the sky down towards a green
+wilderness, and carrying a wish from her with it, a wish that was surely
+soon to be granted. Her life in the little house had been a happy life
+hitherto, but--she looked again at the little Dionysos on the arm of
+Hermes, nestling against his shoulder--how much happier it was going to
+be, how much happier! She was not surprised, for deep in her heart she
+always expected happiness.
+
+People had been delightful to her and to Dion. Indeed, they had flocked
+to the small green door (the Elis door) of 5 Little Market Street in
+almost embarrassing numbers. That was partly Mr. Darlington's fault.
+Naturally Rosamund's and Bruce Evelin's friends came; and of course
+Dion's relations and friends came. That would really have been enough.
+Rosamund enjoyed, but was not at all "mad about," society, and had no
+wish to give up the greater part of her time to paying calls. But
+Mr. Darlington could not forbear from kind efforts on behalf of his
+delightful young friends, that gifted and beautiful creature Rosamund
+Leith, and her pleasant young husband. He, who found time for
+everything, found time to give more than one "little party, just a few
+friends, no more," specially for them; and the end of it was that
+they found themselves acquainted with almost too many interesting and
+delightful people.
+
+At first, too, Rosamund continued to sing at concerts, but at the end of
+July, after their return from Greece, when the London season closed,
+she gave up doing so for the time, and accepted no engagements for the
+autumn. Esme Darlington was rather distressed. He worked very hard in
+the arts himself, and, having "launched" Rosamund, he expected great
+things of her, and wished her to go forward from success to success.
+Besides "the money would surely come in very handy" to two young
+people as yet only moderately well off. He did not quite understand the
+situation. Of course he realized that in time young married people
+might have home interests, home claims upon them which might necessitate
+certain changes of procedure. The day might come--he sincerely hoped it
+would--when a new glory, possibly even more than one, would be added to
+the delightful Rosamund's crown; but in the meanwhile surely the autumn
+concerts need not be neglected. He had heard no hint as yet of any--h'm,
+ha! He stroked his carefully careless beard. But he had left town in
+August with his curiosity unsatisfied, leaving Rosamund and Dion behind
+him. They had had their holiday, and had stayed steadily on in Little
+Market Street through the summer, taking Saturday to Monday runs into
+the country; more than once to the seacoast of Kent, where Bruce Evelin
+and Beatrice were staying, and once to Worcestershire to Dion's mother,
+who had taken a cottage there close to the borders of Warwickshire. The
+autumn had brought people back to town, and it was in the autumn that
+Rosamund withdrew from all contact with the hurly-burly of London. She
+had no fears at all for her body, none of those sick terrors which some
+women have as their time draws near, no premonitions of disaster or
+presages of death, but she desired to "get ready," and her way of
+getting ready was to surround her life with a certain stillness, to
+build about it white walls of peace. Often when Dion was away in the
+City she went out alone and visited some church. Sometimes she spent an
+hour or two in Westminster Abbey; and on many dark afternoons she made
+her way to St. Paul's Cathedral where, sitting a long way from the
+choir, she listened to evensong. The beautiful and tenderly cool singing
+of the distant boys came to her like something she needed, something to
+which her soul was delicately attuned. One afternoon they and the men,
+who formed the deeply melodious background from which their crystalline
+voices seemed to float forward and upward, sang "The Wilderness" of
+Wesley. Rosamund listened to it, thankful that she was alone, and
+remembering many things, among them the green wilderness beneath the
+hill of Drouva.
+
+Very seldom she spoke to Dion about these excursions of hers. There was
+something in her feeling for religion which loved reserve rather than
+expression; she who was so forthcoming in many moments of her life, who
+was genial and gay, who enjoyed laughter and was always at home with
+humanity, knew very well how to be silent. There was a saying she cared
+for, "God speaks to man in the silence;" perhaps she felt there was a
+suspicion of irreverence in talking to any one, even to Dion, about
+her aspiration to God. If, on his return home, he asked her how she had
+passed the day, she often said only, "I've been very happy." Then he
+said to himself, "What more can I want? I'm able to make her happy."
+
+One windy evening in January, when an icy sleet was driving over the
+town, as he came into the little hall, he found Rosamund at the foot of
+the staircase, with a piece of mother's work in her hand, about to go
+into the drawing-room which was on the ground floor of the house.
+
+"Rose," he said, looking down at the little white something she was
+holding, "do you think we shall both feel ever so much older in March?
+It will be in March, won't it?"
+
+"I think so," she answered, with a sort of deeply tranquil gravity.
+
+"In March when we are parents?"
+
+"Are you worrying about that?" she asked him, smiling now, but with, in
+her voice, a hint of reproach.
+
+"Worrying--no. But do you?"
+
+"Let us go into the drawing-room," she said.
+
+When they were there she answered him:
+
+"Absolutely different, but not necessarily older. Feeling older must be
+very like feeling old, I think--and I can't imagine feeling old."
+
+"Because probably you never will."
+
+"Have you had tea, Dion?"
+
+"Yes, at the Greville. I promised I'd meet Guy there to-day. He spoke
+about Beattie."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Do you think Beattie would marry him if he asked her?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+She sat down in the firelight near the hearth, and bent a little over
+her work on the tiny garment, which looked as if it were intended for
+the use of a fairy. Dion looked at her head with its pale hair. As he
+leaned forward he could see all the top of her head. The firelight made
+some of her hair look quite golden, gave a sort of soft sparkle to the
+curve of it about her broad, pure forehead.
+
+"Guy's getting desperate," he said. "But he's afraid to put his fortune
+to the test. He thinks even uncertainty is better than knowledge of the
+worst."
+
+"Of one thing I'm certain, Dion. Beattie doesn't love Guy Daventry."
+
+"Oh well, then, it's all up."
+
+Rosamund looked up from the little garment.
+
+"I didn't say that."
+
+"But if Beattie--but Beattie's the soul of sincerity."
+
+"Yes, I know; but I think she might consent to marry Guy Daventry."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"I don't know exactly. She never told me. I just feel it."
+
+"Oh, if you feel it, I'm sure it is so. But how awfully odd. Isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, it really is rather odd in Beattie. Do you want Beattie to marry
+Guy Daventry?"
+
+"Of course I do. Don't you?"
+
+"Dear Beattie! I want her to be happy. But I think it's very difficult,
+even when one knows some one very, very well, to know just how she can
+get happiness, through just what."
+
+"Rose, have I made you happy?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"As happy as you could be?"
+
+"I think, perhaps, you will have--soon."
+
+"Oh, you mean----?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+She went on stitching quietly. Her hands looked very contented. Dion
+drew up a little nearer to the fire with a movement that was rather
+brusk. It just struck him that his walk home in the driving sleet had
+decidedly chilled his body.
+
+"I believe I know what you mean about Beattie," he said, after a pause,
+looking into the fire. "But do you think that would be fair to Guy?"
+
+"I'm not quite sure myself what I mean, honestly, Dion."
+
+"Well, let's suppose it. If it were so, would it be fair?"
+
+"I think Beattie's so really good that Mr. Daventry, as he loves her,
+could scarcely be unhappy with her."
+
+Dion thought for a moment, then he said:
+
+"Perhaps with Guy it wouldn't be unfair, but, you know, Rose, that sort
+of thing wouldn't do with some men. Some men could never stand being
+married for anything but the one great reason."
+
+He did not explain what that reason was, and Rosamund did not ask. There
+was a sort of wide and sweet tranquillity about her that evening. Dion
+noticed that it seemed to increase upon her, and about her, as the days
+passed by. She showed no sign of nervousness, had evidently no dread at
+all of bodily pain. Either she trusted in her splendid health, or she
+was so wrapped up in the thought of the joy of being a mother that
+the darkness to be passed through did not trouble her; or perhaps--he
+wondered about this--she was all the time schooling herself, looking up,
+in memory, to the columns of the Parthenon. He was much more strung up,
+much more restless and excitable than she was, but she did not seem to
+notice it. Always singularly unconscious of herself she seemed at this
+period to be also unobservant of those about her. He felt that she was
+being deliberately egoistic for a great reason, that she was caring for
+herself, soul and body, with a sort of deep and quiet intensity because
+of the child.
+
+"She is right," he said to himself, and he strove in all ways in his
+power to aid her beautiful selfishness; nevertheless sometimes he felt
+shut out; sometimes he felt as if already the unseen was playing truant
+over the seen. He was conscious of the child's presence in the little
+house through Rosamund's way of being before he saw the child. He
+wondered what other women were like in such periods, whether Rosamund
+was instinctively conforming to an ancient tradition of her sex, or
+whether she was, as usual, strongly individualistic. In many ways she
+was surely not like other women, but perhaps in these wholly natural
+crises every woman resembled all her sisters who were traveling towards
+the same sacred condition. He longed to satisfy himself whether this was
+so or not, and one Saturday afternoon, when Rosamund was resting in her
+little sitting-room with a book, and the Hermes watching over her, he
+bicycled to Jenkins's gymnasium in the Harrow Road, resolved to put in
+forty minutes' hard work, and then to visit his mother. Mrs. Leith and
+Rosamund seemed to be excellent friends, but Dion never discussed his
+wife with his mother. There was no reason why he should do so. On this
+day, however, instinctively he turned to his mother; he thought that she
+might help him towards a clearer knowledge of Rosamund.
+
+Rosamund had long ago been formally made known to Bob Jenkins, Jim's
+boxing "coach," who enthusiastically approved of her, though he had
+never ventured to put his opinion quite in that form to Dion. Even
+Jenkins, perhaps, had his subtleties, those which a really good heart
+cannot rid itself of. Rosamund, in return, had made Dion known to her
+extraordinary friend, Mr. Thrush of Abingdon Buildings, John's Court,
+near the Edgware Road, the old gentleman who went to fetch his sin every
+evening, and, it is to be feared, at various other times also, in a jug
+from the "Daniel Lambert." Dion had often laughed over Rosamund's "cult"
+for Mr. Thrush, which he scarcely pretended to understand, but Rosamund
+rejoiced in Dion's cult for the stalwart Jenkins.
+
+"I like that man," she said. "Perhaps some day----" She stopped there,
+but her face was eloquent.
+
+In his peculiar way Jenkins was undoubtedly Doric, and therefore
+deserving of Rosamund's respect. Of Mr. Thrush so much could hardly be
+said with truth. In him there were to be found neither the stern majesty
+and strength of the Doric, nor the lightness and grace of the Ionic.
+As an art product he stood alone, always wearing the top hat, a figure
+Degas might have immortalized but had unfortunately never seen. Dion
+knew that Mr. Thrush had once rescued Rosamund in a fog and had conveyed
+her home, and he put the rest of the Thrush matter down to Rosamund's
+genial kindness towards downtrodden and unfortunate people. He loved her
+for it, but could not help being amused by it.
+
+When Dion arrived at the gymnasium, Jenkins was giving a lesson to a
+small boy of perhaps twelve years old, whose mother was looking eagerly
+on. The boy, clad in a white "sweater," was flushed with the ardor of
+his endeavors to punch the ball, to raise himself up on the bar till
+his chin was between his hands, to vault the horse neatly, and to turn
+somersaults on the rings. The primrose-colored hair on his small round
+head was all ruffled up, perspiration streamed over his pink rosy
+cheeks, his eyes shone with determination, and his little white teeth
+were gritted as, with all the solemn intensity of childhood, he strove
+to obey on the instant Jenkins's loud words of command. It was obvious
+that he looked to Jenkins as a savage looks to his Tribal God. His
+anxious but admiring mother was forgotten; the world was forgotten;
+Jenkins and the small boy were alone in a universe of grip dumb-bells,
+heavy weights, "exercisers," boxing-gloves, horizontal bars, swinging
+balls and wooden "horses." Dion stood in the doorway and looked on till
+the lesson was finished. It ended with a heavy clap on the small boy's
+shoulders from the mighty paw of Jenkins, and a stentorian, "You're
+getting along and no mistake, Master Tim!"
+
+The face of Master Tim at this moment was a study. All the flags of
+triumph and joy were hung out in it and floated on the breeze; a
+soul appeared at the two windows shining with perfect happiness;
+and, mysteriously, in all the little figure, from the ruffled
+primrose-colored feathers of hair to the feet in the white shoes, the
+pride of manhood looked forth through the glowing rapture of a child.
+
+"What a jolly boy!" said Dion to Jenkins, when Master Tim and his mother
+had departed. "It must be good to have a boy like that."
+
+"I hope you'll have one some day, sir," said Jenkins, speaking heartily
+in his powerful voice, but looking, for the moment, unusually severe.
+
+He and Bert, his wife, had had one child, a girl, which had died of
+quinsy, and they had never had another.
+
+"Now I'm ready for you, sir!" he added, with a sort of outburst of
+recovery. "I should like a round with the gloves to-day, if it's all the
+same to you."
+
+It was all the same to Dion, and, when he reached Queen Anne's Mansions
+in the darkness of evening, he was still glowing from the exercise; the
+blood sang through his veins, and his heart was almost as light as his
+step.
+
+Marion, the parlor-maid, let him in, and told him his mother was at
+home. Dion put his hand to his lips, stole across the hall noiselessly,
+softly opened the drawing-room door, and caught his mother unawares.
+
+Whenever he came into the well-known flat alone, he had a moment of
+retrogression, went back to his unmarried time, and was again, as for so
+many years, in the intimate life of his mother. But to-day, as he opened
+the door, he was abruptly thrust out of his moment. His mother was in
+her usual place on the high-backed sofa near the fire. She was doing
+nothing, was just sitting with her hands, in their wrinkled gloves,
+folded in her lap, and her large, round blue eyes looking. Dion thought
+of them as looking because they were wide open, but they were strangely
+emptied of expression. All of his mother seemed to him for just the one
+instant which followed on his entrance to be emptied, as if the woman he
+had always known--loving, satirical, clever, kind, observant--had been
+poured away. The effect upon him was one of indescribable, almost of
+horrible, dreariness. Omar Khayyam, his mother's black pug, was not in
+the room as usual, stretched out before the fire.
+
+Even as Dion realized this, his mother was poured back into the round
+face and plump figure beside the fire, and greeted him with the usual
+almost saccharine sweet smile, and:
+
+"Dee-ar, I wasn't expecting you to-day. How is the beloved one?"
+
+"The beloved one" was Mrs. Leith's rendering of Rosamund.
+
+"How particularly spry you look," she added. "I'm certain it's the
+Jenkins paragon. You've been standing up to him. Now, haven't you?"
+
+Dion acknowledged that he had, and added:
+
+"But you, mother? How are you?"
+
+"Quite wickedly well. I ought to be down with influenza like all
+well-bred people,--Esme Darlington has it badly,--but I cannot compass
+even one sneeze."
+
+"Where's Omar?"
+
+Mrs. Leith looked grave.
+
+"Poor little chap, we must turn down an empty glass for him."
+
+"What--you don't mean----?"
+
+"Run over yesterday just outside the Mansions, and by a four-wheeler.
+I'm sure he never expected that the angel of death would come for him in
+a growler, poor little fellow."
+
+"I say! Little Omar dead! What a beastly shame! Mother, I am sorry."
+
+He sat down beside her; he was beset by a sensation of calamity. Oddly
+enough the hammer of fate had never yet struck on him so definitely as
+now with the death of a dog. But, without quite realizing it, he was
+considering poor black Omar as an important element in his mother's
+life, now abruptly withdrawn. Omar had been in truth a rather greedy,
+self-seeking animal, but he had also been a companion, an adherent, a
+friend.
+
+"You must get another dog," Dion added quickly. "I'll find you one."
+
+"Good of you, dee-ar boy! But I'm too old to begin on a new dog."
+
+"What nonsense!"
+
+"It isn't. I feel I'm losing my nameless fascination for dogs. A poodle
+barked at me this afternoon in Victoria Street. One can't expect one's
+day to last for ever, though, really, some Englishwomen seem to. But,
+tell me, how is the beloved one?"
+
+"Oh--to be sure! I wanted to talk to you about Rose."
+
+The smile became very sweet and welcoming on Mrs. Leith's handsome round
+face.
+
+"There's nothing wrong, I'm sure. Your Rosamund sheds confidence in her
+dear self like a light all round her."
+
+"Nothing wrong--no. I didn't mean that."
+
+Dion paused. Now he was with his mother he did not know how to explain
+himself; his reason for coming began to seem, even to himself, a little
+vague.
+
+"It's a little difficult," he began at last, "but I've been wondering
+rather about women who are as Rosamund is just now. D'you think all
+women become a good deal alike at such times?"
+
+"In spirit, do you mean?"
+
+"Well--yes, of course."
+
+"I scarcely know."
+
+"I mean do they concentrate on the child a long while before it comes."
+
+"Many smart women certainly don't."
+
+"Oh, smart women! I mean women."
+
+"A good definition, dee-ar. Well, lots of poor women don't concentrate
+on the child either. They have far too much to do and worry about. They
+are 'seeing to' things up till the very last moment."
+
+"Then we must rule them out. Let's say the good women who have the
+time."
+
+"I expect a great many of them do, if the husband lets them."
+
+"Ah!" said Dion rather sharply.
+
+"There are a few husbands, you see, who get fidgety directly the
+pedestal on which number one thinks himself firmly established begins to
+shake."
+
+"Stupid fools!"
+
+"Eminently human stupid fools."
+
+"Are they?"
+
+"Don't you think so?"
+
+"Perhaps. But then humanity's contemptible."
+
+"Extra-humanity, or the attempt at it, can be dangerous."
+
+"What do you mean exactly by that, mater?"
+
+"Only that we have to be as we are, and can never really be, can only
+seem to be, as we aren't."
+
+"What a whipping I'm giving to myself just now!" was her thought, as she
+finished speaking.
+
+"Oh--yes, of course. That's true. I think--I think Rosamund's
+concentrating on the child, in a sort of quiet, big way."
+
+"There's something fine in that. But her doings are often touched with
+fineness."
+
+"Yes, aren't they? She doesn't seem at all afraid."
+
+"I don't think she need be. She has such splendid health."
+
+"But she may suffer very much."
+
+"Yes, but something will carry her gloriously through all that, I
+expect."
+
+"And you think it's very natural, very usual, her--her sort of living
+alone with the child before it is born?"
+
+Mrs. Leith saw in her son's eyes an unmistakably wistful look at this
+moment. It was very hard for her not to take him in her arms just then,
+not to say, "My son, d'you suppose I don't understand it all--_all_?"
+But she never moved, her hands lay still in her lap, and she replied:
+
+"Very natural, quite natural, Dion. Your Rosamund is just being
+herself."
+
+"You think she's able to live with the child already?"
+
+Mrs. Leith hesitated for a moment. In that moment certainly she felt a
+strong, even an almost terrible inclination to tell a lie to her son.
+But she answered:
+
+"Yes, I do."
+
+"That must be very strange," was all that Dion said just then; but a
+little later on--he stayed with his mother longer than usual that day
+because poor little Omar was dead--he remarked:
+
+"D'you know, mater, I believe it's the right thing to be what's called a
+thorough-paced egoist at certain moments, in certain situations."
+
+"Perhaps it is," said his mother incuriously.
+
+"I fancy there's a good deal of rot talked about egoism and that sort of
+thing."
+
+"There's a good deal of rot talked about most things."
+
+"Yes, isn't there? And besides, how is one to know? Very often what
+seems like egoism may not be egoism at all. As I grow older I often feel
+how important it is to search out the real reasons for things."
+
+"Sometimes they're difficult to find," returned his mother, with an
+unusual simplicity of manner.
+
+"Yes, but still----Well, I must be off."
+
+He stood up and looked at the Indian rug in front of the hearth.
+
+"When are you coming to see us?" he asked.
+
+"Almost directly, dee-ar."
+
+"That's right. Rosamund likes seeing you. Naturally she depends upon you
+at such----" He broke off. "I mean, do come as often as you can."
+
+He bent down and kissed his mother.
+
+"By the way," he added, almost awkwardly, "about that dog?"
+
+"What dog, dee-ar?"
+
+"The dog I want to give you."
+
+"We must think about it. Give me time. After a black pug one doesn't
+know all in a moment what type would be the proper successor. You
+remember your poor Aunt Binn?"
+
+"Aunt Binn! Why, what did she do?"
+
+"Gave Uncle Binn a hairless thing like a note of interrogation, that had
+to sleep in a coating of vaseline, when his enormous sheep-dog died who
+couldn't see for hair. She believed in the value of contrast, but
+Uncle Binn didn't. It would have led to a separation but for the hectic
+efforts of your aunt's friend, Miss Vine. When I've decided what type of
+dog, I'll tell you."
+
+Dion understood the negative and, in spite of his feeling of fitness,
+went away rather uncomfortably. He couldn't forget the strange
+appearance of that emptied woman whom he had taken unawares by the
+fireside. If only his mother would let him give her another dog!
+
+When he got home he found Beatrice sitting with Rosamund.
+
+Dion had grown very fond of Beatrice. He had always been rather touched
+and attracted by her plaintive charm, but since she had become his
+sister-in-law he had learnt to appreciate also her rare sincerity and
+delicacy of mind. She could not grip life, perhaps, could not mold it to
+her purpose and desire, but she could do a very sweet and very feminine
+thing, she could live, without ever being intrusive, in the life of
+another. It was impossible not to see how "wrapped up" she was in
+Rosamund. Dion had come to feel sure that it was natural to Beatrice to
+lead her life in another's, and he believed that Rosamund realized this
+and often let Beatrice do little things for her which, full of vigor and
+"go" as she was, she would have preferred to do for herself.
+
+"I've been boxing and then to see mother," he said, as he took
+Beatrice's long narrow hand in his. "She sent her best love to you,
+Rosamund."
+
+"The dear mother!" said Rosamund gently.
+
+Dion sat down by Beatrice.
+
+"I'm quite upset by something that's happened," he continued. "You know
+poor little Omar, Beattie?"
+
+"Yes. Is he ill?"
+
+"Dead. He was run over yesterday by a four-wheeler."
+
+"Oh!" said Beatrice.
+
+"Poor little dog," Rosamund said, again gently.
+
+"When they picked him up--are you going, Rose?"
+
+"Only for a few minutes. I am sorry. I'll write to the dear mother."
+
+She went quietly out of the room. Dion sprang up to open the door for
+her, but she had been sitting nearer to the door than he, and he was too
+late; he shut it, however, and came slowly back to Beatrice.
+
+"I wonder----" He looked at Beatrice's pale face and earnest dark eyes.
+"D'you think Rosamund disliked my mentioning poor Omar's being killed?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But didn't she leave us rather abruptly?"
+
+"I think perhaps she didn't want to hear any details. You were just
+beginning to--"
+
+"How stupid of me!"
+
+"You see, Rosamund has the child to live for now."
+
+"Yes--yes. What blunderers we men are, however much we try--"
+
+"That's not a blame you ought to take," Beatrice interrupted, with
+earnest gentleness. "You are the most thoughtful man I know--for a
+woman, I mean."
+
+Dion flushed.
+
+"Am I? I try to be. If I am it's because--well, Beattie, you know what
+Rose is to me."
+
+"Yes, I know."
+
+"Dearer and dearer every day. But nobody----Mother thinks a lot of her."
+
+"Who doesn't? There aren't many Roses like ours."
+
+"None. Poor mother! Beattie, d'you think she feels very lonely? You know
+she's got heaps of friends--heaps."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It isn't as if she knew very few people, or lived alone in the
+country."
+
+"No but I'm very sorry her little dog's dead."
+
+"I want to give her another."
+
+"It would be no use."
+
+"But why not?"
+
+"You see, little Omar was always there when you were living there."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"He was part of her life with you."
+
+"Oh--yes."
+
+Dion looked rather hard at Beatrice. In that moment he began to realize
+how much of the intelligence of the heart she possessed, and how widely
+she applied it. His application of his intelligence of the heart was, he
+feared, much less widespread than hers.
+
+"Go to see mother when you can, will you?" he said. "She's very fond of
+you, I think."
+
+"I'll go. I like going to her."
+
+"And, Beattie, may I say something rather intimate? I'm your brother
+now."
+
+"Yes."
+
+She was sitting opposite to him near the fire on a low chair. There was
+a large shaded lamp in the room, but it was on a rather distant table.
+He saw Beatrice's face by the firelight and her narrow thoroughbred
+figure in a dark dress. And the firelight, he thought, gave to both face
+and figure a sort of strange beauty that was sad, and that had something
+of the strangeness and the beauty of those gold and red castles children
+see in the fire. They glow--and that evening there was a sort of glow
+in Beatrice; they crumble--and then there was a pathetic something in
+Beatrice, too, which suggested wistful desires, perhaps faint hopes and
+an ending of ashes.
+
+"Would you marry old Guy if he asked you? Don't be angry with me."
+
+"I'm not."
+
+"Of course, we've all known for ages how much he cares for you. He spoke
+to me about it to-day. He's desperately afraid of your refusing him. He
+daren't put his fate to the test. Beattie--would you?"
+
+A slow red crept over Beatrice's face. She put up one hand to guard
+herself from the glow of the fire. For a moment she looked at Dion, and
+he thought, "What a strange expression firelight can give to a face!"
+Then she said:
+
+"I can't tell you."
+
+Her voice was husky.
+
+"Beattie, you've got a cold!"
+
+"Have I?"
+
+She got up.
+
+"I must go, Dion. I'll just see Rosamund for a minute."
+
+As she left the room, she said:
+
+"I'll go and see your mother to-morrow."
+
+The door shut. Dion stood with one elbow resting on the mantelpiece and
+looked down into the fire. He saw his mother sitting alone, a strange,
+emptied figure; he saw Beatrice. And fire, which beautifies, or makes
+romantic and sad everything gave to Beatrice the look of his mother. For
+a moment his soul was full of questions about the two women.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+"I've joined the Artists' Rifles," Dion said to Rosamund one day.
+
+He spoke almost bruskly. Of late he had begun to develop a manner
+which had just a hint of roughness in it sometimes. This manner was the
+expression of a strong inward effort he was making. If, as his mother
+believed, already Rosamund was able to live with the child, Dion's
+solitary possession of the woman he loved was definitely over, probably
+forever. Something within him which, perhaps, foolishly, rebelled
+against this fact had driven him to seek a diversion; he had found it in
+beginning to try to live for the child in the man's way. He intended to
+put the old life behind him, and to march vigorously on to the new. He
+called up Master Tim before him in the little white "sweater," with
+the primrose-colored ruffled feathers of hair, the gritted white teeth,
+small almost as the teeth of a mouse, the moist, ardent cheeks, and
+the glowing eyes looking steadfastly to the Tribal God. He must be the
+Tribal God to his little son, if the child were a son.
+
+Rosamund did not seem surprised by Dion's abrupt statement, though he
+had never spoken of an intention to join any Volunteer Corps. She knew
+he was fond of shooting, and had been in camp sometimes when he was at a
+public school.
+
+"What's that?" she asked. "I've heard of it, but I thought it was a
+corps for men who are painters, sculptors, writers and musicians."
+
+"It was founded, nearly forty years ago, I believe, for fellows working
+in the Arts, but all sorts of business men are let in now."
+
+"Will it take up much time?"
+
+"No; I shall have to drill a certain amount, and in summer I shall go
+into camp for a bit, and of course, if a big war ever came, I could be
+of some use."
+
+"I'm glad you've joined."
+
+"I thought you would be. I shall see a little less of you, I suppose,
+but, after all, a husband can't be perpetually hanging about the house,
+can he?"
+
+Rosamund looked at him and smiled, then laughed gently.
+
+"Dion, how absurd you are! In some ways you are only a boy still."
+
+"Why, what to you mean?"
+
+"A man who sticks to business as you do, hanging about the house!"
+
+"You wouldn't like it if I did."
+
+"No, because I should know it was doing you harm."
+
+"And besides--do you realize how independent you are?"
+
+"Am I?"
+
+"For a woman I think you are extraordinarily independent."
+
+She sat still for a minute, looking straight before her in an almost
+curious stillness.
+
+"I believe I know why perhaps I seem so," she said at length.
+
+And then she quietly, and very naturally, turned the conversation into
+another channel; she was a quieter Rosamund in those days of waiting
+than the Rosamund unaffected by motherhood. That Rosamund had been
+vigorous and joyous; this Rosamund was strongly serene. In all she was
+and did at this time Dion felt strength; but it was shown chiefly in
+stillness. She worked sometimes; she read a great deal sitting upstairs
+in her own little room. One day Dion found her with a volume of
+Tennyson; another day she was reading Shakespeare's "Henry the Fifth";
+she had the "Paradiso" in hand, too, and the Greek Testament with the
+English text in parallel columns. In the room there was a cottage piano,
+and one evening, when Dion had been drilling and came back late, he
+heard her singing. He stood still in the hall, after shutting softly the
+door of the lobby, and listened to the warm and powerful voice of the
+woman he loved. He could hear the words of the song, which was a setting
+of "Lead, kindly Light." Rosamund had only just begun singing it when he
+came into the hall; the first words he caught were, "The night is dark,
+and I am far from home; lead thou me on." He thrust his hands into the
+pockets of the black jacket he was wearing and did not move. He had
+never before heard Rosamund sing any piece of music through without
+seeing her while she was doing it; her voice seemed to him now different
+from the voice he knew so well; perhaps because he was uninfluenced by
+her appearance. That counted for much in the effect Rosamund created
+when she sang to people. The thought went through Dion's mind, "Am I
+really the husband of this voice?" It was beautiful, it was fervent,
+but it was strange, or seemed strange to him as it came down through the
+quiet house on this winter evening. For the first time, listening thus,
+he was able imaginatively to realize something of what it must be
+like to be a mystic, or rather, perhaps, to have within one a definite
+tendency towards mysticism, a definite and ceaseless and governing
+aspiration towards harmony with the transcendental order. When this
+voice which he heard above him sang "The night is dark, and I am far
+from home," he felt a sort of sharp comprehension of the real meaning of
+homeless wandering such as he had certainly never experienced before. He
+felt, too, that the spirit from which this voice proceeded could never
+be at home in the ordinary way of ordinary people, could not be at home
+even as he himself could be at home. The spirit behind this voice needed
+something of which, till now, he had not consciously felt the need;
+something peculiar, out of the way and remote--something very different
+from human love and human comfort. Although he was musical, and could be
+critical about a composition according to its lights, Dion did not think
+about the music of this song _qua_ music--could not have said how good
+he considered it to be. He knew only that this was not poor or insincere
+music. But music sung in this peculiar way was only a means by which
+the under part of a human being, that which has its existence deep down
+under layers and layers of the things which commonly appear and are
+known of, rose to the surface and announced itself.
+
+The Artists' Rifles--and this!
+
+When the voice was silent, Dion went slowly upstairs. The door of
+Rosamund's little room was shut. He paused outside it, and stood looking
+at it, the movable barrier of dark shining wood which divided him from
+the voice. When he was ascending the stairs he had meant to go in to
+Rosamund. But now he hesitated, and presently he turned away. He felt
+that a greater barrier than the door was between them. He might open the
+door easily enough, but the other barrier would remain. The life of the
+body seemed to him just then an antagonist to the life of the soul.
+
+"I'm on the lower plane," said Dion to himself that evening. "If it's a
+boy, I shall have to look after his body; she'll take care of the rest.
+Perhaps mothers always do, but not as she could and will."
+
+From this moment he devoted himself as much as possible to his body,
+almost, indeed, with the ardor of one possessed by a sort of mania.
+The Artists' Corps took up part of his time; Jenkins another part; he
+practised rifle shooting as diligently almost as if he expected to have
+to take his place almost immediately in the field; he began to learn
+fencing. Rosamund saw very little of him, but she made no comment. He
+explained to her what he was doing.
+
+"You see, Rose," he said to her once, "if it's a boy it will be my job
+eventually to train him up to be first-class in the distinctively
+man's part of life. No woman can ever do that. I mustn't let myself get
+slack."
+
+"You never would, I'm sure."
+
+"I hope not. Still, lots of business men do. And I'm sitting about
+three-quarters of my time. One does get soft, and the softer a chap gets
+the less inclined he is to make the effort required of him, if he wants
+to get hard. If I ever am to be the father of a growing-up son--when
+they get to about sixteen, you know, they get awfully critical about
+games and athletics, sport, everything of that kind--I should like to
+be able to keep my end up thoroughly well with him. He'd respect me far
+more then. I know exactly the type of fellow real boys look up to. It
+isn't the intelligent softy, however brainy he may be; it's the man who
+can do all the ordinary things superlatively well."
+
+She smiled at him with her now curiously tranquil yellow-brown eyes, and
+he thought he saw in them approval.
+
+"I think few men would prepare as you do," she said.
+
+"And how many women would prepare as you do?" he returned.
+
+"I couldn't do anything else. But now I feel as if we were working
+together, in a way."
+
+He squeezed her hand. She let it lie motionless in his.
+
+"But if it weren't a boy?" he said, struck by a sudden reaction of
+doubt.
+
+And the thought went, like an arrow, through him:
+
+"What chance should I have then?"
+
+"I know it will be a boy," she answered.
+
+"Why? Not because you sleep north and south!" he exclaimed, with a
+laughing allusion to the assertion of Herrick.
+
+"I don't."
+
+"I always thought the bed----"
+
+"No, it's east and west."
+
+"Fishermen say the dead sleep east and west."
+
+"Are you superstitious?"
+
+"I don't know. Perhaps, where you are concerned."
+
+"Don't be. Superstition seems to me the opposite of belief. Just wait,
+and remember, I _know_ it will be a boy."
+
+One evening Dion went to Great Cumberland Place to dine with Bruce
+Evelin and Beatrice, leaving Rosamund apparently in her usual health.
+She was going to have "something on a tray" in her sitting-room, and he
+went in there to say good-by to her just before he started. He found
+her sitting by the fire, and looking at Hermes and the Child with steady
+eyes. They were lit up rather faintly by a couple of wax candles placed
+on the writing-table. The light from these candles and from the fire
+made a delicate and soothing radiance in the room, which was plainly
+furnished, and almost somber in color. A very dim and cloudy purple-blue
+pervaded it, a very beautiful hue, but austere, and somehow suggestive
+of things ecclesiastical. On a small, black oak table at Rosamund's
+elbow two or three books were lying beside a bowl of dim blue glass
+which had opalescent lights in it. This bowl was nearly full of water
+upon which a water-lily floated. The fire on the hearth was small,
+but glowing with red and gold. Dark curtains were drawn across the one
+window which looked out at the back of the house. It was a frosty night
+and windless.
+
+Dion stood still for a moment on the threshold of the room after he had
+opened the door.
+
+"How quiet you are in here!" he said.
+
+"This little room is always quiet."
+
+"Yes, but to-night it's like a room to which some one has just said
+'Hush!'"
+
+He came in and shut the door quietly behind him.
+
+"I've just a minute."
+
+He came up to the fire.
+
+"And so you were looking at him, our Messenger with winged sandals. Oh,
+Rosamund, how wonderful it was at Olympia! I wonder whether you and I
+shall ever see the Hermes together again. I suppose all the chances are
+against it."
+
+"I hope we shall."
+
+"Do you? And yet--I don't know. It would be terrible to see him together
+again--if things were much altered; if, for instance, one was less happy
+and remembered----"
+
+He broke off, came to the settee at right angles to the fire on which
+she was sitting, and sat down beside her. At this moment--he did not
+know why--the great and always growing love he had for her seemed
+to surge forward abruptly like a tidal wave, and he was conscious of
+sadness and almost of fear. He looked at Rosamund as if he were just
+going to part from her, anxiously, and with a sort of greed of detail.
+
+"Alone I would never go back to Elis," he said. "Never. What a power
+things have if they are connected in our hearts with people. It's--it's
+awful."
+
+A clock chimed faintly.
+
+"I must go."
+
+He got up and stood for a moment looking down at the dear head loved so
+much, at her brow.
+
+"I don't know why it is," he said, "but this evening I hate leaving
+you."
+
+"But it's only for a little while."
+
+There was a tap at the door.
+
+"Ah! here's my tray."
+
+The maid came in carrying a woman's meal, and Dion's strange moment was
+over.
+
+When he got to Great Cumberland Place, Daventry, who was to make a
+fourth, had just arrived, and was taking off his coat in the hall. He
+looked unusually excited, alert in an almost feverish way, which was
+surprising in him.
+
+"I'm in a case," he said, "a quite big case. Bruce Evelin's got it for
+me. I'm going to be junior to Addington; Lewis & Lewis instruct me. What
+d'you think of that?"
+
+Dion clapped him on the shoulder.
+
+"The way of salvation!"
+
+"Where will it lead me?"
+
+"To Salvation, of course."
+
+"I'll walk home with you to-night, old Dion. I must yap across the Park
+with you to Hyde Park Corner, and tell you all about the woman from
+Constantinople."
+
+They were going upstairs.
+
+"The woman----?"
+
+"My client, my client. My dear boy, this is no ordinary case"--he waved
+a small hand ceremoniously--"it's a _cause celebre_ or I shouldn't have
+bothered myself with it."
+
+Lurby opened the drawing-room door.
+
+"How's Rosamund?" was Beatrice's first question to Dion, as they shook
+hands.
+
+"All right. I left her just going to feed from a tray in her little
+room."
+
+"Rosamund always loved having a meal on a tray," said Bruce Evelin.
+"She's a big child still. But enthusiasts never really grow up, luckily
+for them."
+
+"Dinner is served, sir."
+
+"Daventry, will you take Beatrice?"
+
+As Dion followed with Bruce Evelin, he said:
+
+"So you've got Daventry a case!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Bruce Evelin lowered his voice.
+
+"He's a good fellow and a clever fellow, but he's got to work. He's been
+slacking for years."
+
+Dion understood. Bruce Evelin wished Beatrice to marry Daventry.
+
+"He respects you tremendously, sir. If any one can make him work, you
+can."
+
+"I'm going to," returned Bruce Evelin, with his quiet force. "He's got
+remarkable ability, and the slacker--well----"
+
+He looked at Dion with his dark, informed eyes, in which knowledge of
+the world and of men always seemed sitting.
+
+"I can bear with bad energy almost more easily and comfortably than with
+slackness."
+
+During dinner, without seeming to, Dion observed and considered Beatrice
+and Daventry, imagining them wife and husband. He felt sure Daventry
+would be very happy. As to Beatrice, he could not tell. There was
+always in Beatrice's atmosphere, or nearly always, a faint suggestion
+of sadness which, curiously, was not disagreeable but attractive. Dion
+doubted whether Daventry could banish it. Perhaps no one could, and
+Daventry had, perhaps, that love which does not wish to alter, which
+says, "I love you with your little sadness--keep it."
+
+Daventry was exceptionally animated at dinner. The prospect of actually
+appearing in court as counsel in a case had evidently worked upon him
+like a powerful tonic. Always able to be amusing when he chose,
+he displayed to-night a new something--was it a hint of personal
+dignity?--which Dion had not hitherto found in him. "Dear old Daventry,"
+the agreeable, and obviously clever, nobody, who was a sure critic of
+others, and never did anything himself, who blinked at moments with a
+certain feebleness, and was too fond of the cozy fireside, or the deep
+arm-chairs of his club, had evidently caught hold of the flying skirts
+of his self-respect, and was thoroughly enjoying his capture. He did
+not talk very much to Beatrice, but it was obvious that he was at every
+moment enjoying her presence, her attention; when she listened earnestly
+he caught her earnestness and it seemed to help him; when she laughed,
+in her characteristic delicate way,--her laugh seemed almost wholly of
+the mind,--he beamed with a joy that was touching in a man of his type
+because it was so unself-conscious. His affection for Beatrice had
+performed the miracle of drawing him out of the prison of awareness in
+which such men as he dwell. To-night he was actually unobservant. Dion
+knew this by the changed expression of his eyes. Even Beatrice he was
+not observing; he was just feeling what she was, how she was. For once
+he had passed beyond the narrow portals and had left satire far behind
+him.
+
+When Beatrice got up to go to the drawing-room he opened the door for
+her. She blushed faintly as she went out. When the door was shut, and
+the three men were alone, Bruce Evelin said to Dion:
+
+"Will you mind if Daventry and I talk a little shop to-night?"
+
+"Of course not. But would you rather I went up and kept Beattie
+company?"
+
+"No; stay till you're bored, or till you think Beatrice is bored. Let us
+light up."
+
+He walked slowly, with his gently precise gait, to a cigar cabinet,
+opened it, and told the young men to help themselves.
+
+"And now for the Clarke case," he said.
+
+"Is that the name of the woman from Constantinople?" asked Dion.
+
+"Yes, Mrs. Beadon Clarke," said Daventry. "But she hates the Beadon and
+never uses it. Beadon Clarke's trying to divorce her, and I'm on her
+side. She's staying with Mrs. Chetwinde. Esme Darlington, who's an old
+friend of hers, thinks her too unconventional for a diplomatist's wife."
+
+Bruce Evelin had lighted his cigar.
+
+"We mustn't forget that our friend Darlington has always run tame rather
+than wild," he remarked, with a touch of dry satire. "And now, Daventry,
+let us go through the main facts of the case, without, of course,
+telling any professional secrets."
+
+And he began to outline the Clarke case, which subsequently made a great
+sensation in London.
+
+It appeared that Mrs. Clarke had come first to him in her difficulty,
+and had tried hard to persuade him to emerge from his retirement and to
+lead for her defense. He had been determined in refusal, and had advised
+her to get Sir John Addington, with Daventry as junior. This she had
+done. Now Bruce Evelin was carefully "putting up" Daventry to every move
+in the great game which was soon to be played out, a game in which a
+woman's honor and future were at stake. The custody of a much-loved
+child might also come into question.
+
+"Suppose Addington is suddenly stricken with paralysis in the middle of
+the case, you must be ready to carry it through triumphantly alone," he
+observed, with quietly twinkling eyes, to Daventry.
+
+"May I have a glass of your oldest brandy, sir?" returned Daventry,
+holding on to the dinner-table with both hands.
+
+The brandy was given to him and the discussion of the case continued. By
+degrees Dion found himself becoming strongly interested in Mrs. Clarke,
+whose name came up constantly. She was evidently a talented and a very
+unusual woman. Perhaps the latter fact partially accounted for the
+unusual difficulties in which she was now involved. Her husband,
+Councilor to the British Embassy at Constantinople, charged her with
+misconduct, and had cited two co-respondents,--Hadi Bey, a Turkish
+officer, and Aristide Dumeny, a French diplomat,--both apparently men
+of intellect and of highly cultivated tastes, and both slightly younger
+than Mrs. Clarke. A curious fact in the case was that Beadon Clarke was
+deeply in love with his wife, and had--so Dion gathered from a remark of
+Bruce Evelin's--probably been induced to take action against her by
+his mother, Lady Ermyntrude Clarke, who evidently disliked, and perhaps
+honestly disbelieved in, her daughter-in-law. There was one child of
+the marriage, a boy, to whom both the parents were deeply attached. The
+elements of tragedy in the drama were accentuated by the power to love
+possessed by accuser and accused. As Dion listened to the discussion
+he realized what a driving terror, what a great black figure, almost
+monstrous, love can be--not only the sunshine, but the abysmal darkness
+of life.
+
+Presently, in a pause, while Daventry was considering some difficult
+point, Dion remembered that Beatrice was sitting upstairs alone. Her
+complete unselfishness always made him feel specially chivalrous towards
+her. Now he got up.
+
+"It's tremendously interesting, but I'm going upstairs to Beattie," he
+said.
+
+"Ah, how subtle of you, my boy!" said Bruce Evelin.
+
+"Subtle! Why?"
+
+"I was just coming to the professional secrets."
+
+Dion smiled and went off to Beattie. He found her working quietly,
+almost dreamily, on one of those fairy garments such as he had seen
+growing towards its minute full size in the serene hands of his
+Rosamund.
+
+"You too!" he said, looking down at the filmy white. "How good you are
+to us, Beattie!"
+
+He sat down.
+
+"What's this in your lap?"
+
+The filmy white had been lifted in the process of sewing, and a little
+exquisitely bound white book was disclosed beneath it.
+
+"May I look?"
+
+"Yes, do."
+
+Dion took the book up, and read the title, "The Kasidah of Haji Abdu
+El-Yezdi."
+
+"I never heard of this. Where did you get it?"
+
+"Guy Daventry left it here by mistake yesterday. I must give it to him
+to-night."
+
+Dion opened the book, and saw on the title page: "Cynthia Clarke,
+Constantinople, October 1896," written in a curiously powerful, very
+upright caligraphy.
+
+"It doesn't belong to Guy."
+
+"No; it was lent to him by his client, Mrs. Clarke."
+
+Dion turned some of the leaves of the book, began to read and was
+immediately absorbed.
+
+"By Jove, it's wonderful, it's simply splendid!" he said in a moment.
+"Just listen to this:
+
+     "True to thy nature, to thyself,
+         Fame and disfame nor hope, nor fear;
+     Enough to thee the still small voice
+         Aye thundering in thine inner ear.
+
+     From self-approval seek applause:
+         What ken not men thou kennest thou!
+     Spurn every idol others raise:
+         Before thine own ideal bow."
+
+He met the dark eyes of Beatrice.
+
+"You care for that?"
+
+"Yes, very much," she answered, in her soft and delicate voice.
+
+"Beattie, I believe you live by that," he said, almost bruskly.
+
+Suddenly he felt aware of a peculiar sort of strength in her, in her
+softness, a strength not at all as of iron, mysterious and tenacious.
+
+"Dear old Beattie!" he said.
+
+Moisture had sprung into his eyes.
+
+"How lonely our lives are," he continued, looking at her now with a sort
+of deep curiosity. "The lives of all of us. I don't care who it is, man,
+woman, child, he or she, every one's lonely. And yet----"
+
+A doubt had surely struck him. He sat very still for a minute.
+
+"When I think of Rosamund I can't think of her as lonely."
+
+"Can't you?"
+
+"No. Somehow it seems as if she always had a companion with her."
+
+He turned a few more pages of Mrs. Clarke's book, glancing here and
+there.
+
+"Rosamund would hate this book," he said presently. "It seems thoroughly
+anti-Christian. But it's very wonderful."
+
+He put the book down.
+
+"Dear Beattie! Guy cares very much for you."
+
+"Yes, I know," said Beatrice, with a great simplicity.
+
+"If he comes well out of this case, and feels he's on the road to
+success, he'll be another man. He'll dare as a man ought to dare."
+
+She went on sewing the little garment for Dion's child.
+
+"I'll walk across the Park with you, old Dion," said Daventry that
+night, as they left the house in Great Cumberland Place, "whether you're
+going to walk home or whether you're not, whether you're in a devil of
+a hurry to get back to your Rosamund, or whether you're in a mood for
+friendship. What time is it, by the way?"
+
+He was wrapped in a voluminous blue overcoat, with a wide collar,
+immense lapels, and apparently only one button, and that button so
+minute that it was scarcely visible to the naked eye. From somewhere he
+extracted a small, abnormally thin watch with a gold face.
+
+"Only twenty minutes to eleven. We dined early."
+
+"You really wish to walk?"
+
+"I not only wish to walk, I will walk."
+
+The still glory of frost had surely fascinated London, had subdued the
+rumbling and uneasy black monster; it seemed to Dion unusually quiet,
+almost like something in ecstasy under the glittering stars of frost,
+which shone in a sky swept clear of clouds by the hand of the lingering
+winter. It was the last night of February, but it looked, and felt, like
+a night dedicated to the Christ Child, to Him who lay on the breast of
+Mary with cattle breathing above Him. As Dion gazed up at the withdrawn
+and yet almost piercing radiance of the wonderful sky, instinctively he
+thought of the watching shepherds, and of the coming of that Child who
+stands forever apart from all the other children born of women into this
+world. He wished Rosamund were with him to see the stars, and the frost
+glistening white on the great stretches of grass, and the naked trees in
+the mysterious and romantic Park.
+
+"Shall we take the right-hand path and walk round the Serpentine?" said
+Daventry presently.
+
+"Yes. I don't mind. Rosamund will be asleep, I think. She goes to bed
+early now."
+
+"When will it be?"
+
+"Very soon, I suppose; perhaps in ten days or so."
+
+Daventry was silent. He wanted and meant to talk about his own affairs,
+but he hesitated to begin. Something in the night was making him feel
+very small and very great. Dion gave him a lead by saying:
+
+"D'you mind my asking you something about the Clarke case?"
+
+"Anything you like. I'll answer if I may."
+
+"Do you believe Mrs. Clarke to be guilty or innocent?"
+
+"Oh, innocent!" exclaimed Daventry, with unusual warmth.
+
+"And does Bruce Evelin?"
+
+"I believe so. I assume so."
+
+"I noticed that, while I was listening to you both, he never expressed
+any opinion, or gave any hint of what his opinion was on the point."
+
+"I feel sure he thinks her innocent," said Daventry, still almost with
+heat. "Not that it much matters," he added, in a less prejudiced voice.
+"The point is, we must prove her to be innocent whether she is nor not.
+I happen to feel positive she is. She isn't the least the siren type of
+woman, though men like her."
+
+"What type is she?"
+
+"The intellectual type. Not a blue-stocking! God forbid! I couldn't
+defend a blue-stocking. But she's a woman full of taste, who cares
+immensely for fine and beautiful things, for things that appeal to the
+eye and the mind. In that way, perhaps, she's almost a sensualist.
+But, in any other way! I want you to know her. She's a very interesting
+woman. Esme Darlington says her perceptions are exquisite. Mrs.
+Chetwinde's backing her up for all she's worth."
+
+"Then she believes her to be innocent too, of course."
+
+"Of course. Come with me to Mrs. Chetwinde's next Sunday afternoon.
+She'll be there."
+
+"On a night like this, doesn't a divorce case seem preposterous?"
+
+"Well, you have the tongue of the flatterer!"--he looked up--"But
+perhaps it does, even when it's Mrs. Clarke's."
+
+"Are you in love with Mrs. Clarke?"
+
+"Deeply, because she's my first client in a _cause celebre_."
+
+"Have you forgotten her book again?"
+
+"Her book? 'The Kasidah'? I've got it here."
+
+He tapped the capacious side pocket of his coat.
+
+"You saw it then?" he added.
+
+"Beattie had it when I went upstairs."
+
+"I wonder what she made of it," Daventry said, with softness in his
+voice. "Don't ever let Rosamund see it, by the way. It's anything
+rather than Christian. Mrs. Clarke gets hold of everything, dives into
+everything. She's got an unresting mind."
+
+They had come to the edge of the Serpentine, on which there lay an
+ethereal film of baby ice almost like frosted gauze. The leafless trees,
+with their decoration of filigree, suggested the North and its peculiar
+romance--nature trailing away into the mighty white solitudes where the
+Pole star reigns over fields of ice.
+
+"Hyde Park is bringing me illusions to-night," said Daventry. "That
+water might be the Vistula. If I heard a wolf howling over there near
+the ranger's lodge, I shouldn't be surprised."
+
+A lifeguardsman, in a red cloak, and a woman drifted away over the frost
+among the trees.
+
+"I love Mrs. Clarke as a client, but perhaps I love her even more
+because, through her, I hope to get hold of something I've--I've let
+drop," continued Daventry.
+
+"What's that?"
+
+Daventry put his arm through Dion's.
+
+"I don't know whether I can name it even to you; but it's something a
+man of great intelligence, such as myself, should always keep in his
+fist."
+
+He paused.
+
+"The clergy are apt to call it self-respect," he at length added, in a
+dry voice.
+
+Dion pressed his arm.
+
+"Bruce Evelin wants you to marry Beatrice."
+
+"He hasn't told you so?"
+
+"No, except by taking the trouble to force you to work."
+
+Daventry stood still.
+
+"I'm going to ask her--almost directly."
+
+"Come on, Guy, or we shall have all the blackbirds round us. Look over
+there."
+
+Not far off, among the trees, two slinking and sinister shadows of men
+seemed to be intent upon them.
+
+"Isn't it incredible to practise the profession of a blackmailer out of
+doors on a night like this?" said Dion. "D'you remember when we were in
+the night train coming from Burstal? You had a feather that night."
+
+"Damn it! Why rake up--?"
+
+"And I said how wonderful it would be if some day I were married to
+Rosamund."
+
+"Is it wonderful?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Very wonderful?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Children too!"
+
+Daventry sighed.
+
+"One wants to be worthy of it all," he murmured. "And then"--he laughed,
+as if calling in his humor to save him from something--"the children, in
+their turn, feel they would like to live up to papa. Dion, people can be
+caught in the net of goodness very much as they can be caught in the net
+of evil. Let us praise the stars for that."
+
+They arrived at the bridge. The wide road, which looked to-night
+extraordinarily clean, almost as if it had been polished up for the
+passing of some delicate procession in the night, was empty. There were
+no vehicles going by; the night-birds kept among the trees. The quarter
+after eleven chimed from some distant church. Dion thought of Rosamund,
+as he paused on the bridge, thought of himself as a husband yielding his
+wife up to the solitude she evidently desired. He took Daventry for his
+companion; she had the child for hers. There was suffering of a kind
+even in a very perfect marriage, but what he had told Daventry was true;
+it had been very wonderful. He had learnt a great deal in his marriage,
+dear lessons of high-mindedness in desire, of purity in possession.
+If Rosamund were to be cut off from him even to-night he had gained
+enormously by the possession of her. He knew what woman can be, and
+without disappointment; for he did not choose to reckon up those small,
+almost impalpable things which, like passing shadows, had now and
+then brought a faint obscurity into his life with Rosamund, as
+disappointments. They came, perhaps, from himself. And what where they?
+He looked out over the long stretch of unruffled water, filmed over with
+ice near the shores, and saw a tiny dark object traveling through it
+with self-possession and an air of purpose beneath the constellations;
+some aquatic bird up to something, heedless of the approaching midnight
+and the Great Bear.
+
+"Look at that little beggar!" said Daventry. "And we don't know so very
+much more about it all than he does. I expect he's a Muscovy duck, or
+drake, if you're a pedant about genders."
+
+"He's evidently full of purpose."
+
+"Out in the middle of the ice-cold Serpentine. He's only a speck now,
+like our world in space. Now I can't see him."
+
+"I can."
+
+"You're longer-sighted than I am. But, Dion, I'm seeing a longish way
+to-night, farther than I've seen before. Love's a great business,
+the greatest business in life. Ambition, and greed, and vanity, and
+altruism, and even fanaticism, must give place when it's on hand, when
+it harnesses its winged horses to a man's car and swings him away to the
+stars."
+
+"Ask her. I think she'll have you."
+
+A star fell through the frosty clear sky. Dion remembered the falling
+star above Drouva. This time he was swift with a wish, but it was not a
+wish for his friend.
+
+They reached Hyde Park Corner just before midnight and parted there.
+Dion hailed a hansom, but Daventry declared with determination that he
+was going to walk all the way home to Phillimore Gardens.
+
+"To get up my case, to arrange things mentally," he explained. "Big
+brains always work best at night. All the great lawyers toil when
+the stars are out. Why should I be an exception? I dedicate myself to
+Cynthia Clarke. She will have my undivided attention and all my deepest
+solicitude."
+
+"I know why."
+
+"No, no."
+
+He put one hand on the apron which Dion had already closed.
+
+"No, really, you're wrong. I am deeply interested in Mrs. Clarke because
+she is what she is. I want her to win because I'm convinced she's
+innocent. Will you come to Mrs. Chetwinde's next Sunday and meet her?"
+
+"Yes, unless Rosamund wants me."
+
+"That's always understood."
+
+The cab drove away, and the great lawyer was left to think of his case
+under the stars.
+
+When the cab turned the corner of Great Market Street, Westminster, and
+came into Little Market Street, Dion saw in the distance before him two
+large, staring yellow eyes, which seemed to be steadily regarding
+him like the eyes of something on the watch. They were the lamps of a
+brougham drawn up in front of No. 5. Dion's cabman, perforce, pulled up
+short before the brown door of No. 4.
+
+"A carriage in front of my house at this time of night!" thought Dion,
+as he got out and paid the man.
+
+He looked at the coachman and at the solemn brown horse between the
+shafts, and instantly realized that this was the carriage of a doctor.
+
+"Rosamund!"
+
+With a thrill of anxiety, a clutch at his heart, he thrust his latchkey
+into the door. It stuck; he could not turn it. This had never happened
+before. He tried, with force, to pull the key out. It would not move.
+He shook it. The doctor's coachman, he felt, was staring at him from
+the box of the brougham. As he struggled impotently with the key his
+shoulders began to tingle, and a wave of acute irritation flooded him.
+He turned sharply round and met the coachman's eyes, shrewd, observant,
+lit, he thought, by a flickering of sarcasm.
+
+"Has the doctor been here long?" said Dion.
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"This is a doctor's carriage, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, sir. Doctor Mayson."
+
+"Well, I say, has he been here long?"
+
+"About an hour, sir, or a little more."
+
+"Thanks."
+
+Dion turned again and assaulted the latchkey.
+
+But he had to ring the bell to get in. When the maid came, looking
+excited, he said:
+
+"I don't know what on earth's the matter with this key. I can't either
+turn it or get it out."
+
+"No, sir?"
+
+The girl put her hand to the key, and without any difficulty drew it out
+of the door.
+
+"I don't know--I couldn't!"
+
+The girl shut the door.
+
+"What's the matter? Why's the doctor here? It isn't----?"
+
+"Yes, sir," said the girl, with a sort of intensely feminine
+significance. "It came on quite sudden."
+
+"How long ago?"
+
+"A good while, sir. I couldn't say exactly."
+
+"But why wasn't I sent for?"
+
+"My mistress wouldn't have you sent for, sir. Besides, we were expecting
+you every moment."
+
+"Ah! and I--and now it's past midnight."
+
+He had quickly taken off his coat, hat and gloves. Now he ran up the
+shallow steps of the staircase. There was a sort of tumult within him.
+He felt angry, he did not know why. His whole body was longing to do
+something strong, eager, even violent. He hated his latchkey, he hated
+the long stroll in Hyde Park, the absurd delay upon the bridge, his
+preoccupation with the Muscovy duck, or whatever bird it was, voyaging
+over the Serpentine. Why had nothing told him not to lose a moment but
+to hurry home? He remembered that he had been specially reluctant to
+leave Rosamund that evening, that he had even said to her, "I don't know
+why it is, but this evening I hate to leave you." Perhaps, then, he had
+been warned, but he had not comprehended the warning. As he had looked
+at the stars he had thought of the coming of the most wonderful Child
+who had ever visited this earth. Perhaps then, too----He tried to
+snap off his thought, half confusedly accusing himself of some sort of
+blasphemy. At the top of the staircase he turned and looked down into
+the hall.
+
+"The nurse?"
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"Have you managed to get the nurse?"
+
+"Yes, sir; she's been here some time."
+
+At this moment Doctor Mayson opened the door of Rosamund's room and came
+out upon the landing--a tall, rosy and rather intellectual-looking
+man, with tranquil gray eyes, and hair thinning above the high knobby
+forehead. Dion had never seen him before. They shook hands.
+
+"I shouldn't go into your wife's room," said Doctor Mayson in a low bass
+voice.
+
+"Why? Doesn't she wish it?"
+
+"She wished you very much to be in the house."
+
+"Then why not send for me?"
+
+"She was against it, I understand. And she doesn't wish any one to be
+with her just now except the nurse and myself."
+
+"When do you expect? . . ."
+
+"Some time during the night. It's evidently going to be an easy
+confinement. I'm just going down to send away my carriage. It's no use
+keeping the horse standing half the night in this frost. I'm very fond
+of horses."
+
+"Fond of horses--are you?" said Dion, rather vacantly.
+
+"Yes. Are you?"
+
+The low bass voice almost snapped out the question.
+
+"Oh, I dare say. Why not? They're useful animals. I'll come down with
+you if I'm not to go into my wife's room."
+
+He followed the doctor down the stairs he had just mounted. When the
+carriage had been sent away, he asked Doctor Mayson to come into his den
+for a moment. The pains of labor had come on unexpectedly, but were not
+exceptionally severe; everything pointed to an easy confinement.
+
+"Your wife is one of the strongest and healthiest women I have ever
+attended," Doctor Mayson added; "superb health. It's a pleasure to see
+any one like that. I look after so many neurotic women in London. They
+give themselves up for lost when they are confronted with a perfectly
+natural crisis. Mrs. Leith is all courage and self-possession."
+
+"But then why shouldn't I see her?"
+
+"Well, she seems to have an extraordinary sense of duty towards the
+child that's coming. She thinks you might be less calm than she is."
+
+"But I'm perfectly calm."
+
+Doctor Mayson smiled.
+
+"D'you know, it's really ever so much better for us men to keep right
+out of the way in such moments as these. It's the kindest thing we can
+do."
+
+"Very well. I'll do it of course."
+
+"I never go near my own wife when she's like this."
+
+Dion stared into the fire.
+
+"Have you many children?"
+
+"Eleven," remarked the bass voice comfortably. "But I married very
+young, before I left Guy's. Now I'll go up again. You needn't be the
+least alarmed."
+
+"I'm not," said Dion bruskly.
+
+"Capital!"
+
+And Doctor Mayson went off, not treading with any precaution. It was
+quite obvious that his belief in his patient was genuine.
+
+Eleven children! Well, some people were prepared to take any risks and
+to face any responsibilities. Was it very absurd to find in the coming
+of one child a tremendous event? Really, Doctor Mayson had almost
+succeeded in making Dion feel a great fool. Just another child in the
+world--crying, dribbling, feebly trying to grasp the atmosphere; another
+child to cut its first tooth, with shrieks, to have whooping-cough,
+chicken-pox, rose rash and measles; another child to eat of the fruit of
+the tree; another child to combat and love and suffer and die. No,
+damn it, the matter was important. Doctor Mayson and his rosy face were
+unmeaning. He might have eleven, or a hundred and eleven children, but
+he had no imagination.
+
+Dion shut himself into his room, sat down in a big armchair, lit his
+pipe and thought about the Clarke case. He had just told Doctor Mayson
+a white lie. He was determined not to think about his Rosamund: he dared
+not do that; so his mind fastened on the Clarke case. Almost ferociously
+he flung himself upon it, called upon the unknown Mrs. Clarke, the woman
+whom he had never seen to banish from him his Rosamund, to interpose
+between her and him. For Rosamund was inevitably suffering, and if he
+thought about that suffering his deep anxiety, his pity, his yearning
+would grow till they were almost unendurable, might even lead his feet
+to the room upstairs, the room forbidden to him to-night. So he called
+to Mrs. Clarke, and at last, obedient to his insistent demand, she came
+and did her best for him, came, he imagined, from Constantinople, to
+keep him company in this night of crisis.
+
+As Daventry had described her, as Bruce Evelin had, with casual
+allusions and suggestive hints, built her up before Dion in the talk
+after dinner that night, so she was now in the little room: a woman
+of intellect and of great taste, with an intense love for, and fine
+knowledge of, beautiful things: a woman who was almost a sensualist in
+her adoration for fine and rare things.
+
+"I detest the sensation of sinking down in things!"
+
+Who had said that once with energy in Dion's hearing? Oh--Rosamund, of
+course! But she must not be admitted into Dion's life in these hours of
+waiting. Mrs. Clarke must be allowed to reign. She had come (in Dion's
+imagination) all the way from the city of wood and of marble beside the
+seaway of the Golden Horn, a serious, intellectual and highly cultivated
+woman, whom a cruel fate--Kismet--was now about to present to the world
+as a horrible woman. Pale, thin, rather melancholy she was, a reader of
+many books, a great lover of nature, a woman who cared very much for
+her one child. Why should Fate play such a woman such a trick? Perhaps
+because she was very unconventional, and it is unwise for the bird which
+sings in the cage of diplomacy to sing any but an ordinary song.
+
+Daventry had dwelt several times on Mrs. Clarke's unconventionality;
+evidently the defense meant to lay stress on it.
+
+So now Dion sat with a pale, thin, unconventional woman, and she told
+him about the life at Stamboul. She knew, of course, that he had hated
+Constantinople. He allowed her to know that. And she pointed out to him
+that he knew nothing of the wonderful city, upon which Russia breathes
+from the north, and which catches, too, strange airs and scents and
+murmurs of voices from distant places of Asia. What does the passing
+tourist of a Pera hotel know about the great city of the Turks? Nothing
+worth knowing. The roar of the voices of the Levant deafens his ears;
+the glitter of the shop windows in the Grande Rue blinds his eyes. He
+knows not the exquisite and melancholy charm, full of nuances and of the
+most fragile and evanescent subtleties, which Constantinople holds for
+those who know her and love her well.
+
+The defense was evidently going to make much of Mrs. Clarke's passion
+for the city on the Bosporus. Daventry had alluded to it more than once,
+and Bruce Evelin had said, "Mrs. Clarke has always had an extraordinary
+feeling for places. If her husband had accused her of a liaison with
+Eyub, or of an unholy fancy for the forest of Belgrad, we might have
+been in a serious difficulty. She had, I know, a regular romance once
+with the Mosquee Verte at Brusa."
+
+Evidently she was a woman whom ordinary people would be likely to
+misunderstand. Dion sat in his arm-chair trying to understand her. The
+effort would help him to forget, or to ignore if he couldn't forget,
+what was going on upstairs in the little house. He pulled hard at his
+pipe, as an aid to his mind; he sat alone for a long while with Mrs.
+Clarke. Sometimes he looked across the Golden Horn from a bit of waste
+ground in Pera, near to a small cemetery: it was from there, towards
+evening, that he had been able to "feel" Stamboul, to feel it as an
+unique garden city, held by the sea, wooden and frail, marble and
+enduring. And somewhere in the great and mysterious city Mrs. Clarke had
+lived and been adored by the husband who, apparently still adoring, was
+now trying to get rid of her.
+
+Sometimes Dion heard voices rising from the crowded harbor of the Golden
+Horn. They crept up out of the mystery of the evening; voices from the
+caiques, and from the boats of the fishermen, and from the big sailing
+vessels which ply to the harbors of the East, and from the steamers at
+rest near the Galata Bridge, and from the many craft of all descriptions
+strung out towards the cypress-crowned hill of Eyub. And Mrs. Clarke,
+standing beside him, began to explain to him in a low and hoarse voice
+what these strange cries of the evening meant.
+
+Daventry had mentioned that she had a hoarse voice.
+
+At a little after three o'clock Dion sat forward abruptly in his chair
+and listened intently. He fancied he had heard a faint cry. He waited,
+surrounded by silence, enveloped by silence. There was a low drumming
+in his ears. Mrs. Clarke had escaped like a phantom. Stamboul, with its
+mosques, its fountains, its pigeons and its plane trees, had faded away.
+The voices from the Golden Horn were stilled. The drumming in Dion's
+ears grew louder. He stood up. He felt very hot, and a vein in his left
+temple was beating--not fluttering, but beating hard.
+
+He heard, this time really heard, a cry overhead, and then the muffled
+sound of some one moving about; and he went to the door, opened it and
+passed out into the hall. He did not go upstairs, but waited in the
+hall until Doctor Mayson came down, looking as rosy and serene and
+unconcerned as ever.
+
+"Well, Mr. Leith," he said, "you're a father. I congratulate you. You
+wife has got through beautifully."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"By the way, it's a boy."
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+Doctor Mayson looked genuinely surprised.
+
+"Why 'of course'? I don't quite understand."
+
+"She knew it was going to be a boy."
+
+The doctor smiled faintly.
+
+"Women often have strange fancies at such times. I mean before they are
+confined."
+
+"But you see she was right. It is a boy."
+
+"Exactly," returned the doctor, looking at his nails.
+
+Dion saw the star falling above the hill of Drouva.
+
+Did the Hermes know?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+On the following Sunday afternoon Dion was able to fulfil his promise
+to Daventry. Rosamund and the baby were "doing beautifully"; he was not
+needed at home, so he set out with Daventry, who came to fetch him, to
+visit Mrs. Willie Chetwinde in Lowndes Square.
+
+When they reached the house Daventry said:
+
+"Now for Mrs. Clarke. She's really a wonderful woman, Dion, and she's
+got a delicious profile."
+
+"Oh, it's that--"
+
+"No, it isn't."
+
+He gently pushed Mrs. Chetwinde's bell.
+
+As they went upstairs they heard a soft hum of voices.
+
+"Mrs. Clarke's got heaps of people on her side," whispered Daventry.
+"This is a sort of rallying ground for the defense."
+
+"Where's her child? Here?"
+
+"No, with some relations till the trial's over."
+
+The butler opened the door, and immediately Dion's eyes rested on
+Mrs. Clarke, who happened to be standing very near to it with Esme
+Darlington. Directly Dion saw her he knew at whom he was looking.
+Something--he could not have said what--told him.
+
+By a tall pedestal of marble, on which was poised a marble statuette
+of Echo,--not that Echo who babbled to Hera, but she who, after her
+punishment, fell in love with Narcissus,--he saw a very thin, very pale,
+and strangely haggard-looking woman of perhaps thirty-two talking to
+Esme Darlington. At first sight she did not seem beautiful to Dion.
+He was accustomed to the radiant physical bloom of his Rosamund. This
+woman, with her tenuity, her pallor, her haunted cheeks and temples, her
+large, distressed and observant eyes--dark hazel in color under brown
+eyebrows drawn with a precise straightness till they neared the bridge
+of the nose and there turning abruptly downwards, her thin and almost
+white-lipped mouth, her cloudy brown hair which had no shine or sparkle,
+her rather narrow and pointed chin, suggested to him unhealthiness, a
+human being perhaps stricken by some obscure disease which had drained
+her body of all fresh color, and robbed it of flesh, had caused to
+come upon her something strange, not easily to be defined, which almost
+suggested the charnel-house.
+
+As he was looking at her, Mrs. Clarke turned slightly and glanced up at
+the statue of Echo, and immediately Dion realized that she had beauty.
+The line of her profile was wonderfully delicate and refined, almost
+ethereal in its perfection; and the shape of her small head was
+exquisite. Her head, indeed, looked girlish. Afterwards he knew that she
+had enchanting hands--moving purities full of expressiveness--and slim
+little wrists. Her expression was serious, almost melancholy, and in her
+whole personality, shed through her, there was a penetrating refinement,
+a something delicate, wild and feverish. She looked very sensitive and
+at the same time perfectly self-possessed, as if, perhaps, she dreaded
+Fate but could never be afraid of a fellow-creature. He thought:
+
+"She's like Echo after her punishment."
+
+On his way to greet Mrs. Chetwinde, he passed by her; as he did so she
+looked at him, and he saw that she thoroughly considered him, with a
+grave swiftness which seemed to be an essential part of her personality.
+Then she spoke to Esme Darlington. Dion just caught the sound of her
+voice, veiled, husky, but very individual and very attractive--a voice
+that could never sing, but that could make of speech a music frail and
+evanescent as a nocturne of Debussy's.
+
+"Daventry's right," thought Dion. "That woman is surely innocent."
+
+Mrs. Chetwinde, who was as haphazard, as apparently absent-minded and as
+shrewd in her own house as in the houses of others, greeted Dion with a
+vague cordiality. Her husband, a robust and very definite giant, with a
+fan-shaped beard, welcomed him largely.
+
+"Never appear at my wife's afternoons, you know," he observed, in a fat
+and genial voice. "But to-day's exceptional. Always stick to an innocent
+woman in trouble."
+
+He lowered his voice in speaking the last sentence, and looked very
+human. And immediately Dion was aware of a special and peculiar
+atmosphere in Mrs. Chetwinde's drawing-room on this Sunday afternoon,
+of something poignant almost, though lightly veiled with the sparkling
+gossamer which serves to conceal undue angularities, something which
+just hinted at tragedy confronted with courage, at the attempted stab
+and the raised shield of affection. Here Mrs. Clarke was in sanctuary.
+He glanced towards her again with a deepening interest.
+
+"Canon Wilton's coming in presently," said Mrs. Chetwinde. "He's
+preaching at St. Paul's this afternoon, or perhaps it's Westminster
+Abbey--something of that kind."
+
+"I've heard him two or three times," answered Dion, who was on very
+good, though not on very intimate, terms with Canon Wilton. "I'd rather
+hear him than anybody."
+
+"In the pulpit--yes, I suppose so. I'm scarcely an amateur of sermons.
+He's a volcano of sincerity, and never sends out ashes. It's all red-hot
+lava. Have you met Cynthia Clarke?"
+
+"No."
+
+"She's over there, echoing my Echo. Would you like----?"
+
+"Very much indeed."
+
+"Then I'll--"
+
+An extremely pale man, with long, alarmingly straight hair and wandering
+eyes almost the color of silver, said something to her.
+
+"Watteau? Oh, no--he died in 1721, not in 1722," she replied. "The only
+date I can never remember is William the Conqueror. But of course you
+couldn't remember about Watteau. It's distance makes memory. You're too
+near."
+
+"That's the fan painter, Murphy-Elphinston, Watteau's reincarnation,"
+she added to Dion. "He's always asking questions about himself.
+Cynthia--this is Mr. Dion Leith. He wishes----" She drifted away, not,
+however, without dexterously managing to convey Mr. Darlington with her.
+
+Dion found himself looking into the large, distressed eyes of Mrs.
+Clarke. Daventry was standing close to her, but, with a glance at his
+friend, moved away.
+
+"I should like to sit down," said Mrs. Clarke.
+
+"Here are two chairs----"
+
+"No, I'd rather sit over there under the Della Robbia. I can see Echo
+from there."
+
+She walked very slowly and languidly, as if tired, to a large and low
+sofa covered with red, which was exactly opposite to the statuette.
+Dion followed her, thinking about her age. He supposed her to be about
+thirty-two or thirty-three, possibly a year or two more or less. She was
+very simply dressed in a gray silk gown with black and white lines in
+it. The tight sleeves of it were unusually long and ended in points.
+They were edged with some transparent white material which rested
+against her small hands.
+
+She sat down and he sat down by her, and they began to talk. Unlike Mrs.
+Chetwinde, Mrs. Clarke showed that she was alertly attending to all that
+was said to her, and, when she spoke, she looked at the person to whom
+she was speaking, looked steadily and very unself-consciously. Dion
+mentioned that he had once been to Constantinople.
+
+"Did you care about it?" said Mrs. Clarke, rather earnestly.
+
+"I'm afraid I disliked it, although I found it, of course, tremendously
+interesting. In fact, I almost hated it."
+
+"That's only because you stayed in Pera," she answered, "and went about
+with a guide."
+
+"But how do you know?"--he was smiling.
+
+"Well, of course you did."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I could easily make you love it," she continued, in an oddly impersonal
+way, speaking huskily.
+
+Dion had never liked huskiness before, but he liked it now.
+
+"You are fond of it, I believe?" he said.
+
+His eyes met hers with a great deal of interest.
+
+He considered her present situation an interesting one; there was drama
+in it; there was the prospect of a big fight, of great loss or great
+gain, destruction or vindication.
+
+In her soul already the drama was being played. He imagined her soul in
+turmoil, peopled with a crowd of jostling desires and fears, and he was
+thinking a great many things about her, and connected with her, almost
+simultaneously--so rapidly a flood of thoughts seemed to go by in the
+mind--as he put his question.
+
+"Yes, I am," replied Mrs. Clarke. "Stamboul holds me very fast in its
+curiously inert grip. It's a grip like this."
+
+She held out her small right hand, and he put his rather large and
+sinewy brown hand into it. The small hand folded itself upon his in a
+curious way--feeble and fierce at the same time, it seemed--and held
+him. The hand was warm, almost hot, and soft, and dry as a fire is
+dry--so dry that it hisses angrily if water is thrown on it.
+
+"Now, you are trying to get away," she said. "And of course you can,
+but----"
+
+Dion made a movement as if to pull away his hand, but Mrs. Clarke
+retained it. How was that? He scarcely knew; in fact he did not know.
+She did not seem to be doing anything definite to keep him, did not
+squeeze or grip his hand, or cling to it; but his hand remained in hers
+nevertheless.
+
+"There," she said, letting his hand go. "That is how Stamboul holds. Do
+you understand?"
+
+Mrs. Chetwinde's vague eyes had been on them during this little episode.
+Dion had had time to see that, and to think, "Now, at such a time, no
+one but an absolutely innocent woman would do in public what Mrs. Clarke
+is doing to me." Mrs. Chetwinde, he felt sure, full of all worldly
+knowledge, must be thinking the very same thing.
+
+"Yes," he said. "I think I do. But I wonder whether it could hold me
+like that."
+
+"I know it could."
+
+"May I ask how you know?"
+
+"Why not? Simply by my observation of you."
+
+Dion remembered the swift grave look of consideration she had given to
+him as he came into the room. Something almost combative rose up in him,
+and he entered into an argument with her, in the course of which he
+was carried away into the revelation of his mental comparison between
+Constantinople and Greece, a comparison into which entered a moral
+significance. He even spoke of the Christian significance of the
+Hermes of Olympia. Mrs. Clarke listened to him with a very still, and
+apparently a very deep, attention.
+
+"I've been to Greece," she said simply, when he had finished.
+
+"You didn't feel at all as I did, as I do?"
+
+"You may know Greece, but you don't know Stamboul," she said quietly.
+
+"If you had shown it to me I might feel very differently," Dion said,
+with a perhaps slightly banal politeness.
+
+And yet he did not feel entirely banal as he said it.
+
+"Come out again and I will show it to you," she said.
+
+She was almost staring at him, at his chest and shoulders, not at his
+face, but her eyes still kept their unself-conscious and almost oddly
+impersonal look.
+
+"You are going back there?"
+
+"Of course, when my case is over."
+
+Dion felt very much surprised. He knew that Mrs. Clarke's husband was
+accredited to the British Embassy at Constantinople; that the
+scandal about her was connected with that city and with its
+neighborhood--Therapia, Prinkipo, and other near places, that both the
+co-respondents named in the suit lived there. Whichever way the case
+went, surely Constantinople must be very disagreeable to Mrs. Clarke
+from now onwards. And yet she was going back there, and apparently
+intended to take up her life there again. She evidently either saw or
+divined his surprise, for she added in the husky voice:
+
+"Guilt may be governed by circumstances. I suppose it is full of alarms.
+But I think an innocent woman who allows herself to be driven out of a
+place she loves by a false accusation is merely a coward. But all this
+is very uninteresting to you. The point is, I shall soon be settled down
+again at Constantinople, and ready to make you see it as it really is,
+if you ever return there."
+
+She had spoken without hardness or any pugnacity; there was no defiance
+in her manner, which was perfectly simple and straightforward.
+
+"Your moral comparison between Constantinople and Greece--it isn't fair,
+by the way, to compare a city with a country--doesn't interest me at
+all. People can be disgusting anywhere. Greece is no better than
+Turkey. It has a wonderfully delicate, pure atmosphere; but that doesn't
+influence the morals of the population. Fine Greek art is the purest art
+in the world; but that doesn't mean that the men who created it had only
+pure thoughts or lived only pure lives. I never read morals into art,
+although I'm English, and it's the old hopeless English way to do
+that. The man who made Echo"--she turned her large eyes towards the
+statuette--"may have been an evil liver. In fact, I believe he was. But
+Echo is an exquisite pure bit of art."
+
+Dion thought of Rosamund's words about Praxiteles as they sat before
+Hermes. His Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke were mentally at opposite poles;
+yet they were both good women.
+
+"My friend Daventry would agree with you, I know," he said.
+
+"He's a clever and a very dear little man. Who's that coming in?"
+
+Dion looked and saw Canon Wilton. He told Mrs. Clarke who it was.
+
+"Enid told me he was coming. I should like to know him."
+
+"Shall I go and tell him so?"
+
+"Presently. How's your baby? I'm told you've got a baby."
+
+Dion actually blushed. Mrs. Clarke gazed at the blush, and no doubt
+thoroughly understood it, but she did not smile, or look arch, or full
+of feminine understanding.
+
+"It's very well, thank you. It's just like other babies."
+
+"So was mine. Babies are always said to be wonderful, and never are.
+And we love ours chiefly because they aren't. I hate things with wings
+growing out of their shoulders. My boy's a very naughty boy."
+
+They talked about the baby, and then about Mrs. Clarke's son of ten;
+and then Canon Wilton came up, shook hands warmly with Dion, and was
+introduced by Mrs. Chetwinde to Mrs. Clarke.
+
+Presently, from the other side of the room where he was standing with
+Esme Darlington, Dion saw them in conversation; saw Mrs. Clarke's eyes
+fixed on the Canon's almost fiercely sincere face.
+
+"It's going to be an abominable case," murmured Mr. Darlington in Dion's
+ear. "We must all stand round her."
+
+"I can't imagine how any one could think such a woman guilty," said
+Dion.
+
+"It has all come about through her unconventionality." He pulled his
+beard and lifted his ragged eyebrows. "It really is much wiser
+for innocent people, such as Cynthia, to keep a tight hold on the
+conventions. They have their uses. They have their place in the scheme.
+But she never could see it, and look at the result."
+
+"But then don't you think she'll win?"
+
+"No one can tell."
+
+"In any case, she tells me she's going back to live at Constantinople."
+
+"Madness! Sheer madness!" said Mr. Darlington, almost piteously. "I
+shall beg her not to."
+
+Dion suppressed a smile. That day he had gained the impression that Mrs.
+Clarke had a will of iron.
+
+When he went up to say good-by to her, Daventry had already gone; he
+said he had work to do on the case.
+
+"May I wish you success?" Dion ventured to say, as he took her hand.
+
+"Thank you," she answered. "I think you must go in for athletic
+exercises, don't you?"
+
+Her eyes were fixed on the breadth of his chest, and then traveled to
+his strong, broad shoulders.
+
+"Yes, I'm very keen on them."
+
+"I want my boy to go in for them. It's so important to be healthy."
+
+"Rather!"
+
+He felt the Stamboul touch in her soft, hot hand. As he let it go, he
+added:
+
+"I can give you the address of a first-rate instructor if your boy ever
+wants to be physically trained. I go to him. His name's Jenkins."
+
+"Thank you."
+
+She was still looking at his chest and shoulders. The expression of
+distress in her eyes seemed to be deepening. But a tall man, Sir John
+Killigrew, one of her adherents, spoke to her, and she turned to give
+him her complete attention.
+
+"I'll walk with you, if you're going," said Canon Wilton's strong voice
+in Dion's ear.
+
+"That's splendid. I'll just say good-by to Mrs. Chetwinde."
+
+He found her by the tea-table with three or four men and two very smart
+women. As he came up one of the latter was saying:
+
+"It's all Lady Ermyntrude's fault. She always hated Cynthia, and she has
+a heart of stone."
+
+The case again!
+
+"Oh, are you going?" said Mrs. Chetwinde.
+
+She got up and came away from the tea-table.
+
+"D'you like Cynthia Clarke?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, very much. She interests me."
+
+"Ah?"
+
+She looked at him, and seemed about to say something, but did not speak.
+
+"You saw her take my hand," he said, moved by a sudden impulse.
+
+"Did she?"
+
+"We were talking about Stamboul. She did it to show me----" He broke
+off. "I saw you felt, as I did, that no one but a through and through
+innocent woman could have done it, just now--like that, I mean."
+
+"Of course Cynthia is innocent," Mrs. Chetwinde said, rather coldly and
+very firmly. "There's Canon Wilton waiting for you."
+
+She turned away, but did not go back to the tea-table; as Dion went out
+of the room he saw her sitting down on the red sofa by Mrs. Clarke.
+
+Canon Wilton and he walked slowly away from the house. The Canon, who
+had some heart trouble of which he never spoke, was not allowed to walk
+fast; and to-day he was tired after his sermon at the Abbey. He inquired
+earnestly about Rosamund and the child, and seemed made happy by the
+good news Dion was able to give him.
+
+"Has it made all life seem very different to you?" he asked.
+
+Dion acknowledged that it had.
+
+"I was half frightened at the thought of the change which was coming,"
+he said. "We were so very happy as we were, you see."
+
+The Canon's intense gray eyes shot a glance at him, which he felt rather
+than saw, in the evening twilight.
+
+"I hope you'll be even happier now."
+
+"It will be a different sort of happiness now."
+
+"I think children bind people together more often than not. There are
+cases when it's not so, but I don't think yours is likely to be one of
+them."
+
+"Oh, no."
+
+"Is it a good-looking baby?"
+
+"No, really it's not. Even Rosamund thinks that. D'you know, so far
+she's marvelously reasonable in her love."
+
+"That's splendid," said Canon Wilton, with a strong ring in his voice.
+"An unreasonable love is generally a love with something rotten at its
+roots."
+
+Dion stood still.
+
+"Oh, is that true really?"
+
+The Canon paused beside him. They were in Eaton Square, opposite to St.
+Peter's.
+
+"I think so. But I hate anything that approaches what I call mania.
+Religious mania, for instance, is abhorrent to me, and, I should think,
+displeasing to God. Any mania entering into a love clouds that purity
+which is the greatest beauty of love. Mania--it's detestable!"
+
+He spoke almost with a touch of heat, and put his hand on Dion's
+shoulder.
+
+"Beware of it, my boy."
+
+"Yes."
+
+They walked on, talking of other things. A few minutes before they
+parted they spoke of Mrs. Clarke.
+
+"Did you know her before to-day?" asked the Canon.
+
+"No. I'd never even seen her. How dreadful for her to have to face such
+a case."
+
+"Yes, indeed."
+
+"The fact that she's innocent gives her a great pull, though. I realized
+what a pull when I was having a talk with her."
+
+"I don't know much about the case," was all that the Canon said. "I hope
+justice will be done in it when it comes on."
+
+Dion thought that there was something rather implacable in his voice.
+
+"I don't believe Mrs. Clarke doubts that."
+
+"Did she say so?" asked Canon Wilton.
+
+"No. But I felt that she expected to win--almost knew she would win."
+
+"I see. She has confidence in the result."
+
+"She seems to have."
+
+"Women often have more confidence in difficult moments than we men.
+Well, here I must leave you."
+
+He held out his big, unwavering hand to Dion.
+
+"Good-by. God bless you both, and the child, whether it's plain or
+not. One good thing's added to us when we start rather ill-favored; the
+chance of growing into something well-favored."
+
+He gripped Dion's hand and walked slowly, but powerfully, away.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+As Dion had said, the baby was an ordinary baby. "In looks," the nurse
+remarked, "he favors his papa." Certainly in this early stage of his
+career the baby had little of the beauty and charm of Rosamund. As his
+head was practically bald, his forehead, which was wrinkled as if by
+experience and the troubles of years, looked abnormally high. His face,
+full of puckers, was rather red; his nose meant very little as yet; his
+mouth, with perpetually moving lips, was the home of bubbles. His eyes
+were blue, and looked large in his extremely small countenance, which
+was often decorated with an expression of mild inquiry. This expression,
+however, sometimes changed abruptly to a network of wrath, in which
+every feature, and even the small bald head, became involved. Then the
+minute feet made feeble dabs, or stabs, at the atmosphere; the tiny
+fists doubled themselves and wandered to and fro as if in search of the
+enemy; and a voice came forth out of the temple, very personal and very
+intense, to express the tempest of the soul.
+
+"Hark at him!" said the nurse. "He knows already what he wants and what
+he _don't_ want."
+
+And Rosamund, listening as only a mother can listen, shook her head over
+him, trying to condemn the rage, but enjoying the strength of her
+child in the way of mothers, to whom the baby's roar perhaps brings the
+thought, "What a fine, bold man he'll be some day." If Rosamund had such
+a thought the nurse encouraged it with her. "He's got a proud spirit
+already, ma'am. He's not to be put upon. Have his way he will, and I
+don't altogether blame him." Nor, be sure, did Rosamund altogether
+blame the young varmint for anything. Perhaps in his tiny fisticuffs and
+startlingly fierce cries she divined the Doric, in embryo, as it were;
+perhaps when "little master" shrieked she thought of the columns of the
+Parthenon.
+
+But Dion told the truth to Canon Wilton when he had said that Rosamund
+was marvelously reasonable, so far, in her love for her baby son. The
+admirable sanity, the sheer healthiness of outlook which Dion loved in
+her did not desert her now. To Dion it seemed that in the very calmness
+and good sense of her love she showed its great depth, showed that
+already she was thinking of her child's soul as well as of his little
+body.
+
+Dion felt the beginnings of a change in Rosamund, but he did not find
+either her or himself suddenly and radically changed by the possession
+of a baby. He had thought that perhaps as mother and father they would
+both feel abruptly much older than before, even perhaps old. It was not
+so. Often Dion gazed at the baby as he bubbled and cooed, sneezed with
+an air of angry astonishment, stared at nothing with a look of shallow
+surmise, or, composing his puckers, slept, and Dion still felt young,
+even very young, and not at all like a father.
+
+"I'm sure," he once said to Rosamund, "women feel much more like mothers
+when they have a baby than men feel like fathers."
+
+"I feel like a mother all over," she replied, bending above the child.
+"In every least little bit of me."
+
+"Then do you feel completely changed?"
+
+"Completely, utterly."
+
+Dion sat still for a moment gazing at her. She felt his look, perhaps,
+for she lifted her head, and her eyes went from the baby to him.
+
+"What is it, Rosamund? What are you considering?"
+
+"Well----" She hesitated. "Perhaps no one could quite understand, but I
+feel a sense of release."
+
+"Release! From what?"
+
+Again she hesitated; then she looked once more at the child almost as if
+she wished to gain something from his helplessness. At last she said:
+
+"Dion, as you've given me _him_, I'll tell you. Very often in the past
+I've had an urgent desire some day to enter into the religious life."
+
+"D'you--d'you mean to become a Roman Catholic and a nun?" he exclaimed,
+feeling, absurdly perhaps, almost afraid and half indignant.
+
+"No. I've never wished to change my religion. There are Anglican
+sisterhoods, you know."
+
+"But your singing!"
+
+"I only intended to sing for a time. Then some day, when I felt quite
+ready, I meant--"
+
+"But you married me?" he interrupted.
+
+"Yes. So you see I gave it all up."
+
+"But you said it was the child which had brought you a sensation of
+release!"
+
+"Perhaps you have never been a prisoner of a desire which threatens to
+dominate your soul forever," she said, quietly evading his point and
+looking down, so that he could not see her eyes. "Look, he's waking!"
+
+Surely she had moved abruptly and the movement had awakened the child.
+She began playing with him, and the conversation was broken.
+
+The Clarke trial came on in May, when Robin was becoming almost elderly,
+having already passed no less than ten weeks in the midst of this wicked
+world. On the day before it opened, Daventry made Dion promise to come
+into court at least once to hear some of the evidence.
+
+"A true friend would be there every day," he urged--"to back up his old
+chum."
+
+"Business!" returned Dion laconically.
+
+"What's your real reason against it?"
+
+"Well, Rosamund hates this kind of case. I spoke to her about it the
+other day."
+
+"What did she say?"
+
+"That she was delighted you had something to do, and that she hoped, if
+Mrs. Clarke were innocent, she'd win. She pities her for being dragged
+through all this mud."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"She said at the end that she hoped I wouldn't think her unsympathetic
+if she neither talked about the case nor read about it. She hates
+filling her mind with ugly details and horrible suggestions."
+
+"I see."
+
+"You know, Guy, Rosamund thinks--she's told me so more than once--that
+the mind and the soul are very sensitive, and that--that they ought to
+be watched over, and--and taken care of."
+
+Dion looked rather uncomfortable as he finished. It was one thing to
+speak of such matters with Rosamund, and quite another to touch on them
+with a man, even a man who was a trusted friend.
+
+"Perhaps you'd rather not come at all?"
+
+"No, no. I'll come once. You know how keen I am on your making a good
+start."
+
+Daventry took him at his word, and got him a seat beside Mrs. Chetwinde
+on the third day of the trial, when Mrs. Clarke's cross-examination,
+begun on the previous day, was continued by Sir Edward Jeffson, Beadon
+Clarke's leading counsel.
+
+Dion told Rosamund where he was going when he left the house in the
+morning.
+
+"I hope it will go well for poor Mrs. Clarke," she said kindly, but
+perhaps rather indifferently.
+
+She had not looked at the reports of the case in the papers, and had not
+discussed its progress with Dion. He was not sorry for that. It was a
+horrible case, full of abominable allegations and suggestions such as
+he would have hated to discuss with Rosamund. As he stood in the little
+hall of their house, which was delicately scented with lavender and lit
+by pale sunshine, bidding her good-by, he realized the impossibility of
+such a woman as she was ever being "mixed up" in such a trial. Simply
+that couldn't happen, he thought. Instinct would keep her far from every
+suggestion of a possible impurity. He felt certain that Mrs. Clarke
+was innocent, but, as he looked into Rosamund's honest brown eyes,
+he thought that Mrs. Clarke must have been singularly imprudent. He
+remembered how she had held his hand in Mrs. Chetwinde's drawing-room.
+Wisdom and unwisdom; he compared them: the one was a builder up, the
+other a destroyer of beauty--the beauty that is in every completely sane
+and perfectly poised life.
+
+"Rose," he said, leaning forward to kiss his wife, "I think you are very
+wise."
+
+"Why wise all of a sudden?" she asked, smiling.
+
+"You keep the door of your life."
+
+He glanced round at the little hall, simple, fresh, with a few white
+roses in a blue pot, the pale sunshine lying on the polished floor of
+wood, the small breeze coming in almost affectionately between snowy
+curtains. Purity--everything seemed to whisper of that, to imply that;
+simplicity ruling, complexity ruled out.
+
+And then he was sitting in the crowded court, breathing bad air, hearing
+foul suggestions, watching strained or hateful faces, surrounded by
+people who were attracted by ugly things as vultures are attracted by
+the stench of dead and decaying bodies. At first he loathed being there;
+presently, however, he became interested, then almost fascinated by his
+surroundings and by the drama which was being played slowly out in the
+midst of them.
+
+Daventry, in wig and gown, looked tremendously legal and almost severe
+in his tense gravity. Sir John Addington, his leader, a man of great
+fame, was less tense in his watchfulness, amazingly at his ease with the
+Court, and on smiling terms with the President, who, full of worldly
+and unworldly knowledge, held the balance of justice with an unwavering
+firmness. The jury looked startlingly commonplace, smug and sleepy,
+despite the variety of type almost inevitably presented by twelve human
+beings. Not one of them looked a rascal; not one of them looked an
+actively good man. The intense Englishness of them hit one in the face
+like a well-directed blow from a powerful fist. And they had to give the
+verdict on this complex drama of Stamboul! How much they would have
+to tell their wives presently! Their sense of their unusual importance
+pushed through the smugness heavily, like a bulky man in broadcloth
+showing through a dull crowd.
+
+Mrs. Clarke occasionally glanced at them with an air of almost
+distressed inquiry, as if she had never seen such cabbages before, and
+was wondering about their gray matter. Her life in Stamboul must have
+effected changes in her. She looked almost exotic in this court, despite
+the simplicity of her gown, her unpretending little hat; as if her mind,
+perhaps, had become exotic. But she certainly did not look wicked. Dion
+was struck again by the strong mentality of her and by her haggardness.
+To him she seemed definitely a woman of mind, not at all an animal
+woman. When he gazed at her he felt that he was gazing at mind rather
+than at body. Just before she went into the box she met his eyes. She
+stared at him, as if carefully and strongly considering him; then she
+nodded. He bowed, feeling uncomfortable, feeling indeed almost a brute.
+
+"She'll think I've come out of filthy curiosity," he thought, looking
+round at the greedy faces of the crowd.
+
+No need to ask why those faces were there.
+
+He felt still more uncomfortable when Mrs. Clarke was in the
+witness-box, and Sir Edward Jeffson took up the cross-examination which
+he had begun late in the afternoon of the previous day.
+
+Dion had very seldom been in a Court of Justice, and had never before
+been in the Divorce Court. As the cross-examination of Mrs. Clarke
+lengthened out he felt as if his clothes, and the clothes of all the
+human beings who crowded about him, were being ruthlessly stripped off,
+as if an ugly and abominable nakedness were gradually appearing. The
+shame of it all was very hateful to him; and yet--yes, he couldn't deny
+it--there was a sort of dreadful fascination in it, too.
+
+The two co-respondents, Hadi Bey and Aristide Dumeny of the French
+Embassy in Constantinople, were in court, sitting not far from Dion, to
+whom Mrs. Chetwinde, less vague than, but quite as self-possessed as,
+usual, pointed them out.
+
+Both were young men. Hadi Bey, who of course wore the fez, was a fine
+specimen of the smart, alert, cosmopolitan and cultivated Turk of modern
+days. There was a peculiar look of vividness and brightness about him,
+in his piercing dark eyes, in his red lips, in his healthy and manly
+face with its rosy brown complexion and its powerful decided chin.
+He had none of the sleepiness and fatalistic languor of the fat
+hubble-bubble smoking Turk of caricature. The whole of him looked
+aristocratic, energetic, perfectly poised and absolutely self-possessed.
+Many of the women in court glanced at him without any distaste.
+
+Aristide Dumeny was almost strangely different--an ashy-pale, dark-eyed,
+thin and romantic-visaged man, stamped with a curious expression of pain
+and fatalism. He looked as if he had seen much, dreamed many dreams,
+and suffered not a little. There was in his face something slightly
+contemptuous, as if, intellectually, he seldom gazed up at any man. He
+watched Mrs. Clarke in the box with an enigmatic closeness of attention
+which seemed wholly impersonal, even when she was replying to hideous
+questions about himself. That he had an interesting personality was
+certain. When his eyes rested on the twelve jurymen he smiled every so
+faintly. It seemed to him, perhaps, absurd that they should have power
+over the future of the woman in the witness-box.
+
+That woman showed an extraordinary self-possession which touched dignity
+but which never descended to insolence. Despite her obvious cleverness
+and mental resource she preserved a certain simplicity. She did not pose
+as a passionate innocent, or assume any forced airs of supreme virtue.
+She presented herself rather as a woman of the world who was careless of
+the conventions, because she thought of them as chains which prevented
+free movement and were destructive of genuine liberty. She acknowledged
+that she had been a great deal with Hadi Bey and Dumeny, that she had
+often made long excursions with each of them on foot, on horseback, in
+caiques, that she had had them to dinner, separately, on many occasions
+in a little pavilion which stood at the end of her husband's garden and
+looked upon the Bosporus. These dinners had frequently taken place when
+her husband was away from home. Monsieur Dumeny was a good musician and
+had sometimes sung and played to her till late in the night. Hadi Bey
+had sometimes been her guide in Constantinople and had given to her the
+freedom of his strange and mysterious city of Stamboul. With him she had
+visited the mosques, with him she had explored the bazaars, with him
+she had sunk down in the strange and enveloping melancholy of the vast
+Turkish cemeteries which are protected by forests of cypresses. All this
+she acknowledged without the least discomposure. One of her remarks to
+the cross-examining counsel was this:
+
+"You suggest that I have been very imprudent. I answer that I am not
+able to live what the conventional call a prudent life. Such a life
+would be a living death to me."
+
+"Kindly confine yourself to answering my questions," retorted Counsel
+harshly. "I suggest that you were far more than imprudent. I suggest
+that when you and Hadi Bey remained together in that pavilion on
+the Bosporus until midnight, until after midnight, you----" and then
+followed another hideous accusation, which, gazing with her observant
+eyes at the brick-red shaven face of her accuser, Mrs. Clarke quietly
+denied. She never showed temper. Now and then she gave indications of a
+sort of cold disgust or faint surprise. But there were no outraged
+airs of virtue. A slight disdain was evidently more natural to the
+temperament of this woman than any fierceness of protestation. Once when
+Counsel said, "I shall ask the jury to infer"--something abominable,
+Mrs. Clarke tranquilly rejoined:
+
+"Whatever they infer it won't alter the truth."
+
+Daventry moved his shoulders. Dion was certain that he considered this
+remark ill-advised. The jury, however, at whom Mrs. Clarke gazed in the
+short silence which followed, seemed, Dion thought, impressed by her
+firmness. The luncheon interval prevented Counsel from saying anything
+further just then, and Mrs. Clarke stepped down from the box.
+
+"Isn't she wonderful?"
+
+Dion heard this murmur, which did not seem to be addressed to any
+particular person. It had come from Mrs. Chetwinde, who now got up and
+went to speak to Mrs. Clarke. The whole court was in movement. Dion went
+out to have a hasty lunch with Daventry.
+
+"A pity she said that!" Daventry said in a low voice to Dion, hitching
+up his gown. "Juries like to be deferred to."
+
+"I believe she impressed them by her independence."
+
+"Do you, though? She's marvelously intelligent. Perhaps she knows more
+of men, even of jurymen, than I do."
+
+At lunch they discussed the case. Daventry had had two or three chances
+given to him by Sir John Addington, and thought he had done quite well.
+
+"Do you think Mrs. Clarke will win?" said Dion.
+
+"I know she's innocent, but I can't tell. She's so infernally
+unconventional and a jury's so infernally conventional that I can't help
+being afraid."
+
+Dion thought of his Rosamund's tranquil wisdom.
+
+"I think Mrs. Clarke's very clever," he said. "But I suppose she isn't
+very wise."
+
+"I'll tell you what it is, old Dion; she prefers life to wisdom."
+
+"Well, but----" Dion Began.
+
+But he stopped. Now he knew Mrs. Clarke a little better, from her own
+evidence, he knew just what Daventry meant. He looked upon the life of
+unwisdom, and he was able to feel its fascination. There were scents in
+it that lured, and there were colors that tempted; in its night there
+was music; about it lay mystery, shadows, and silver beams of the moon
+shining between cypresses like black towers. It gave out a call to
+which, perhaps, very few natures of men were wholly deaf. The unwise
+life! Almost for the first time Dion considered it with a deep
+curiosity.
+
+He considered it more attentively, more curiously, during the afternoon,
+when Mrs. Clarke's cross-examination was continued.
+
+It was obvious that during this trial two women were being presented to
+the judge and jury, the one a greedy and abominably secret and clever
+sensualist, who hid her mania beneath a cloak of intellectuality, the
+other a genuine intellectual, whose mental appetites far outweighed the
+appetites of her body, who was, perhaps, a sensualist, but a sensualist
+of the spirit and not of the flesh. Which of these two women was the
+real Cynthia Clarke? The jury would eventually give their decision,
+but it might not be in accordance with fact. Meanwhile, the horrible
+unclothing process was ruthlessly proceeded with. But already Dion was
+becoming accustomed to it. Perhaps Mrs. Clarke's self-possession helped
+him to assimilate the nauseous food which was offered to him.
+
+Beadon Clarke was in court, and had been pointed out to Dion, an
+intellectual and refined-looking man, bald, with good features, and
+a gentle, but now pained, expression; obviously a straight and
+aristocratic fellow. Beside him sat his mother, that Lady Ermyntrude
+who, it was said, had forced on the trial. She sat upright, her eyes
+fixed on her daughter-in-law, a rather insignificant small woman,
+not very well dressed, young looking, with hair done exactly in Queen
+Alexandra's way, and crowned with a black toque.
+
+Dion noticed that she had a very firm mouth and chin. She did not
+look actively hostile as she gazed at the witness, but merely
+attentive--deeply, concentratedly attentive. Mrs. Clarke never glanced
+towards her.
+
+Perhaps, whatever Lady Ermyntrude had believed hitherto, she was now
+beginning to wonder whether her conception of her son's wife had been
+a wrong one, was beginning to ask herself whether she had divined the
+nature of the soul inhabiting the body which now stood up before her.
+
+About an hour before the close of the sitting the heat in the court
+became almost suffocating, and the Judge told Mrs. Clarke she might
+continue her evidence sitting down. She refused this favor.
+
+"I'm not at all tired, my lord," she said.
+
+"She's made of iron," Mrs. Chetwinde murmured to Dion. "Though she
+generally looks like a corpse. She was haggard even as a girl."
+
+"Did you know her then?" he whispered.
+
+"I've known her all my life."
+
+Daventry wiped his brow with a large pocket-handkerchief, performing the
+action legally. One of the jurymen, who was too fat, and had something
+of the expression of a pug dog, opened his mouth and rolled slightly
+in his seat. The cross-examination became with every moment more
+disagreeable. Beadon Clarke never lifted his eyes from his knees. All
+the women in court, except Mrs. Chetwinde and Mrs. Clarke, were looking
+strangely alive and conscious. Dion had forgotten everything except
+Stamboul and the life of unwisdom. Suppose Mrs. Clarke had lived the
+life imputed to her by Counsel, suppose she really were a consummately
+clever and astoundingly ingenious humbug, driven, as many human beings
+are driven, by a dominating vice which towered over her life issuing
+commands she had not the strength to resist, how had it profited her?
+Had she had great rewards in it? Had she been led down strange ways
+guided by fascination bearing the torch from which spring colored fires?
+Good women sometimes, perhaps oftener than many people realize, look
+out of the window and try to catch a glimpse of the world of the wicked
+women, asking themselves, "Is it worth while? Is their time so much
+better than mine? Am I missing--missing?" And they shut the window--for
+fear. Far away, turning the corner of some dark alley, they have seen
+the colored gleam of the torch.
+
+Rosamund would never do that--would never even want to do that. She was
+not one of the good women who love to take just a peep at evil "because
+one ought to know something of the trials and difficulties of those less
+fortunately circumstanced than oneself."
+
+But, for the moment, Dion had quite forgotten his Rosamund. She was
+in England, but he was in Stamboul, hearing the waters of the Bosporus
+lapping at the foot of Mrs. Clarke's garden pavilion, while Dumeny
+played to her as the moon came up to shine upon the sweet waters of
+Asia; or sitting under the plane trees of the Pigeon Mosque, while Hadi
+Bey showed her how to write an Arabic love-letter--to somebody in the
+air, of course. In this trial he felt the fascination of Constantinople
+as he had never felt it when he was in Constantinople; but he felt, too,
+that only those who strayed deliberately from the beaten paths could
+ever capture the full fascination of the divided city, which looks to
+Europe and to Asia, and is set along the way of the sea.
+
+Whether innocent or guilty, Mrs. Clarke had certainly done that. He
+watched her with a growing interest. How very much she must know that he
+did not know. Then he glanced at Hadi Bey, who still sat up alertly, who
+still looked bright and vivid, intelligent, ready for anything, a man
+surely with muscles of steel and a courageous robust nature, and at
+Aristide Dumeny. Upon the latter his eyes rested for a long time.
+When at last he again looked at Mrs. Clarke he had formed the definite
+impression that Dumeny was corrupt--an interesting man, a clever,
+probably a romantic as well as a cynical man, but certainly corrupt.
+
+Didn't that tell against Mrs. Clarke?
+
+She was now being questioned about a trip at night in a caique with Hadi
+Bey down the sweet waters of Asia where willows lean over the stream.
+Mrs. Chetwinde's pale eyes were fastened upon her. Beadon Clarke bent
+his head a little lower as, in her husky voice, his wife said that
+he knew of the expedition, had apparently smiled upon her
+unconventionalities, knowing how entirely free she was from the ugly
+bias towards vice attributed to her by Counsel.
+
+Lady Ermyntrude Clarke shot a glance at her son, and her firm mouth
+became firmer.
+
+The willows bent over the sweet waters in the warm summer night; the
+Albanian boatmen were singing.
+
+"She must have had wonderful times!"
+
+The whisper came from an unseen woman sitting just behind Dion. His mind
+echoed the thought she had expressed. Now the Judge was rising from the
+bench and bowing to the Court; Mrs. Clarke was stepping down from the
+witness-box; Dumeny, his eyes half closed, was brushing his shining silk
+hat with the sleeve of his coat; Beadon Clarke was leaning to speak to
+his mother.
+
+The Court was adjourned.
+
+As Dion got up he felt the heat as if it were heat from a furnace. His
+face and his body were burning.
+
+"Come and speak to Cynthia, and take us to tea somewhere--can you?" said
+Mrs. Chetwinde.
+
+"Of course, with pleasure."
+
+"Your Rosamund----?"
+
+Her eyes were on him for a moment.
+
+"She won't expect me at any particular time."
+
+"Mr. Daventry can come too."
+
+Dion never forgot their difficult exit from the court. It made him feel
+ashamed for humanity, for the crowd which frantically pressed to stare
+at a woman because perhaps she had done things which were considered
+by all right-minded people to be disgusting. Mrs. Clarke and her little
+party of friends had to be helped away by the police. When at length
+they were driving away towards Claridge's Hotel, Dion was able once
+more to meet the eyes of his companions, and again he was amazed at
+the self-possession of Mrs. Clarke. Really she seemed as composed, as
+completely mistress of herself, as when he had first seen her standing
+near the statue of Echo in the drawing-room of Mrs. Chetwinde.
+
+"You haven't been in court before to-day, have you?" she said to Dion.
+
+"No."
+
+"Why did you come to-day?"
+
+"Well, I----" He hesitated. "I promised Mr. Daventry to come to-day."
+
+"That was it!" said Mrs. Clarke, and she looked out of the window.
+
+Dion felt rather uncomfortable as he spoke to Mrs. Chetwinde and left
+further conversation with Mrs. Clarke to Daventry; but when they were
+all in a quiet corner of the tearoom at Claridge's, a tea-table before
+them and a band playing softly at a distance, he was more at his ease.
+The composure of Mrs. Clarke perhaps conveyed itself to him. She spoke
+of the case quite naturally, as a guilty woman surely could not possibly
+have spoken of it--showing no venom, making no attack upon her accusers.
+
+"It's all a mistake," she said, "arising out of stupidity, out of the
+most widespread and, perhaps, the most pitiable and dangerous lack in
+human nature."
+
+"And what's that?" asked Daventry, rather eagerly.
+
+"I expect you know."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Don't you?" she asked of Dion, spreading thinly some butter over a
+piece of dry toast.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't."
+
+"Cynthia means the lack of power to read character, the lack of
+psychological instinct," drifted from the lips of Mrs. Chetwinde.
+
+"Three-quarters of the misunderstandings and miseries of the world come
+from that," said Mrs. Clarke, looking at the now buttered toast. "If my
+mother-in-law and my husband had any psychological faculty they would
+never have mistaken my unconventionality, which I shall never give up,
+for common, and indeed very vulgar, sinfulness."
+
+"Confusing the pastel with the oleograph," dropped out Mrs. Chetwinde,
+looking abstractedly at an old red woman in a turret of ostrich plumes,
+who was spread out on the other side of the room before a plate of
+cakes.
+
+"You are sure Lady Ermyntrude didn't understand?" said Daventry, with a
+certain sharp legality of manner.
+
+"You mean that she might be wicked instead of only stupid?"
+
+"Well, yes. I suppose it does come to that."
+
+"Believe me, Mr. Daventry, she's a quite honest stupid woman. She
+honestly thinks that I'm a horrible creature."
+
+And Mrs. Clarke began to bite the crisp toast with her lovely teeth.
+Mrs. Chetwinde's eyes dwelt on her for a brief instant with, Dion
+thought, a rather peculiar look which he could not quite understand. It
+had, perhaps, a hint of hardness, or of cold admiration, something of
+that kind, in it.
+
+"Tell me some more about the baby," was Mrs. Clarke's next remark,
+addressed to Dion. "I want to get away for a minute into a happy
+domestic life. And yours is that, I know."
+
+How peculiarly haggard, and yet how young she looked as she said that!
+She added:
+
+"If the case ends as I feel sure it will, I hope your wife and I shall
+get to know each other. I hear she's the most delightful woman in
+London, and extraordinarily beautiful. Isn't she?"
+
+"I think she is beautiful," Dion said simply.
+
+And then they talked about Robin, while Mrs. Chetwinde and Daventry
+discussed some question of the day. Before they parted Dion could not
+help saying:
+
+"I want to ask you something."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Why do you feel sure that the trial will end as it ought to end? Surely
+the lack of the psychological instinct is peculiarly abundant--if a
+lack can be abundant!"--he smiled, almost laughed, a little
+deprecatingly--"in a British jury?"
+
+"And so you think they're likely to go wrong in their verdict?"
+
+"Doesn't it rather follow?"
+
+She stared at him, and her eyes were, or looked, even more widely opened
+than usual. After a long pause she said;
+
+"You wish to frighten me."
+
+She got up, and began to draw on her dove-colored Swedish kid gloves.
+
+"Tippie," she said to Mrs. Chetwinde, "I must go home now and have a
+little rest."
+
+Only then did Dion realize how marvelously she was bearing a tremendous
+strain. He began to admire her prodigiously.
+
+When he said good-by to her under the great porch he couldn't help
+asking:
+
+"Are your nerves of steel?"
+
+She leaned forward in the brougham.
+
+"If your muscles are of iron."
+
+"My muscles!" he said.
+
+"Haven't you educated them?"
+
+"Oh--yes."
+
+"And perhaps I've educated my nerves."
+
+Mrs. Chetwinde's spirited horses began to prance and show temper. Mrs.
+Clarke sat back. As the carriage moved away, Dion saw Mrs. Chetwinde's
+eyes fixed upon him. They looked at that moment not at all vague. If
+they had not been her eyes, he would have been inclined to think them
+piercing. But, of course, Mrs. Chetwinde's eyes could never be that.
+
+"How does one educate one's nerves, Guy?" asked Dion, as the two friends
+walked away.
+
+"By being defendant in a long series of divorce cases, I should say."
+
+"Has Mrs. Clarke ever been in another case of this kind?"
+
+"Good heavens, no. If she had, even I couldn't believe in her innocence,
+as I do now."
+
+"Then where did she get her education?"
+
+"Where do women get things, old Dion? It seems to me sometimes straight
+from God, and sometimes straight from the devil."
+
+Dion's mental comment on this was, "What about Mrs. Clarke?" But he did
+not utter it.
+
+Before he left Daventry, he was pledged to be in court on the last day
+of the case, when the verdict would be given. He wished to go to the
+court again on the morrow, but the thought of Rosamund decided him not
+to do this; he would, he knew, feel almost ashamed in telling her that
+the divorce court, at this moment, fascinated him, that he longed,
+or almost longed, to follow the colored fires of a certain torch down
+further shadowy alleys of the unwise life. He felt quite sure that
+Mrs. Clarke was an innocent woman, but she had certainly been very
+unconventional indeed in her conduct. He remembered the almost stern
+strength in her husky voice when she had said "my unconventionality,
+_which I shall never give up_." So even this hideous and widely
+proclaimed scandal would not induce her to bow in the future before the
+conventional gods. She really was an extraordinary woman. What would
+Rosamund think of her? If she won her case she evidently meant to know
+Rosamund. Of course, there could be nothing against that. If she
+lost the case, naturally there could never be any question of such an
+acquaintance; he knew instinctively that she would never suggest it.
+Whatever she was, or was not, she was certainly a woman of the world.
+
+That evening, when he reached home, he found Rosamund sitting in the
+nursery in the company of Robin and the nurse. The window was partially
+open. Rosamund believed in plenty of air for her child, and no
+"cosseting"; she laughed to scorn, but genially, the nurse's prejudice
+against "the night air."
+
+"My child," she said, "must get accustomed to night as well as day,
+Nurse--and the sooner the better." So now "Master Robin" was played upon
+by a little wind from Westminster. He seemed in no way alarmed by it.
+This evening he was serene, and when his father entered the room he
+assumed his expression of mild inquiry, vaguely agitated his small
+rose-colored fists, and blew forth a welcoming bubble.
+
+Dion was touched at the sight.
+
+"Little rogue!" he said, bending over Robin. "Little, little rogue!"
+
+Robin raised his, as yet scarcely defined, eyebrows, stared tremendously
+hard at the nursery atmosphere, pulled out his wet lips and gurgled, at
+the same time wagging his head, now nicely covered with silky fair hair,
+or down, whichever you chose to call it.
+
+"He knows his papa, ma'am, and that he does, a boy!" said the nurse,
+who approved of Dion, and had said below stairs that he was "as good a
+husband as ever wore shoe-leather."
+
+"Of course he does," said Rosamund softly. "Babies have plenty of
+intelligence of a kind, and I think it's a darling kind."
+
+Dion sat down beside her, and they both bent over Robin in the gathering
+twilight, while the nurse went softly out of the room.
+
+Dion had quite forgotten the Clarke case.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Three days later Daventry called in Little Market Street early, and
+was shown into the dining-room where he found Rosamund alone at the
+breakfast-table.
+
+"Do forgive me for bursting in upon the boiled eggs," he said, looking
+unusually excited. "I'm off almost directly to the Law Courts and I want
+to take Dion with me. It's the last day of Mrs. Clarke's case. We expect
+the verdict some time this evening. I dare say the court will sit late.
+Where's Dion?"
+
+"He's just coming down. We were both disturbed in the night, so we slept
+later than usual."
+
+"Disturbed? Burglars? Fire?"
+
+"No; Robin's not at all well."
+
+"I say! I'm sorry for that. What is it?"
+
+"He's had a very bad throat and been feverish, poor little chap. But I
+think he's better this morning. The doctor came."
+
+"You'll never be one of the fussy mothers."
+
+"I hope not," she said, rather gravely; "I'm not fond of them. Here's
+Dion."
+
+Daventry sat with them while they breakfasted, and Dion agreed to keep
+his promise and go to the court.
+
+"I told Uncle Biron I must be away from business to hear the
+summing-up," he said. "I'll send a telegram to the office. Do you think
+it will be all right for Mrs. Clarke?"
+
+"She's innocent, but nobody can say. It depends so much on the
+summing-up."
+
+Dion glanced at Rosamund.
+
+"You mustn't think I'm going to turn into an idler, Rose. This is a very
+special occasion."
+
+"I know. Mr. Daventry's first case."
+
+"Haven't you followed it at all?" Daventry asked.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No, but I've been wished you well all the same."
+
+When the two men got up to go, Dion said:
+
+"Rosamund!"
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"If Mrs. Clarke wins and is completely exonerated, I think she would
+like very much to make your acquaintance."
+
+Rosamund looked surprised.
+
+"What makes you think so?"
+
+"Well, she said something to that effect the other day."
+
+"She's a very interesting, clever woman," interposed Daventry, with
+sudden warmth.
+
+"I'm sure she is. We must see. It's very kind of her. Poor woman! What
+dreadful anxiety she must be in to-day! You'll all be glad when it's
+over."
+
+When the two friends were out in the sunshine, walking towards the
+Strand, Daventry said:
+
+"Why is your wife against Mrs. Clarke?"
+
+"She isn't. What makes you thinks so?"
+
+"I'm quite sure she doesn't want to know her, even if she gets the
+verdict."
+
+"Well, of course all this sort of thing is--it's very far away from
+Rosamund."
+
+"You don't mean to say you doubt Mrs. Clarke?"
+
+"No, but----"
+
+"Surely if she's innocent she's as good as any other woman."
+
+"I know, but----I suppose it's like this: there are different ways of
+being good, and perhaps Mrs. Clarke's way isn't Rosamund's. In fact, we
+know it isn't."
+
+Daventry said nothing more on the subject; he began to discuss the case
+in all its bearings, and presently dwelt upon the great power English
+judges have over the decisions of juries.
+
+"Mrs. Clarke gave her evidence splendidly on the whole," he said.
+"And Hadi Bey made an excellent impression. My one fear is that fellow
+Aristide Dumeny. You didn't hear him, but, of course, you read his
+evidence. He was perfectly composed and as clever as he could be in the
+box, but I'm sure, somehow, the jury were against him."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I hardly know. It may be something in his personality."
+
+"I believe he's a beast," said Dion.
+
+"There!" exclaimed Daventry, wrinkling his forehead. "If the Judge
+thinks as you do it may just turn things against us."
+
+"Why did she make a friend of the fellow?"
+
+"Because he's chock-full of talent and knowledge, and she loves both.
+Dion, my boy, the mind can play the devil with us as well as the body.
+But I hope--I hope for the right verdict. Anyhow I've done well, and
+shall get other cases out of this. The odd thing is that Mrs. Clarke's
+drained me dry of egoism. I care only to win for her. I couldn't bear to
+see her go out of court with a ruined reputation. My nerves are all on
+edge. If Mrs. Clarke loses, how d'you think she'll take it?"
+
+"Standing up."
+
+"I expect you're right. But I don't believe I shall take it standing.
+Perhaps some women make us men feel for them more than they feel for
+themselves. Don't look at me in court whatever you do."
+
+They had arrived at the Law Courts. He hurried away.
+
+Dion's place was again beside Mrs. Chetwinde, who looked unusually
+alive, and whose vagueness had been swept away by something--anxiety
+for her friend, perhaps, or the excitement of following day after day an
+unusually emotional _cause celebre_.
+
+Now, as Sir John Addington stood up to continue his speech on Mrs.
+Clarke's behalf, begun on the previous day, Mrs. Chetwinde leaned
+forward and fixed her eyes upon him, closing her fingers tightly on the
+fan she had brought with her.
+
+Sir John spoke with an earnestness and conviction which at certain
+moments rose almost to passion, as he drew the portrait of a woman whose
+brilliant mind and innocent nature had led her into the unconventional
+conduct which her enemies now asserted were wickedness. Beadon Clarke's
+counsel had suggested that Mrs. Clarke was an abominable woman,
+brilliantly clever, exquisitely subtle, who had chosen as an
+armor against suspicion a bold pretense of simplicity and harmless
+unconventionality, but who was the prey of a hidden and ungovernable
+vice. He, Sir John, ventured to put forward for the jury's careful
+examination a very different picture. He made no secret of the fact
+that, from the point of view of the ordinary unconventional man or
+woman, Mrs. Clarke had often acted unwisely, and, with not too fine a
+sarcasm, he described for the jury the average existence of "a careful
+drab woman" in the watchful and eternally gossiping diplomatic world.
+Then he contrasted with it the life led by Mrs. Clarke in the wonderful
+city of Stamboul--a life "full of color, of taste, of interest, of
+charm, of innocent, joyous and fragrant liberty. Which of us," he
+demanded, "would not in our souls prefer the latter life to the
+former? Which of us did not secretly long for the touch of romance,
+of strangeness, of beauty, to put something into our lives which they
+lacked? But we have not the moral courage to break our prison doors and
+to emerge into the nobler world."
+
+"The dull, the drab, the platter-faced and platter-minded people," he
+said, in a passage which Dion was always to remember, "who go forever
+bowed down beneath the heavy yoke of convention, are too often apt to
+think that everything charming, everything lively, everything unusual,
+everything which gives out, like sweet incense, a delicate aroma of
+strangeness, must be, somehow, connected with wickedness. Everything
+which deviates from their pattern must deviate towards the devil,
+according to them; every step taken away from the beaten path must
+be taken towards ultimate destruction. They have no conception of
+intimacies between women and men cemented not by similar lusts
+and similar vices, but by similar intellectual tastes and similar
+aspirations towards beauty. In color such people always find blackness,
+in gaiety wickedness, in liberty license, in the sacred intimacies
+of the soul the hateful vices of the body. But you, gentlemen of the
+jury----"
+
+His appeal to the twelve in the box at this moment was, perhaps,
+scarcely convincing. He addressed them as if, like Mrs. Clarke and
+himself, they were enamored of the unwise life, which is only unwise
+because we live in a world of censorious fools, and as if he knew it.
+The strange thing was that the jury were evidently impressed if not
+carried away, by his appeal. They sat forward, stared at Sir John as
+if fascinated, and even began to assume little airs which were
+almost devil-may-care. But when, with a precise and deliberately cold
+acuteness, Sir John turned to the evidence adverse to his client, and
+began to tear it to shreds, they stared less, frowned, and showed by
+their expressions their efforts to be legal.
+
+As soon as Sir John had finished his speech, the Court rose for the
+luncheon interval.
+
+"Are you going out?" said Mrs. Chetwinde to Dion. "I've brought some
+horrible little sandwiches, and I shan't stir."
+
+"I'm not hungry. I'll stay with you."
+
+He sighed.
+
+"What a crowd!" he said, looking over the sea of hot, staring faces.
+"How horrid people look sometimes!"
+
+"When they're feeling cruel."
+
+She began to eat her sandwiches, which were tightly packed in a small
+silver box.
+
+"Isn't Mrs. Clarke coming to-day?" Dion asked.
+
+"Yes. I expect her in a moment. Esme Darlington is bringing her."
+
+"Mr. Darlington?"
+
+"You're surprised?"
+
+"Well, I should hardly have expected somehow that--I don't know."
+
+"I do. But Esme Darlington's more of a man than he seems. And he's
+thoroughly convinced of Cynthia's innocence. Here they are."
+
+There was a stir in the crowd. Many women present rustled as they turned
+in their seats; some stood up and craned forward; people in the gallery
+leaned over, looking eagerly down; a loud murmur and a wide hiss of
+whispering emphasized the life in the court. The tall, loose-limbed
+figure of Esme Darlington, looking to-day singularly dignified and
+almost impressive, pushed slowly forward, followed by the woman whose
+social fate was so soon to be decided.
+
+Mrs. Clarke glanced round over the many faces without any defiance as
+she made her way with difficulty to a seat beside her solicitor. The
+lack of defiance in her expression struck Dion forcibly. This woman did
+not seem to be mentally on the defensive, did not seem to be wishing to
+repel the glances, fierce with curiosity, which were leveled at her from
+all sides. Apparently she had no fear at all of bristling bayonets. Her
+haggard face was unsmiling, not cold, but intense with a sort of living
+calm which was surely not a mask. She looked at Mrs. Chetwinde and at
+Dion as she passed near to them, giving them no greeting except with her
+large eyes which obviously recognized them. In a moment she was sitting
+down between her solicitor and Esme Darlington.
+
+"It will quite break Guy Daventry up if she doesn't get the verdict,"
+said Dion in an uneven voice to Mrs. Chetwinde.
+
+"Mr. Daventry?" she said, with an odd little stress of emphasis on the
+name.
+
+"Of course I should hate it too. Any man who feels a woman is
+innocent--"
+
+He broke off. She said nothing, and went on eating her little sandwiches
+as if she rather disliked them.
+
+"Mrs. Chetwinde, do tell me. I believe you've got an extraordinary
+flair--will she win?"
+
+"My dear boy, now how can I know?"
+
+Dion felt very young for a minute.
+
+"I want to know what you expect."
+
+Mrs. Chetwinde closed the small silver box with a soft snap.
+
+"I fully expect her to win."
+
+"Because she's innocent?"
+
+"Oh no. That's no reason in a world like this, unfortunately."
+
+"But, then, why?"
+
+"Because Cynthia always does get what she wants, or needs. She has quite
+abnormal will-power, and will-power is _the_ conqueror. If I'm to tell
+you the truth, I see only one reason for doubt, I don't say fear, as to
+the result."
+
+"Can you tell me what it is?"
+
+"Aristide Dumeny."
+
+At this moment the Judge returned to the bench. An hour later he began
+to sum up.
+
+He spoke very slowly and rather monotonously, and at first Dion thought
+that he was going to be "let down" by this almost cruelly level finale
+to a dramatic, sometimes even horrible, struggle between powerful
+opposing forces. But presently he began to come under a new fascination,
+the fascination of a cool and very clear presentation of undressed
+facts. Led by the Judge, he reviewed again the complex life at
+Constantinople, he followed again Mrs. Clarke's many steps away from the
+beaten paths, he penetrated again through some of the winding ways into
+the shadows of the unwise life. And he began to wonder a little and a
+little to fear for the woman who was sitting so near to him waiting for
+the end. He could not tell whether the Judge believed her to be innocent
+or guilty, but he thought he could tell that the Judge considered her
+indiscreet, too heedless of those conventions on which social relations
+are based, too determined a follower after the flitting light of her own
+desires. Presently the position of Beadon Clarke in the Constantinople
+_menage_ was touched upon, and suddenly Dion found himself imagining how
+it would be to have as his wife a Mrs. Clarke. Suppose Rosamund were
+to develop the unconventional idiosyncrasies of a Cynthia Clarke? He
+realized at once that he was not a Beadon Clarke; he could never stand
+that sort of thing. He felt hot at the mere thought of his Rosamund
+making night expeditions in caiques alone with young men--such, for
+instance, as Hadi Bey; or listening alone at midnight in a garden
+pavilion isolated, shaded by trees, to the music made by a Dumeny.
+
+Dumeny! The Judge pronounced his name.
+
+"I come now to the respondent's relation with the second co-respondent,
+Aristide Dumeny of the French Embassy in Constantinople."
+
+Dion leaned slightly forward and looked at Dumeny. Dumeny was sitting
+bolt upright, and now, as the Judge mentioned his name, he folded his
+arms, raised his long dark eyes, and gazed steadily at the bench. Did he
+know that he was the danger in the case? If he did he did not show any
+apprehension. His white face, typically French, with its rather long
+nose, slightly flattened temples, faintly cynical and ironic lips
+and small but obstinate chin, was almost sinister in its complete
+immobility.
+
+"He's certainly a corrupt beast," Dion said to himself. "But as
+certainly he's an interesting, clever, knowledgeable beast."
+
+Dumeny's very thick, glossy, and slightly undulating dark hair, growing
+closely round his low forehead, helped to make him almost romantically
+handsome, although his features were rather irregular. His white ears
+were abnormally small, Dion noticed.
+
+The Judge went with cold minuteness into every detail of Dumeny's
+intimacy with Mrs. Clarke that had been revealed in the trial, and dwelt
+on the link of music which, it was said, had held them together.
+
+"Music stimulates the passions, and may, in highly sensitive persons,
+generate impulses not easy to control, provided that the situation
+in which such persons find themselves, when roused and stirred,
+is propitious. It has been given in evidence that Monsieur Dumeny
+frequently played and sang to the respondent till late in the night in
+the pavilion which has been described to you. You have seen Monsieur
+Dumeny in the box, and can judge for yourselves whether he was a man
+likely to avail himself of any advantage his undoubted talents may have
+given him with a highly artistic and musical woman."
+
+There was nothing striking in the words, but to Dion the Judge's voice
+seemed slightly changed as it uttered the last sentence. Surely a frigid
+severity had crept into it, surely it was colored with a faint, but
+definite, contempt. Several of the jury started narrowly at Aristide
+Dumeny, and the foreman, with a care and precision almost ostentatious,
+took a note.
+
+The Judge continued his analysis of Mrs. Clarke's intimacy with Dumeny.
+He was scrupulously fair; he gave full weight to the mutual attraction
+which may be born out of common intellectual tastes--an attraction
+possibly quite innocent, quite free from desire of anything but food for
+the brain, the subtler emotions, and the soul "if you like to call
+it so, gentlemen." But, somehow, he left upon the mind of Dion, and
+probably upon the minds of many others, an impression that he, the
+Judge, was doubtful as to the sheer intellectuality of Monsieur Dumeny,
+was not convinced that he had reached that condition of moral serenity
+and purification in which a rare woman can be happily regarded as a sort
+of disembodied spirit.
+
+When the Judge at length finished with Dumeny and Dumeny's relations
+with Mrs. Clarke, Dion felt very anxious about the verdict. The Judge
+had not succeeded in making him believe that Mrs. Clarke was a guilty
+woman, but he feared that the jury had been made doubtful. It was
+evident to him that the Judge had a bad opinion of Dumeny, and had
+conveyed his opinion to the jury. Was the unwisdom of Mrs. Clarke to
+prove her undoing? Esme Darlington was pulling his ducal beard almost
+nervously. A faint hum went through the densely packed court. Mrs.
+Chetwinde moved and used her fan for a moment. Dion did not dare to look
+at Guy Daventry. He was realizing, with a sort of painful sharpness, how
+great a change a verdict against Mrs. Clarke must make in her life.
+
+Her boy, perhaps, probably indeed, would be taken from her. She had only
+spoken to him casually about her boy, but he had felt that the casual
+reference did not mean that she had a careless heart. The woman whose
+hand had held his for a moment would be tenacious in love. He felt sure
+of that, and sure that she loved her naughty boy with a strong vitality.
+
+When the Judge had finished his task and the jury retired to consider
+their verdict, it was past four o'clock.
+
+"What do you think?" Dion said in a low voice to Mrs. Chetwinde.
+
+"About the summing-up?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It has left things very much as I expected. Any danger there is lies in
+Monsieur Dumeny."
+
+"Do you know him?"
+
+"Oh, yes. I stayed with Cynthia once in Constantinople. He took us
+about."
+
+She made no further comment on Monsieur Dumeny.
+
+"I wonder whether the jury will be away long?" Dion said, after a
+moment.
+
+"Probably. I shan't be at all surprised if they can't agree. Then there
+will be another trial."
+
+"How appalling!"
+
+"Yes, it wouldn't be very nice for Cynthia."
+
+"I can't help wishing----"
+
+He paused, hesitating.
+
+"Yes?" said Mrs. Chetwinde, looking about the court.
+
+"I can't help wishing Mrs. Clarke hadn't been unconventional in quite
+such a public way."
+
+A faint smile dawned and faded on Mrs. Chetwinde's lips and in her pale
+eyes.
+
+"The public method's often the safest in the end," she murmured.
+
+Then she nodded to Esme Darlington, who presently got up and managed to
+make his way to them. He, too, thought the jury would probably disagree,
+and considered the summing-up rather unfavorable to Mrs. Clarke.
+
+"People who live in the diplomatic world live in a whispering gallery,"
+he said, bending down, speaking in an under-voice and lifting and
+lowering his eyebrows. "I told Cynthia so when she married. I ventured
+to give her the benefit of my--if I may say so--long and intimate
+knowledge of diplomatic life and diplomatists. I said to her, 'Remember
+you can _always_ be under observation.' Ah, well--one can only hope
+the jury will take the right view. But how can we expect British
+shopkeepers, fruit brokers, cigar merchants, and so forth to understand
+a--really, one can only say--a wild nature like Cynthia's? It's a wild
+mind--I'd say this before her!--in an innocent body, just that."
+
+He pulled almost distractedly at his beard with bony fingers, and
+repeated plaintively:
+
+"A wild mind in an innocent body--h'm, ha!"
+
+"If only Mr. Grundy can be brought to comprehension of such a
+phenomenon!" murmured Mrs. Chetwinde.
+
+It was obvious to Dion that his two friends feared for the result.
+
+The Judge had left the bench. An hour passed by, and the chime of a
+clock striking five dropped down coolly, almost frostily, to the hot and
+curious crowd. Mrs. Clarke sat very still. Esme Darlington had returned
+to his place beside her, and she spoke to him now and then. Hadi
+Bey wiped his handsome rounded brown forehead with a colored silk
+handkerchief; and Aristide Dumeny, with half-closed eyes, ironically
+examined the crowd, whispered to a member of his Embassy who had
+accompanied him into court, folded his arms and sat looking down. Beadon
+Clarke's face was rigid, and a fierce red, like the red of a blush of
+shame, was fixed on his cheeks. His mother had pulled a thick black veil
+with a pattern down over her face, and was fidgeting perpetually with a
+chain of small moonstones set in gold which hung from her throat to her
+waist. Daventry, blinking and twitching, examined documents, used
+his handkerchief, glanced at his watch, hitched his gown up on his
+shoulders, looked at Mrs. Clarke and looked away.
+
+Uneasiness, like a monster, seemed crouching in the court as in a lair.
+
+At a quarter-past five, the Judge returned to the bench. He had received
+a communication from the jury, who filed in, to say, through their
+foreman, that they could not agree upon a verdict. A parley took
+place between the foreman and the Judge, who made inquiry about their
+difficulties, answered two questions, and finally dismissed them to
+further deliberations, urging them strongly to try to arrive at an
+unanimous conclusion.
+
+"I am willing to stay here till nightfall," he said, in a loud and
+almost menacing voice, "if there is any chance of a verdict."
+
+The jury, looking weary, harassed and very hot, once more disappeared,
+the Judge left the bench, and the murmuring crowd settled down to
+another period of waiting.
+
+To Dion it seemed that a great tragedy was impending. Already Mrs.
+Clarke had received a blow. The fact that the jury had publicly
+announced their disagreement would be given out to all the world by the
+newspapers, and must surely go against Mrs. Clarke even if she got a
+verdict ultimately.
+
+"Do you think there is any chance still?" he said to Mrs. Chetwinde.
+
+"Oh, yes. As I told you, Cynthia always manages to get what she wants."
+
+"I shouldn't think she can ever have wanted anything so much as she
+wants the right verdict to-day."
+
+"I don't know that," Mrs. Chetwinde replied, with a rather disconcerting
+dryness.
+
+She was using her fan slowly and monotonously, as if, perhaps, she were
+trying to make her mind calm by the repetition of a physical act.
+
+"I'm sorry the foreman said they couldn't agree," Dion said, almost in
+a whisper. "Even if the verdict is for Mrs. Clarke, I'm afraid that will
+go against her."
+
+"If she wins she wins, and it's all right. Cynthia's not the sort of
+woman who cares much what the world thinks. The only thing that really
+matters is what the world does; and if she gets the verdict the world
+won't do anything--except laugh at Beadon Clarke."
+
+A loud buzz of conversation rose from the court. Presently the light
+began to fade, and the buzz faded with it; then some lights were turned
+on, and there was a crescendo of voices. It was possible to see more
+clearly the multitude of faces, all of them hot, nearly all of them
+excited and expressive. A great many people were standing, packed
+closely together and looking obstinate in their determined curiosity.
+Most of them were either staring at, or were trying to stare at Mrs.
+Clarke, who was now talking to her solicitor. Esme Darlington was
+eating a meat lozenge and frowning, evidently discomposed by the jury's
+dilemma. Lady Ermyntrude Clarke had lifted her veil and was whispering
+eagerly to her son, bending her head, and emphasizing her remarks with
+excited gestures which seemed to suggest the energy of one already
+uplifted by triumph. Beadon Clarke listened with the passivity of a man
+encompassed by melancholy, and sunk deep in the abyss of shame.
+Aristide Dumeny was reading a letter which he held with long-fingered,
+waxen-white hands very near to his narrow dark eyes. His close-growing
+thick hair looked more glossy now that there was artificial light in
+the court; from the distance its undulations were invisible, and it
+resembled a cap of some heavy and handsome material drawn carefully down
+over his head. Hadi Bey retained his vivid, alert and martial demeanor.
+He was twisting his mustaches with a muscular brown hand, not nervously,
+but with a careless and almost a lively air. Many women gazed at him
+as if hypnotized; they found the fez very alluring. It carried their
+thoughts to the East; it made them feel that the romance of the East was
+not very far from them. Some of them wished it very near, and thought of
+husbands in silk hats, bowlers, and flat caps of Harris tweed with
+the dawning of a dull distaste. The woman just behind Dion was talking
+busily to her neighbor. Dion heard her say:
+
+"Some women always manage to have a good time. I wish I was one of them.
+Dick is a dear, but still----" She whispered for a minute or two; then
+out came her voice with, "There must be great chances for a woman in
+the diplomatic world. I knew a girl who married an _attache_ and went
+to Bucharest. You can have no idea what the Roumanians----" whisper,
+whisper, whisper.
+
+That woman was envying Mrs. Clarke, it seemed, but surely not envying
+her innocence. Dion began to be conscious of faint breaths from the
+furnace of desire, and suddenly he saw the gaunt and sickly-smiling head
+of hypocrisy, like the flat and tremulously moving head of a serpent,
+lifted up above the court. Only a little way off Robin, now better, but
+still "not quite the thing," was lying in his cozy cot in the nursery of
+No. 5 Little Market Street, with Rosamund sitting beside him. The window
+to-day, for once, would probably be shut as a concession to Robin's
+indisposition. A lamp would be burning perhaps. In fancy, Dion saw
+Rosamund's head lit up by a gentle glow, her hair giving out little
+gleams of gold, as if fire were caught in its meshes. How was it that
+her head always suggested to him purity; and not only her purity but the
+purity of all sweet, sane and gloriously vigorous women--those women
+who tread firmly, nobly, in the great central paths of life? He did not
+know, but he was certain that the head of no impure, of no lascivious
+woman could ever look like his Rosamund's. That nursery, holding little
+Robin and his mother in the lamplight, was near to this crowded court,
+but it was very far away too, as far as heaven is from hell. It would be
+good, presently, to go back to it.
+
+Chime after chime dropped down frostily into the almost rancid heat of
+the court. Time was sending its warning that night was coming to London.
+
+An epidemic of fidgeting and of coughing seized the crowd, which was
+evidently beginning to feel the stinging whip of an intense irritation.
+
+"What on earth," said the voice of a man, expressing the thought which
+bound all these brains together, "what on earth can the jury be up to?"
+
+Surely by now everything for and against Mrs. Clarke must have been
+discussed _ad nauseam_. Only the vainest of repetitions could be
+occupying the time of the jury. People began positively to hate those
+twelve uninteresting men, torn from their dull occupations to decide a
+woman's fate. Even Mrs. Chetwinde showed vexation.
+
+"This is really becoming ridiculous," she murmured. "Even twelve fools
+should know when to give their folly a rest."
+
+"I suppose there must be one or two holding out against all argument and
+persuasion. Don't you think so?" said Dion, almost morosely.
+
+"I dare say. I know a great deal about individual fools, but very little
+about them in dozens. The heat is becoming unbearable."
+
+She sighed deeply and moved in her seat, opening and shutting her fan.
+
+"She must be enduring torment," muttered Dion.
+
+"Yes; even Cynthia can hardly be proof against this intolerable delay."
+
+Another dropping down of chimes: eight o'clock! A long murmur went
+through the crowd. Some one said: "They're coming at last."
+
+Every one moved. Instinctively Dion leant forward to look at Mrs.
+Clarke. He felt very much excited and nervous, almost as if his own fate
+were about to be decided. As he looked he saw Mrs. Clarke draw herself
+up till she seemed taller than usual. She had a pair of gloves in
+her lap, and she now began to pull one of these gloves on, slowly and
+carefully, as if she were thinking about what she was doing. The jury
+filed in looking feverish, irritable and battered. Three or four of them
+showed piteous and injured expressions. Two others had the peculiar look
+of obstinate men who have been giving free rein to their vice, indulging
+in an orgy of what they call willpower. Their faces were, at the same
+time, implacable and ridiculous, but they walked impressively. The Judge
+was sent for. Two or three minutes elapsed before he came in. During
+those minutes there was no coughing and scarcely any moving. The silence
+in the court was vital. During it, Dion stared hard at the jury and
+strove to read the verdict in their faces. Naturally he failed. No
+message came from them to him.
+
+The Judge came back to the bench, looking weary and harsh.
+
+"Do you find that the respondent has been guilty or not guilty of
+misconduct with the co-respondent, Hadi Bey?" said the clerk of the
+court.
+
+"We find that the respondent has not been guilty of misconduct with Hadi
+Bey."
+
+After a slight pause, speaking in a louder voice than before, the clerk
+of the court said:
+
+"Do you find that the respondent has been guilty or not guilty of
+misconduct with the co-respondent, Aristide Dumeny?"
+
+"We find that the respondent has not been guilty of misconduct with
+Aristide Dumeny."
+
+Dion saw the Judge frown.
+
+Slight applause broke out in the court, but it was fitful and uncertain
+and almost immediately died away.
+
+Mrs. Chetwinde said in a low voice, almost as if to herself:
+
+"Cynthia has got what she wants--again."
+
+Then, after the formalities, the crowd was in movement; the weary and
+excited people, their curiosity satisfied at last, began to melt away;
+the young barristers hurried out, eagerly discussing the rights and
+wrongs of the case; and Mrs. Clarke's adherents made their way to her to
+offer her their congratulations.
+
+Daventry was triumphant. He shook his client's hand, held it, shook
+it again, and could scarcely find words to express his excitement and
+delight. Even Esme Darlington's usual careful serenity was for the
+moment obscured by an emotion eminently human, as he spoke into Mrs.
+Clarke's ear the following words of a ripe wisdom:
+
+"Cynthia, my dear, after this do take my advice and live as others live.
+In a conventional world conventionality is the line of least resistance.
+Don't turn to the East unless the whole congregation does it."
+
+"I shall never forget your self-sacrifice in facing the crowd with me
+to-day, dear Esme," was her answer. "I know how much it cost you."
+
+"Oh, as to that, for an old friend--h'm, ha!"
+
+His voice failed in his beard. He drew forth a beautiful Indian
+handkerchief--a gift from his devoted friend the Viceroy of India--and
+passed it over a face which looked unusually old.
+
+Mrs. Chetwinde said:
+
+"I expected you to win, Cynthia. It was stupid of the jury to be so
+slow in arriving at the inevitable verdict. But stupid people are as
+lethargic as silly ones are swift. How shall we get to the carriage? We
+can't go out by the public exit. I hear the crowd is quite enormous, and
+won't move. We must try a side door, if there is one."
+
+Then Dion held Mrs. Clarke's hand, and looked down at her haggard but
+still self-possessed face. It astonished him to find that she preserved
+her earnestly observant expression.
+
+"I'm very glad," was all he found to say.
+
+"Thank you," she replied, in a voice perhaps slightly more husky than
+usual. "I mean to stay on in London for some time. I've got lots of
+things to settle"--she paused--"before I go back to Constantinople."
+
+"But are you really going back?"
+
+"Of course--eventually."
+
+Her voice, nearly drowned by the noise of people departing from the
+court, sounded to him implacable.
+
+"You heard the hope of the Court that my husband and I would come
+together again? Of course we never shall. But I'm sure I shall get hold
+of Jimmy. I know my husband won't keep him from me." She stared at his
+shoulders. "I want you to help me with Jimmy's physical education--I
+mean by getting him to that instructor you spoke of."
+
+"To be sure--Jenkins," he said, marveling at her.
+
+"Jenkins--exactly. And I hope it will be possible for your wife and me
+to meet soon, now there's nothing against it owing to the verdict."
+
+"Thank you."
+
+"Do tell her, and see if we can arrange it."
+
+Dumeny at this moment passed close to them with his friend on his way
+out of court. His eyes rested on Mrs. Clarke, and a faint smile went
+over his face as he slightly raised his hat.
+
+"Good-by," said Mrs. Clarke to Dion.
+
+And she turned to Sir John Addington.
+
+Dion made his way slowly out into the night, thinking of the unwise life
+and of the smile on the lips of Dumeny.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+That summer saw, among other events of moment, the marriage of Beatrice
+and Daventry, the definite establishment of Robin as a power in his
+world, and the beginning of one of those noiseless contests which seem
+peculiar to women, and which are seldom, if ever, fully comprehended in
+all their bearings by men.
+
+Beatrice, as she wished it, had a very quiet, indeed quite a
+hole-and-corner wedding in a Kensington church, of which nobody had ever
+heard till she was married in it, to the great surprise of its vicar,
+its verger, and the decent widow woman who swept its pews for a moderate
+wage. For their honeymoon she and Daventry disappeared to the Garden of
+France to make a leisurely tour through the Chateaux country.
+
+Meanwhile Robin, according to his nurse, "was growing something
+wonderful, and improving with his looks like nothing I ever see before,
+and me with babies ever since I can remember anything as you may say,
+a dear!" His immediate circle of wondering admirers was becoming almost
+extensive, including, as it did, not only his mother and father, his
+nurse, and the four servants at No. 5 Little Market Street, but also
+Mrs. Leith senior, Bruce Evelin--now rather a lonely man--and Mr. Thrush
+of John's Court near the Edgware Road.
+
+At this stage of his existence, Rosamund loved Robin reasonably but with
+a sort of still and holy concentration, which gradually impinged upon
+Dion like a quiet force which spreads subtly, affecting those in its
+neighborhood. There was in it something mystical and, remembering her
+revelation to him of the desire to enter the religious life which had
+formerly threatened to dominate her, Dion now fully realized the truth
+of a remark once made by Mrs. Chetwinde about his wife. She had called
+Rosamund "a radiant mystic."
+
+Now changes were blossoming in Rosamund like new flowers coming up in
+a garden, and one of these flowers was a beautiful selfishness. So Dion
+called it to himself but never to others. It was a selfishness surely
+deliberate and purposeful--an unselfish selfishness, if such a thing can
+be. Can the ideal mother, Dion asked himself, be wholly without it? All
+that she is, perhaps, reacts upon the child of her bosom, the child who
+looks up to her as its Providence. And what she is must surely be at
+least partly conditioned by what she does and by all her way of life.
+The child is her great concern, and therefore she must guard sedulously
+all the gates by which possible danger to the child might strive to
+enter in. This was what Rosamund had evidently made up her mind to do,
+was beginning to do. Dion compared her with many of the woman of London
+who have children and who, nevertheless, continue to lead haphazard,
+frivolous, utterly thoughtless lives, caring apparently little more for
+the moral welfare of their children than for the moral welfare of their
+Pekinese. Mrs. Clarke had a hatred of "things with wings growing out of
+their shoulders." Rosamund would probably never wish their son to have
+wings growing out of his shoulders, but if he had little wings on his
+sandals, like the Hermes, perhaps she would be very happy. With winged
+sandals he might take an occasional flight to the gods. Hermes, of
+course, was really a rascal, many-sided, and, like most many-sided
+people and gods, capable of insincerity and even of cunning; but the
+Hermes of Olympia, their Hermes, was the messenger purged, by Praxiteles
+of very bit of dross--noble, manly, pure, serene. Little Robin bore at
+present no resemblance to the Hermes, or indeed--despite the nurse's
+statements--to any one else except another baby; but already it was
+beginning mysteriously to be possible to foresee the great
+advance--long clothes to short clothes, short clothes to knickerbockers,
+knickerbockers to trousers. Robin would be a boy, a youth, a man, and
+what Rosamund was might make all the difference in that Trinity. The
+mystic who enters into religion dedicated her life to God. Rosamund
+dedicated hers to her boy. It was the same thing with a difference. And
+as the mystic is often a little selfish in shutting out cries of the
+world--cries sometimes for human aid which can scarcely be referred from
+the fellow-creature to God--so Rosamund was a little selfish, guided by
+the unusual temperament which was housed within her. She shut out some
+of the cries that she might hear Robin's the better.
+
+Robin's sudden attack of illness during Mrs. Clarke's ordeal had been
+overcome and now seemed almost forgotten. Rosamund had encountered the
+small fierce shock of it with an apparent calmness and self-possession
+which at the time had astonished Dion and roused his admiration. A baby
+often comes hardly into the world and slips out of it with the terrible
+ease of things fated to far-off destinies. During one night Robin
+had certainly been in danger. Perhaps that danger had taught Rosamund
+exactly how much her child meant to her. Dion did not know this; he
+suspected it because, since Robin's illness, he had become much more
+sharply aware of the depth of mother-love in Rosamund, of the hovering
+wings that guarded the nestling. That efficient guarding implies
+shutting out was presently to be brought home to him with a definiteness
+leading to embarrassment.
+
+The little interruptions a baby brings into the lives of a married
+couple were setting in. Dion was sure that Rosamund never thought
+of them as interruptions. When Robin grew much older, when he was in
+trousers, and could play games, and appreciate his father's prowess
+and God-given capacities in the gymnasium, on the tennis lawn, over the
+plowland among the partridges, Dion's turn would come. Meanwhile, did
+he actually love Robin? He thought he did. He was greatly interested in
+Robin, was surprised by his abrupt manifestations and almost hypnotized
+by his outbursts of wrath; when Robin assumed his individual look of
+mild inquiry, Dion was touched, and had a very tender feeling at his
+heart. No doubt all this meant love. But Dion fully realized that his
+feeling towards Robin did not compare with Rosamund's. It was less
+intense, less profound, less of the very roots of being. His love for
+Robin was a shadow compared with the substance of his love for Rosamund.
+How would Rosamund's two loves compare? He began to wonder, even
+sometimes put to himself the questions, "Suppose Robin were to die,
+how would she take it? And how would she take it if I were to die?" And
+then, of course, his mind sometimes did foolish things, asked questions
+beginning with, "Would she rather----?" He remembered his talks with
+Rosamund on the Acropolis--talks never renewed--and compared the former
+life without little Robin, with the present life pervaded gently, or
+vivaciously, or almost furiously by little Robin. Among the mountains
+and by the deep-hued seas of Greece he had foreseen and wondered about
+Robin. Now Robin was here; the great change was accomplished. Probably
+Rosamund and he, Dion, would never again be alone with their love. Other
+children, perhaps, would come. Even if they did not, Robin would pervade
+their lives, in long clothes, short skirts, knickerbockers, trousers. He
+might, of course, some day choose a profession which would carry him to
+some distant land: to an Indian jungle or a West African swamp. But by
+that time his parents would be middle-aged people. And how would their
+love be then? Dion knew that now, when Rosamund and he were still young,
+both less than thirty, he would give a hundred Robins, even if they were
+all his own Robins, to keep his one Rosamund. That was probably quite
+natural now, for Robin was really rather inexpressive in the midst of
+his most unbridled demonstrations. When he was calm and blew bubbles he
+had charm; when he was red and furious he had a certain power; when he
+sneezed he had pathos; when he slept the serenity of him might be felt;
+but he would mean very much more presently. He would grow, and surely
+his father's love for him would grow. But could it ever grow to the
+height, the flowering height, of the husband's love for Rosamund? Dion
+already felt certain that it never could, that it was his destiny to be
+husband rather than parent, the eternal lover rather than the eternal
+father. Rosamund's destiny was perhaps to be the eternal mother. She had
+never been exactly a lover. Perhaps her remarkable and beautiful
+purity of disposition had held her back from being that. Force, energy,
+vitality, strong feelings, she had; but the peculiar something in which
+body seems mingled with soul, in which soul seems body and body soul,
+was apparently lacking in her. Dion had perhaps never, with full
+consciousness, missed that element in her till Robin made his
+appearance; but Robin, in his bubbling innocence, and almost absurd
+consciousness of himself and of others, did many things that were not
+unimportant. He even had the shocking impertinence to open his father's
+eyes, and to show him truths in a bright light--truths which, till now,
+had remained half-hidden in shadow; babyhood enlightened youth, the
+youth persisting hardily because it had never sown wild oats. Robin did
+not know that; he knew, in fact scarcely anything except when he wanted
+nourishment and when he desired repose. He also knew his mother, knew
+her mystically and knew her greedily, with knowledge which seemed of
+God, and with an awareness whose parent was perhaps a vital appetite.
+At other people he gazed and bubbled but with a certain infantile
+detachment, though his nurse, of course, declared that she had never
+known a baby to take such intelligent notice of all created things
+in its neighborhood. "He knows," she asseverated, with the air of one
+versed in mysteries, "he knows, does little master, who's who as well as
+any one, and a deal better than some that prides themselves on this and
+that, a little upsy-daisy-dear!"
+
+Mrs. Leith senior paid him occasional visits, which Dion found just
+the least bit trying. Since Omar had been killed, Dion had felt more
+solicitous about his mother, who had definitely refused ever to have
+another dog. If he had been allowed to give her a dog he would have felt
+more easy about her, despite Beatrice's quiet statement of why Omar had
+meant so much. As he might not do that, he begged his mother to come
+very often to Little Market Street and to become intimate with Robin.
+But when he saw her with Robin he was generally embarrassed, although
+she was obviously enchanted with that gentleman, for whose benefit she
+was amazingly prodigal of nods and becks and wreathed smiles. It was
+a pity, he thought, that his mother was at moments so apparently
+elaborate. He felt her elaboration the more when it was contrasted with
+the transparent simplicity of Rosamund. Even Robin, he fancied, was
+at moments rather astonished by it, and perhaps pushed on towards a
+criticism at present beyond the range of his powers. But Mrs. Leith's
+complete self-possession, even when immersed in the intricacies of a
+baby-language totally unintelligible to her son, made it impossible to
+give her a hint to be a little less--well, like herself when at No.
+5. So he resigned himself to a faint discomfort which he felt sure was
+shared by Rosamund, although neither of them ever spoke of it. But they
+never discussed his mother, and always assumed that she was ideal both
+as mother-in-law and grandmother. She was Robin's godmother and had
+given him delightful presents. Bruce Evelin and Daventry were his
+godfathers.
+
+Bruce Evelin now lived alone in the large house in Great Cumberland
+Place. He made no complaint of his solitude, which indeed he might be
+said to have helped to bring about by his effective, though speechless,
+advocacy of Daventry's desire. But it was obvious to affectionate eyes
+that he sometimes felt rather homeless, and that he was happy to be in
+the little Westminster home where such a tranquil domesticity reigned.
+Dion sometimes felt as if Bruce Evelin were watching over that home in
+a wise old man's way, rather as Rosamund watched over Robin, with a
+deep and still concentration. Bruce Evelin had, he confessed, "a
+great feeling" for Robin, whom he treated with quiet common sense as
+a responsible entity, bearing, with a matchless wisdom, that entity's
+occasional lapses from decorum. Once, for instance, Robin chose Bruce
+Evelin's arms unexpectedly as a suitable place to be sick in, without
+drawing down upon himself any greater condemnation than a quiet, "How
+lucky he selected a godfather as his receptacle!"
+
+And Mr. Thrush of John's Court? One evening, when he returned home, Dion
+found that old phenomenon in the house paying his respects to Robin. He
+was quite neatly dressed, and wore beneath a comparatively clean collar
+a wisp of black tie that was highly respectable, though his top hat,
+deposited in the hall, was still as the terror that walketh in darkness.
+His poor old gray eyes were pathetic, and his long, battered old face
+was gently benign; but his nose, fiery and tremendous as ever, still
+made proclamation of his "failing." Dion knew that Mr. Thrush had
+already been two or three times to see Robin, and had wondered about it
+with some amusement. "Where will your cult for Mr. Thrush lead you?"
+he had laughingly said to Rosamund. And then he had forgotten "the
+phenomenon," as he sometimes called Mr. Thrush. But now, when he
+actually beheld Mr. Thrush in his house, seated on a chair in the
+nursery, with purple hands folded over a seedy, but carefully brushed,
+black coat, he genuinely marveled.
+
+Mr. Thrush rose up at his entrance, quite unself-conscious and
+self-possessed, and as Dion, concealing his surprise, greeted the
+visitor, Rosamund, who was showing Robin, remarked:
+
+"Mr. Thrush has great ideas on hygiene, Dion. He quite agrees with us
+about not wrapping children in cotton-wool."
+
+"Your conceptions are Doric, too, in fact?" said Dion to Thrush, in the
+slightly rough or bluff manner which he now sometimes assumed.
+
+"I wouldn't go so far as to say exactly that, sir," said Mr. Thrush,
+speaking with a sort of gentleness which was almost refined. "But
+having been a chemist in a very good way of business--just off Hanover
+Square--during the best years of my life, I have my views, foolish or
+perhaps the reverse, on the question of infants. My motto, so far as I
+have one, is, _Never cosset_."
+
+He turned towards Robin, who, from his mother's arms, sent him a look of
+mild inquiry, and reiterated, with plaintive emphasis, "_Never cosset!_"
+
+"There, Dion!" said Rosamund, with a delicious air of genial
+appreciation which made Mr. Thrush gently glow.
+
+"And I'll go further," pursued that authority, lifting a purple hand
+and moving his old head to give emphasis to his deliverance, "I'll
+go further even than that. Having retired from the pharmaceutical
+brotherhood I'll say this: If you can do it, avoid drugs. Chemists"--he
+leaned forward and emphatically lowered his voice almost to a
+whisper--"Chemists alone know what harm they do."
+
+"By Jove, though, and do they?" said Dion heartily.
+
+"Terrible, sir, terrible! Some people's insides that I know of--used to
+know of, perhaps I should say--must be made of iron to deal with all the
+medicines they put into 'em. Oh, keep your baby's inside free from all
+such abominations!" (He loomed gently over Robin, who continued to stare
+at him with an expression of placid interrogation.) "Keep it away from
+such things as the Sampson Syrup, Mother Maybrick's infant tablets,
+Price's purge for the nursery, Tinkler's tone-up for tiny tots, Ada
+Lane's pills for the poppets, and above and before all, from Professor
+Jeremiah T. Iplock's 'What baby wants' at two-and-sixpence the bottle,
+or in tabloid form for the growing child, two-and-eight the box. Keep
+his inside clear of all such, and you'll be thankful, and he'll bless
+you both on his bended knees when he comes to know his preservation."
+
+"He'll never have them, Mr. Thrush," said Rosamund, with a sober voice
+and twinkling eyes. "Never."
+
+"Bless you, ma'am, for those beautiful words. And now really I must be
+going."
+
+"You'll find tea in the housekeeper's room, Mr. Thrush, as usual," said
+Rosamund.
+
+"And very kind of you to have it there, I'm sure, ma'am!" the old
+gentleman gallantly replied as he made his wavering adieux.
+
+At the door he turned round to face the nursery once more, lifted one
+hand in a manner almost apostolic, and uttered the final warning "_Never
+cosset!_" Then he evaporated, not without a sort of mossy dignity, and
+might be heard tremblingly descending to the lower regions.
+
+"Rose, since when do we have a housekeeper's room?" asked Dion, touching
+Robin's puckers with a gentle fore-finger.
+
+"I can't call it the servants' hall to him, poor old man. And I like to
+give him tea. It may wean him from----" An expressive look closed the
+sentence.
+
+That night, at last, Dion drew from her an explanation of her Thrush
+cult. On the evening when Mr. Thrush had rescued her in the fog, as they
+walked slowly to Great Cumberland Place, he had told her something of
+his history. Rosamund had a great art in drawing from people the story
+of their troubles when she cared to do so. Her genial and warm-hearted
+sympathy was an almost irresistible lure. Mr. Thrush's present fate
+had been brought about by a tragic circumstance, the death of his only
+child, a girl of twelve, who had been run over by an omnibus in Oxford
+Circus and killed on the spot. Left alone with a peevish, nagging wife
+who had never suited him, or, as he expressed it, "studied" him in any
+way, he had gone down the hill till he had landed near the bottom. All
+his love had been fastened on his child, and sorrow had not strengthened
+but had embittered him.
+
+"But to me he seems a gentle old thing," Dion said, when Rosamund told
+him this.
+
+"He's very bitter inside, poor old chap, but he looks upon us as
+friends. He's taken sorrow the wrong way. That's how it is. I'm trying
+to get him to look at things differently, and Robin's helping me."
+
+"Already!" said Dion, smiling, yet touched by her serious face.
+
+"Yes. He's an unconscious agent. Poor old Mr. Thrush has never learnt
+the lesson of our dear Greek tombs: farewell! He hasn't been able to say
+that simply and beautifully, leaving all in other hands. And so he's the
+poor old wreck we know. I want to get him out of it if I can. He came
+into my life on a night of destiny too."
+
+But she explained nothing more. And she left Dion wondering just how she
+would receive a sorrow such as had overtaken Mr. Thrush. Would she be
+able to submit as those calm and simple figures on the tombs which she
+loved appeared to be submitting? Would she let what she loved pass away
+into the shades with a brave and noble, "Farewell"? Would she take the
+hand of Sorrow, that hand of steel and ice, as one takes the hand of a
+friend--stern, terrible, unfathomed, never to be fathomed in this world,
+but a friend? He wondered, but, loving her with that love which never
+ceased to grow within him, he prayed that he might never know. She
+seemed born to shed happiness and to be happy, and indeed he could
+scarcely imagine her wretched.
+
+It was after the explanation of Mr. Thrush's exact relation to Rosamund
+that the silent contest began in the waning summer when London was
+rather arid, and even the Thames looked hot between its sluggish banks
+of mud.
+
+After the trial of her divorce case was over, Mrs. Clarke had left
+London and gone into the country for a little while, to rest in a small
+house possessed by Esme Darlington at Hook Green, a fashionable part
+of Surrey. At, and round about, Hook Green various well-known persons
+played occasionally at being rural; it suited Mrs. Clarke very well to
+stay for a time among them under Mr. Darlington's ample and eminently
+respectable wing. She hated being careful, but even she, admonished by
+Mr. Darlington, realized that immediately after emerging from the shadow
+of a great scandal she had better play propriety for a time. It really
+must be "playing," for, as had been proved at the trial, she was a
+thoroughly proper person who hadn't troubled to play hitherto. So she
+rested at Hook Green, till the season was over, with Miss Bainbridge, an
+old cousin of Esme's; and Esme "ran down" for Saturdays and Sundays, and
+"ran up" from Mondays to Saturdays, thus seeing something of the season
+and also doing his chivalrous devoir by "poor dear Cynthia who had had
+such a cruel time of it."
+
+The season died, and Mr. Darlington then settled down for a while at
+Pinkney's Place, as his house was called, and persuaded Mrs. Clarke to
+lengthen her stay there till the end of August. He would invite a few of
+the people likely to "be of use" to her under the present circumstances,
+and by September things would be "dying down a little," with all the
+shooting parties of the autumn beginning, and memories of the past
+season growing a bit gray and moldy. Then Mrs. Clarke could do what she
+liked "within reason, of course, and provided she gave Constantinople
+a wide berth." This she had not promised to do, but she seldom made
+promises.
+
+Rosamund had expressed to Daventry her pleasure in the result of the
+trial, but in the rather definitely detached manner which had always
+marked her personal aloofness from the whole business of the deciding of
+Mrs. Clarke's innocence or guilt. She had only spoken once again of the
+case to Dion, when he had come to tell her the verdict. Then she had
+said how glad she was, and what a relief it must be to Mrs. Clarke,
+especially after the hesitation of the jury. Dion had touched on Mrs.
+Clarke's great self-possession, and--Rosamund had begun to tell him
+how much better little Robin was. He had not repeated to Rosamund Mrs.
+Clarke's final words to him. There was no necessity to do that just
+then.
+
+Mrs. Clarke stayed at Hook Green till the end of August without
+making any attempt to know Rosamund. By that time Dion had come to the
+conclusion that she had forgotten about the matter. Perhaps she had
+merely had a passing whim which had died. He was not sorry, indeed, he
+was almost actively glad, for he was quite sure Rosamund had no wish to
+make Mrs. Clarke's acquaintance. At the beginning of September, however,
+when he had just come back to work after a month in camp which had
+hardened him and made him as brown as a berry, he received the following
+note:
+
+
+"CLARIDGE'S HOTEL, 2 September, 1897
+
+"DEAR Mr. LEITH,--What of that charming project of bringing about a
+meeting between your wife and me? Esme Darlington is always talking of
+her beauty and talent, and you know my love of the one and the other.
+Beauty is the consolation of the world; talent the incentive to action
+stirring our latent vitality. In your marriage you are fortunate; in
+mine I have been unfortunate. You were very kind to me when things were
+tiresome. I feel a desire to see your happiness. I'm here arranging
+matters with my solicitor, and expect to be here off and on for several
+months. Perhaps October will see you back in town, but if you happen
+to be in this dusty nothingness now, you might come and see me one
+day.--Yours with goodwill,
+
+"CYNTHIA CLARKE
+
+"P. S.--My husband and I are separated, of course, but I have my boy a
+good deal with me. He will be up with me to-morrow. I very much want to
+take him to that physical instructor you spoke of to me. I forget the
+name. Is it Hopkins?"
+
+
+As Dion read this note in the little house he felt the soft warm grip
+of Stamboul. Rosamund and Robin were staying at Westgate till the end of
+September; he would go down there every week from Saturday till Monday.
+It was now a Monday evening. Four London days lay before him. He put
+away the letter and resolved to answer it on the morrow. This he did,
+explaining that his wife was by the sea and would not be back till the
+autumn. He added that the instructor's name was not Hopkins but Jenkins,
+and gave Mrs. Clarke the address of the gymnasium. At the end of his
+short note he expressed his intention of calling at Claridge's, but did
+not say when he would come. He thought he would not fix the day and the
+hour until he had been to Westgate. On a postcard Mrs. Clarke thanked
+him for Jenkins's address, and concluded with "Suggest your own day,
+or come and dine if you like. Perhaps, as you're alone, you'll prefer
+that.--C. C."
+
+At Westgate Dion showed Rosamund Mrs. Clarke's letter. As she read it
+he watched her, but could gather nothing from her face. She was looking
+splendidly well and, he thought, peculiarly radiant. A surely perfect
+happiness gazed bravely out from her mother's eyes, changed in some
+mysterious way since the coming of Robin.
+
+"Well?" he said, as she gave him back the letter.
+
+"It's very kind of her. Esme Darlington turns us all into swans, doesn't
+he? He's a good-natured enchanter. How thankful she must be that it's
+all right about her boy. Oh, here's Robin! Robino, salute your father!
+He's a hard-bitten military man, and some day--who knows?--he'll have
+to fight for his country. Dion, look at him! Now isn't he trying to
+salute?"
+
+"And that he is, ma'am!" cried the ecstatic nurse. "He knows, a boy!
+It's trumpets, sir, and drums he's after already. He'll fight some day
+with the best of them. Won't he then, a marchy-warchy-umtums?"
+
+And Robin made reply with active fists and feet and martial noises,
+assuming alternate expressions of severe decision almost worthy of
+a Field-Marshal, and helpless bewilderment that suggested a startled
+puppy. He was certainly growing in vigor and beginning to mean a good
+deal more than he had meant at first. Dion was more deeply interested
+in him now, and sometimes felt as if Robin returned the interest,
+was beginning to be able to assemble and concentrate his faculties at
+certain moments. Certainly Robin already played an active part in the
+lives of his parents. Dion realized that when, on the following Monday,
+he returned to town without having settled anything with regard to Mrs.
+Clarke. Somehow Robin had always intervened when Dion had drawn near to
+the subject of the projected acquaintance between the woman who kept the
+door of her life and the woman who, innocently, followed the flitting
+light of desire. There were the evenings, of course, but somehow they
+were not propitious for a discussion of social values. Although Robin
+retired early, he was apt to pervade the conversation. And then Rosamund
+went away at intervals to have a look at him, and Dion filled up
+the time by smoking a cigar on the cliff edge. The clock struck
+ten-thirty--bedtime at Westgate--before one had at all realized how late
+it was getting; and it was out of the question to bother about things
+on the edge of sleep. That would have made for insomnia. The question
+of Mrs. Clarke could easily wait till the autumn, when Rosamund would
+be back in town. It was impossible for the two women to know each other
+when the one was at Claridge's and the other at Westgate. Things would
+arrange themselves naturally in the autumn. Dion never said to himself
+that Rosamund did not intend to know Mrs. Clarke, but he did say to
+himself that Mrs. Clarke intended to know Rosamund.
+
+He wondered a little about that. Why should Mrs. Clarke be so apparently
+keen on making the acquaintance of Rosamund? Of course, Rosamund was
+delightful, and was known to be delightful. But Mrs. Clarke must know
+heaps of attractive people. It really was rather odd. He decidedly
+wished that Mrs. Clarke hadn't happened to get the idea into her head,
+for he didn't care to press Rosamund on the subject. The week passed,
+and another visit to Westgate, and he had not been to Claridge's. In the
+second week another note came to him from Mrs. Clarke.
+
+
+"CLARIDGE'S, ETC.
+
+"DEAR Mr. LEITH,--I'm enchanted with Jenkins. He's a trouvaille. My
+boy goes every day to the 'gym,' as he calls it, and is getting on
+splendidly. We are both grateful to you, and hope to tell you so. Come
+whenever you feel inclined, but only then. I love complete liberty too
+well ever to wish to deprive another of it--even if I could. How wise of
+your wife to stay by the sea. I hope it's doing wonders for the baby who
+(mercifully) isn't wonderful.--Yours sincerely,
+
+"CYNTHIA CLARKE"
+
+
+After receiving this communication Dion felt that he simply must go
+to see Mrs. Clarke, and he called at the hotel and asked for her about
+five-thirty on the following afternoon. She was out, and he left his
+card, feeling rather relieved. Next morning he had a note regretting she
+had missed him, and asking him, "when" he came again, to let her know
+beforehand at what time he meant to arrive so that she might be in. He
+thanked her, and promised to do this, but he did not repeat his visit.
+By this time, quite unreasonably he supposed, he had begun to feel
+decidedly uncomfortable about the whole affair. Yet, when he considered
+it fully and fairly, he told himself that he was a fool to imagine that
+there could be anything in it which was not quite usual and natural.
+He had been sympathetic to Mrs. Clarke when she was passing through
+an unpleasant experience; he was Daventry's good friend; he was also a
+friend of Mrs. Chetwinde and of Esme Darlington; naturally, therefore,
+Mrs. Clarke was inclined to number him among those who had "stuck to
+her" when she was being cruelly attacked. Where was the awkwardness in
+the situation? After denying to himself that there was any awkwardness
+he quite suddenly and quite clearly realized one evening that such
+denial was useless. There was awkwardness, and it arose simply from
+Rosamund's passive resistance to the faint pressure--he thought it
+amounted to that--applied by Mrs. Clarke. This it was which had given
+him, which gave him still, a sensation obscure, but definite, of
+contest.
+
+Mrs. Clarke meant to know Rosamund, and Rosamund didn't mean to know
+Mrs. Clarke. Well, then, the obvious thing for him to do was to keep out
+of Mrs. Clarke's way. In such a matter Rosamund must do as she liked.
+He had no intention of attempting to force upon her any one, however
+suitable as an acquaintance or even as a friend, whom she didn't want
+to know. He loved her far too well to do that. He decided not to mention
+Mrs. Clarke again to Rosamund when he went down to Westgate; but somehow
+or other her name came up, and her boy was mentioned, too.
+
+"Is he still with his mother?" Rosamund asked.
+
+"Yes. He's nearly eleven, I believe. She takes him to Jenkins for
+exercise. She's very fond of him, I think."
+
+After a moment of silence Rosamund simply said, "Poor child!" and then
+spoke of something else, but in those two words, said as she had said
+them, Dion thought he heard a definite condemnation of Mrs. Clarke. He
+began to wonder whether Rosamund, although she had not read a full, or,
+so far as he knew, any account of the case in the papers, had somehow
+come to know a good deal about the unwise life of Constantinople.
+Friends came to see her in London; she knew several people at Westgate;
+report of a _cause celebre_ floats in the air; he began to believe she
+knew.
+
+At the end of September, just before Rosamund was to return to London
+for the autumn and winter, Mrs. Clarke wrote to Dion again.
+
+
+"CLARIDGE'S, 28 September, 1897
+
+"DEAR Mr. LEITH,--I'm so sorry to bother you, but I wonder whether
+you can spare me a moment. It's about my boy. He seems to me to have
+strained himself with his exercises. Jenkins, as you probably know, has
+gone away for a fortnight's holiday, so I can't consult him. I feel a
+little anxious. You're an athlete, I know, and could set me right in a
+moment if I'm making a fuss about nothing. The strain seems to be in the
+right hip. Is that possible?--Yours sincerely,
+
+"CYNTHIA CLARKE"
+
+
+Dion didn't know how to refuse this appeal, so he fixed an hour, went
+to Claridge's, and had an interview with Mrs. Clarke and her son,
+Jimmy Clarke. When he went up to her sitting-room he felt rather
+uncomfortable. He was thinking of her invitation to dinner, and to call
+again, of his lack of response. She must certainly be thinking of
+them, too. But when he was with her his discomfort died away before her
+completely natural and oddly impersonal manner. Dinners, visits, seemed
+far away from her thoughts. She was apparently concentrated on her boy,
+and seemed to be thinking of him, not at all of Dion. Had Dion been a
+vain man he might have been vexed by her indifference; as he was not
+vain, he felt relieved, and so almost grateful to her. Jimmy,
+too, helped to make things go easily. The young rascal, a sturdy,
+good-looking boy, with dark eyes brimming over with mischief, took
+tremendously to Dion at first sight.
+
+"I say," he remarked, "you must be jolly strong! May I?"
+
+He felt Dion's biceps, and added, with a sudden profound gravity:
+
+"Well, I'm blowed! Mater, he's almost as hard as Jenkins."
+
+His mother gave Dion a swift considering look, and then at once began
+to consult him about Jimmy's hip. The visit ended with an application by
+Dion of Elliman's embrocation, for which one of the hotel page-boys was
+sent to the nearest chemist.
+
+"I say, mind you come again, Mr. Leith!" vociferated Jimmy, when Dion
+was going. "You're better than doctors, you know."
+
+Mrs. Clarke did not back up her son's frank invitation. She only thanked
+Dion quietly in her husky voice, and bade him good-by with an "I know
+how busy you must be, and how difficult you must find it ever to pay a
+call. You've been very good to us." At the door she added, "I've never
+seen Jimmy take so much to anyone as to you." As Dion went down the
+stairs something in him was gently glowing. He was glad that young
+rascal had taken to him at sight. The fact gave him confidence when he
+thought of Robin and the future.
+
+It occurred to him, as he turned into the Greville Club, that Mrs.
+Clarke had not once mentioned Rosamund during his visit.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+When Rosamund, Robin and the nurse came back to London on the last day
+of September, Beatrice and Daventry were settled in their home. They
+had taken a flat in De Lorne Gardens, Kensington, high up on the seventh
+floor of a big building, which overlooked from a distance the trees of
+Kensington Gardens. Their friends soon began to call on them, and one
+of the first to mount up in the lift to their "hill-top," as Daventry
+called their seventh floor, was Mrs. Clarke. A few nights after her
+call the Daventrys dined in Little Market Street, and Daventry, whose
+happiness had raised him not only to the seventh-floor flat, but also
+to the seventh heaven, mentioned that she had been, and that they
+were going to dine with her at Claridge's on the following night. He
+enlarged, almost with exuberance, upon her _savoir-vivre_, her knowledge
+and taste, and said Beattie was delighted with her. Beatrice did not
+deny it. She was never exuberant, but she acknowledged that she had
+found Mrs. Clarke attractive and interesting.
+
+"A lot of the clever ones are going to-morrow," said Daventry. He
+mentioned several, both women and men, among them a lady who was famed
+for her exclusiveness as well as for her brains.
+
+Evidently Mrs. Chetwinde had been speaking by the book when she had said
+at the trial, "If she wins, she wins, and it's all right. If she
+gets the verdict, the world won't do anything, except laugh at Beadon
+Clarke." No serious impression had apparently been left upon society by
+the first disagreement of the jury. The "wild mind in the innocent body"
+had been accepted for what it was. And perhaps now, chastened by a sad
+experience, the wild mind was on the way to becoming tame. Dion wondered
+if it were so. After dinner he was undeceived by Daventry, who told him
+over their cigars that Mrs. Clarke was positively going back to live in
+Constantinople, and had already taken a flat there, "against every one's
+advice." Beadon Clarke had got himself transferred, and was to be sent
+to Madrid, so she wouldn't run against him; but nevertheless she was
+making a great mistake.
+
+"However," Daventry concluded, "there's something fine about her
+persistence; and of course a guilty woman would never dare to go back,
+even after an acquittal."
+
+"No," said Dion, thinking of the way his hand had been held in Mrs.
+Chetwinde's drawing-room. "I suppose not."
+
+"I wonder when Rosamund will get to know her," said Daventry, with
+perhaps a slightly conscious carelessness.
+
+"Never, perhaps," said Dion, with equal carelessness. "Often one
+lives for years in London without knowing, or even ever seeing, one's
+next-door neighbor."
+
+"To be sure!" said Daventry. "One of London's many advantages, or
+disadvantages, as the case may be."
+
+And he began to talk about Whistler's Nocturnes. Dion had never
+happened to tell Daventry about Jimmy Clarke's strained hip and his own
+application of Elliman's embrocation. He had told Rosamund, of course,
+and she had said that if Robin ever strained himself she should do
+exactly the same thing.
+
+That night, when the Daventrys had gone, Dion asked Rosamund whether
+she thought Beattie was happy. She hesitated for a moment, then she said
+with her usual directness:
+
+"I'm not sure that she is, Dion. Guy is a dear, kind, good husband to
+her, but there's something homeless about Beattie somehow. She's living
+in that pretty little flat in De Lorne Gardens, and yet she seems to
+me a wanderer. But we must wait; she may find what she's looking for. I
+pray to God that she will."
+
+She did not explain; he guessed what she meant. Had she, too, been a
+wanderer at first, and had she found what she had been looking for?
+While Rosamund was speaking he had been pitying Guy. When she had
+finished he wondered whether he had ever had cause to pity some one
+else--now and then. Despite the peaceful happiness of his married life
+there was a very faint coldness at, or near to, his heart. It came upon
+him like a breath of frost stealing up out of the darkness to one who,
+standing in a room lit and warmed by a glowing fire, opens a window and
+lets in for a moment a winter night. But he shut his window quickly, and
+he turned to look at the fire and to warm his hands at its glow.
+
+Mrs. Clarke rapidly established a sort of intimacy with the Daventrys.
+As Daventry had helped to fight for her, and genuinely delighted in her
+faculties, this was very natural; for Beatrice, unlike Rosamund, was
+apt to take her color gently from those with whom she lived, desiring to
+please them, not because she was vain and wished to be thought charming,
+but because she had an unusually sweet disposition and wished to
+be charming. She was sincere, and if asked a direct question always
+returned an answer that was true; but she sometimes fell in with an
+assumption from a soft desire to be kind. Daventry quite innocently
+assumed that she found Mrs. Clarke as delightful as he did. Perhaps
+she did; perhaps she did not. However it was, she gently accepted Mrs.
+Clarke as a friend.
+
+Dion, of course, knew of this friendship; and so did Rosamund. She never
+made any comment upon it, and showed no interest in it. But her life
+that autumn was a full one. She had Robin; she had the house to
+look after, "my little house"; she had Dion in the evenings; she had
+quantities of friends and acquaintances; and she had her singing. She
+had now definitely given up singing professionally. Her very short
+career as an artist was closed. But she had begun to practise diligently
+again, and showed by this assiduity that she loved music not for
+what she could gain by it, but for its own sake. Of her friends and
+acquaintances she saw much less than formerly. Many of them complained
+that they never could get a glimpse of her now, that she shut them
+out, that "not at home" had become a parrot-cry on the lips of her
+well-trained parlor-maid, that she cared for nobody now that she had
+a husband and a baby, that she was self-engrossed, etc., etc. But they
+could not be angry with her; for if they did happen to meet her, or if
+she did happen to be "at home" when they called, they always found
+her the genial, radiant, kind and friendly Rosamund of old; full,
+apparently, of all the former interest in them and their doings,
+eager to welcome and make the most of their jokes and good stories,
+sympathetic towards their troubles and sorrows. To Dion she once said
+in explanation of her withdrawal from the rather bustling life which
+keeping up with many friends and acquaintances implies:
+
+"I think one sometimes has to make a choice between living deeply in the
+essentials and just paddling up to one's ankles in the non-essentials.
+I want to live deeply if I can, and I am very happy in quiet. I can hear
+only in peace the voices that mean most to me."
+
+"I remember what you said to me once in the Acropolis," he answered.
+
+"What was that?"
+
+"You said, 'Oh, Dion, if you knew how something in me cares for
+freshness and for peace.'"
+
+"You remember my very words!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then you understand?"
+
+"And besides," he said slowly, and as if with some hesitation, "you used
+to long for a very quiet life, for the religious life; didn't you?"
+
+"Once, but it seems such ages ago."
+
+"And yet Robin's not a year old yet."
+
+She looked at him with a sudden, and almost intense, inquiry; he was
+smiling at her.
+
+"Robino maestro di casa!" he added.
+
+And they both laughed.
+
+Towards the end of November one day Daventry said to Dion in the
+Greville Club:
+
+"Beatrice is going to give a dinner somewhere, probably at the Carlton.
+She thought of the twenty-eighth. Are Rosamund and you engaged that
+night? She wants you, of course."
+
+"No. We don't go out much. Rose is an early rooster, as she calls it."
+
+"Then the twenty-eighth would do capitally."
+
+"Shall I tell Rose?"
+
+"Yes, do. Beattie will write too, or tell Rosamund when she sees her."
+
+"Whom are you going to have?"
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Chetwinde for one, and--we must see whom we can get. We'll try
+to make it cheery and not too imbecile."
+
+As Daventry was speaking, Dion felt certain that the dinner had an
+object, and he thought he knew what that object was. But he only said:
+
+"It's certain to be jolly, and I always enjoy myself at the Carlton."
+
+"Even with bores?" said Daventry, unable to refrain from pricking a
+bubble, although he guessed the reason why Dion had blown it.
+
+"Anyhow, I'm sure you won't invite bores," said Dion, trying to preserve
+a casual air, and wishing, for the moment, that he and his friend were
+densely stupid instead of quite intelligent.
+
+"Pray that Beattie and I may be guided in our choice," returned
+Daventry, going to pick up the "Saturday Review."
+
+Rosamund said of course she would go on the twenty-eighth and help
+Beattie with her dinner. She had accepted before she asked who were
+the invited guests. Beattie, who was evidently quite guileless in the
+matter, told her at once that Mrs. Clarke was among them. Rosamund said
+nothing, and appeared to be looking forward to the twenty-eighth. She
+even got a new gown for it, and Dion began to feel that he had made a
+mistake in supposing that Rosamund had long ago decided not to know Mrs.
+Clarke. He was very glad, for he had often felt uncomfortable about Mrs.
+Clarke, who, he supposed, must have believed that his wife did not wish
+to meet her, as her reiterated desire to make Rosamund's acquaintance
+had met with no response. She had, he thought, shown the tact of a lady
+and of a thorough woman of the world in not pressing the point, and in
+never seeking to continue her acquaintance, or dawning friendship, with
+him since his wife had come back to town. He felt a strong desire now
+to be pleasant and cordial to her, and to show her how charming and
+sympathetic his Rosamund was. He looked forward to this dinner as he
+seldom looked forward to any social festivity.
+
+On the twenty-sixth of November Robin had a cold! On the twenty-seventh
+it was worse, and he developed a little hard cough which was rather
+pathetic, and which seemed to surprise and interest him a good deal.
+Rosamund was full of solicitude. On the night of the twenty-seventh she
+said she would sit up with Robin. The nurse protested, but Rosamund was
+smilingly firm.
+
+"I want you to have a good night, Nurse," she said. "You're too devoted
+and take too much out of yourself. And, besides, I shouldn't sleep.
+I should be straining my ears all the time to hear whether my boy was
+coughing or not."
+
+Nurse had to give in, of course. But Dion was dismayed when he heard of
+the project.
+
+"You'll be worn out!" he exclaimed.
+
+"No, I shan't But even if I were it wouldn't matter."
+
+"But I want you to look your radiant self for Beattie's dinner."
+
+"Oh--the dinner!"
+
+It seemed she had forgotten it.
+
+"Robin comes first," she said firmly, after a moment of silence.
+
+And she sat up that night in an arm-chair by the nursery fire,
+ministering at intervals to the child, who seemed impressed and
+heartened in his coughings by his mother's presence.
+
+On the following day she was rather tired, the cough was not abated, and
+when Dion came back from business he learnt that she had telegraphed to
+Beattie to give up the dinner. He was very much disappointed. But she
+did really look tired; Robin's cough was audible in the quiet house; the
+telegram had gone, and of course there was nothing more to be done. Dion
+did not even express his disappointment; but he begged Rosamund to go
+very early to bed, and offered to sleep in a separate room if his return
+late was likely to disturb her. She agreed that, perhaps, that would be
+best. So, at about eleven-thirty that night, Dion made his way to their
+spare room, walking tentatively lest a board should creak and awaken
+Rosamund.
+
+Everybody had missed her and had made inquiries about her, except Mrs.
+Clarke and Daventry. The latter had not mentioned her in Dion's hearing.
+But he was very busy with his guests. Mrs. Clarke had apparently not
+known that Rosamund had been expected at the dinner, for when Dion, who
+had sat next her, had said something about the unfortunate reason for
+Rosamund's absence, Mrs. Clarke had seemed sincerely surprised.
+
+"But I thought your wife had quite given up going out since her child
+was born?" she had said.
+
+"Oh no. She goes out sometimes."
+
+"I had no idea she did. But now I shall begin to be disappointed and to
+feel I've missed something. You shouldn't have told me."
+
+It was quite gravely and naturally said. As he went into the spare room,
+Dion remembered the exact tone of Mrs. Clarke's husky voice in speaking
+it, the exact expression in her eyes. They were strange eyes, he
+thought, unlike any other eyes he had seen. In them there was often a
+look that seemed both intent and remote. Their gaze was very direct but
+it was not piercing. There was melancholy in the eyes but there was no
+demand for sympathy. When Dion thought of the expression in Rosamund's
+eyes he realized how far from happiness, and even from serenity, Mrs.
+Clarke must be, and he could not help pitying her. Yet she never posed
+as _une femme incomprise_, or indeed as anything. She was absolutely
+simple and natural. He had enjoyed talking to her. Despite her gravity
+she was, he thought, excellent company, a really interesting woman
+and strongly individual. She seemed totally devoid of the little
+tiresomenesses belonging to many woman--tiresomenesses which spring out
+of vanity and affectation, the desire of possession, the uneasy wish to
+"cut out" publicly other women. Mrs. Clarke would surely never
+"manage" a man. If she held a man it would be with the listless and yet
+imperative grip of Stamboul. The man might go if he would, but--would he
+want to go?
+
+In thinking of Mrs. Clarke, Dion of course always considered her with
+the detached spectator's mind. No woman on earth was of real importance
+to him except Rosamund. His mother he did not consciously count among
+women. She was to him just the exceptional being, the unique and homely
+manifestation a devoted mother is to the son who loves her without
+thinking about it; not numbered among women or even among mothers. She
+stood to him for protective love unquestioning, for interest in him and
+all his doings unwavering, for faith in his inner worth undying, for the
+Eternities without beginning or ending; but probably he did not know it.
+Of Rosamund, what she was, what she meant in his life, he was intensely,
+even secretly, almost savagely conscious. In Mrs. Clarke he was more
+interested than he happened to be in any of the women who dwelt in the
+great world of those whom he did not love and never could love.
+
+Had the dinner-party he had just been to been arranged by Daventry in
+order that Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke might meet in a perfectly natural
+way? If so, it must have been Daventry's idea and not Mrs. Clarke's.
+Dion had a feeling that Daventry had been vexed by Rosamund's defection.
+He knew his friend very well. It was not quite natural that Daventry
+had not mentioned Rosamund. But why should Daventry strongly wish Mrs.
+Clarke and Rosamund to meet if Mrs. Clarke had not indicated a desire to
+know Rosamund? Daventry was an enthusiastic adherent of Mrs. Clarke's.
+He had, Dion knew, a chivalrous feeling for her. Having helped to win
+her case, any slight put upon her would be warmly resented by him.
+
+Had Rosamund put upon her a slight? Had she deliberately avoided the
+dinner?
+
+Dion was on the point of getting into the spare-room bed when he asked
+himself that question. As he pulled back the clothes he heard a dry
+little sound. It was Robin's cough. He stole to the door and opened it.
+As he did so he saw the tail of Rosamund's dressing-gown disappearing
+over the threshold of the nursery. The nursery door shut softly behind
+her, and Dion got into bed feeling heartily ashamed of his suspicion.
+How low it was to search for hidden motives in such a woman as Rosamund.
+He resolved never to do that again. He lay in bed listening, but he did
+not hear Robin's cough again, and he wondered if the child was already
+old enough to be what nurses call "artful," whether he had made use of
+his little affliction to get hold of his providence in the night.
+
+What a mystery was the relation of mother and little child! He lay for
+a long while musing about it. Why hadn't he followed Rosamund over the
+threshold of the nursery just now? The mystery had held him back.
+
+Was it greater than the mystery of the relation of man to woman in a
+love such as his for Rosamund? He considered it, but he was certain that
+he could not fathom it. No man, he felt sure, knew or ever could know
+how a mother like Rosamund, that is an intensely maternal mother,
+regarded her child when he was little and dependent on her; how she
+loved him, what he meant to her. And no doubt the gift of the mother to
+the child was subtly reciprocated by the child. But just how?
+
+Dion could not remember at all what he had felt, or how he had regarded
+his mother when he was nine months old. Presently he recalled Hermes and
+the child in that remote and hushed room hidden away in the green wilds
+of Elis; he even saw them before him--saw the beautiful face of the
+Hermes, saw the child's stretched-out arm.
+
+Elis! He had been wonderfully happy there, far away in the smiling
+wilderness. Would he ever be there again? And, if fate did indeed lead
+his steps thither, would he again be wonderfully happy? Of one thing he
+was certain; that he would never see Elis, would never see Hermes and
+the child again, unless Rosamund was with him. She had made the green
+wilderness to blossom as the rose. She only could make his life to
+blossom. He depended upon her terribly--terribly. Always that love of
+his was growing. People, especially women, often said that the love of
+a man was quickly satisfied, more quickly than a woman's, that the
+masculine satisfaction was soon followed by satiety. Love such as that
+was only an appetite, a species of lust. Such a woman as Rosamund could
+not awaken mere lust. For her a man might have desire, but only the
+desire that every great love of a man for a woman encloses. And how
+utterly different that was from physical lust.
+
+He thought of the maidens upholding the porch of the Erechtheion. His
+Rosamund descended from them, was as pure, as serene in her goodness, as
+beautiful as they were.
+
+In thinking of the beloved maidens he did not think of them as marble.
+
+Before he went to sleep Dion had realized that, since Rosamund was
+awake, the reason for his coming to the spare room did not exist.
+Nevertheless he did not go to their bedroom that night. Robin's little
+dry cough still sounded in his ears. To-night was Robin's kingdom.
+
+In a day or two Robin was better, in a week he was perfectly well. If
+he had not chanced to catch cold, would Rosamund have worn that new
+evening-gown at the Carlton dinner?
+
+On that question Dion had a discussion with Daventry which was
+disagreeable to him. One day Daventry, who had evidently been, in
+silence, debating whether to speak or not, said to him:
+
+"Oh, Dion, d'you mind if I use a friend's privilege and say something I
+very much want to say, but which you mayn't be so keen to hear?"
+
+"No, of course not. We can say anything to each other."
+
+"Can we? I'm not sure of that--now."
+
+"What d'you mean?"
+
+"Oh, well--anyhow, this time I'll venture. Why did Rosamund throw us
+over the other night at almost the last moment?"
+
+"Because Robin was ill."
+
+"He's quite well now."
+
+"Why not. It's ten days ago."
+
+"He can't have been so very ill."
+
+"He was ill enough to make Rosamund very anxious. She was up with him
+the whole night before your dinner; and not only that, she was up again
+on the night of the dinner, though she was very tired."
+
+"Well, coming to our dinner wouldn't have prevented that--only eight
+till ten-thirty."
+
+"I don't think, Guy, you at all understand Rosamund's feeling for
+Robin," said Dion, with a sort of dry steadiness.
+
+"Probably not, being a man."
+
+"Perhaps a father can understand better."
+
+"Better? It seems to me one either does understand a thing or one
+doesn't understand it."
+
+There was a not very attractive silence which Daventry broke by saying:
+
+"Then you think if Beattie and I give another dinner at the Carlton--a
+piece of reckless extravagance, but we are made on entertaining!--Robin
+won't be ill again?"
+
+"Another dinner? You'll be ruined."
+
+"I've got several more briefs. Would Robin be ill?"
+
+"How the deuce can any one know?"
+
+"I'll hazard a guess. He would be ill."
+
+Dion reddened. There was sudden heat not only in his cheeks but also
+about his heart.
+
+"I didn't know you were capable of talking such pernicious rubbish!" he
+said.
+
+"Let's prove whether it's rubbish or not. Beattie will send Rosamund
+another dinner invitation to-morrow, and then we'll wait and see what
+happens to Robin's health."
+
+"Guy, I don't want to have a quarrel with you."
+
+"A quarrel? What about?"
+
+"If you imply that Rosamund is insincere, is capable of acting a part,
+we shall quarrel. Robin was really ill. Rosamund fully meant to go to
+your dinner. She bought a new dress expressly for it."
+
+"Forgive me, old Dion, and please don't think I was attacking Rosamund.
+No. But I think sometimes the very sweetest and best women do have their
+little bit of insincerity. To women very often the motive seems of more
+importance than the action springing from it. I had an idea that perhaps
+Rosamund was anxious not to hurt some one's feelings."
+
+"Whose?"
+
+After a slight hesitation Daventry said:
+
+"Mrs. Clarke's."
+
+"Did Mrs. Clarke know that Rosamund accepted to go to your dinner?"
+asked Dion abruptly, and with a forcible directness that put the not
+unastute Daventry immediately on his guard.
+
+"What on earth has that to do with it?"
+
+"Everything, I should think. Did she?"
+
+"No," said Daventry.
+
+"Then how could--?" Dion began. But he broke off, and added more
+quietly:
+
+"Why are you so anxious that Rosamund should know Mrs. Clarke?"
+
+"Well, didn't Mrs. Clarke ages ago express a wish to know Rosamund if
+the case went in her favor?"
+
+"Oh, I--yes, I fancy she did. But she probably meant nothing by it, and
+has forgotten it."
+
+"I doubt that. A woman who has gone through Mrs. Clarke's ordeal is
+generally hypersensitive afterwards."
+
+"But she's come out splendidly. Everybody believes in her. She's got her
+child. What more can she want?"
+
+"As she's such a great friend of ours I think it must seem very odd to
+her not knowing Rosamund, especially as she's good friends with you.
+D'you mind if we ask Rosamund to meet her again?"
+
+"You've done it once. I should leave things alone. Mind, Rosamund has
+never told me she doesn't want to know Mrs. Clarke."
+
+"That may be another example of her goodness of heart," said Daventry.
+"Rosamund seldom or never speaks against people. I'll tell you the
+simple truth, Dion. As I helped to defend Mrs. Clarke, and as we won
+and she was proved to be an innocent woman, and as I believe in her and
+admire her very much, I'm sensitive for her. Perhaps it's very absurd."
+
+"I think it's very chivalrous."
+
+"Oh--rot! But there it is. And so I hate to see a relation of my own--I
+count Rosamund as a relation now--standing out against her."
+
+"There's no reason to think she's doing that."
+
+An expression that seemed to be of pity flitted over Daventry's
+intelligent face, and he slightly raised his eyebrows.
+
+"Anyhow, we won't bother you with another dinner invitation," he said.
+
+And so the conversation ended.
+
+It left with Dion an impression which was not pleasant, and he could not
+help wondering whether, during the conversation, his friend had told him
+a direct and deliberate lie.
+
+No more dinners were given by Beattie and Daventry at the Carlton.
+Robin's health continued to be excellent. Mrs. Clarke was never
+mentioned at 5 Little Market Street, and she gave to the Leiths no sign
+of life, though Dion knew that she was still in London and was going to
+stay on there until the spring. He did not meet her, although she knew
+many of those whom he knew. This was partly due, perhaps, to chance; but
+it was also partly due to deliberate action by Dion. He avoided going to
+places where he thought he might meet her: to Esme Darlington's, to Mrs.
+Chetwinde's, to one or two other houses which she frequented; he even
+gave up visiting Jenkins's gymnasium because he knew she continued to
+go there regularly with Jimmy Clarke, whom, since the divorce case, with
+his father's consent, she had taken away from school and given to the
+care of a tutor. All this was easy enough, and required but little
+management on account of Rosamund's love of home and his love of what
+she loved. Since Robin's coming she had begun to show more and more
+plainly her root-indifference to the outside pleasures and attractions
+of the world, was becoming, Dion thought, week by week, more cloistral,
+was giving the rein, perhaps, to secret impulses which marriage had
+interfered with for a time, but which were now reviving within her.
+Robin was a genuine reason, but perhaps also at moments an excuse. Was
+there not sometimes in the quiet little house, quiet unless disturbed by
+babyhood's occasional outbursts, a strange new atmosphere, delicate and
+subdued, which hinted at silent walks, at twilight dreamings, at slowly
+pacing feet, bowed heads and wide-eyed contemplation? Or was all this
+a fancy of Dion's, bred in him by Rosamund's revelation of an old and
+haunting desire? He did not know; but he did know that sometimes, when
+he heard her warm voice singing at a little distance from him within
+their house, he thought of a man's voice, in some dim and remote chapel
+with stained-glass windows, singing an evening hymn in the service of
+Benediction.
+
+In the midst of many friends, in the midst of the enormous City,
+Rosamund effected, or began to effect, a curiously intent withdrawal,
+and Dion, as it were, accompanied her; or perhaps it were truer to say,
+followed after her. He loved quiet evenings in his home, and the love of
+them grew steadily upon him. To the occasional protests of his friends
+he laughingly replied:
+
+"The fact is we're both very happy at home. We're an unfashionable
+couple."
+
+Bruce Evelin, Esme Darlington and a few others, including, of course,
+Dion's mother and the Daventrys, they sometimes asked to come to them.
+Their little dinners were homely and delightful; but Mr. Darlington
+often regretted plaintively their "really, if I may say so, almost too
+definite domesticity." He even said to certain intimates:
+
+"I know the next thing we shall hear of will be that the Leiths have
+decided to bury themselves in the country. And Dion Leith will wreck his
+nerves by daily journeys to town in some horrid business train."
+
+At the beginning of January, however, there came an invitation which
+they decided to accept. It was to an evening party at Mrs. Chetwinde's,
+and she begged Rosamund to be nice to her and sing at it.
+
+"Since you've given up singing professionally one never hears you at
+all," she wrote. "I'm not going to tell the usual lie and say I'm only
+having a few people. On the contrary, I'm asking as many as my house
+will hold. It's on January the fifteenth."
+
+It happened that the invitation arrived in Little Market Street by the
+last post, and that, earlier in the day, Daventry had met Dion in the
+Club and had casually told him that Mrs. Clarke was spending the whole
+of January in Paris, to get some things for the flat in Constantinople
+which she intended to occupy in the late spring. Rosamund showed Dion
+Mrs. Chetwinde's note.
+
+"Let's go," he said at once.
+
+"Shall we? Do you like these crowds? She says 'as many as my house will
+hold.'"
+
+"All the better. There'll be all the more to enjoy the result of your
+practising. Do say yes."
+
+His manner was urgent. Mrs. Clarke would be in Paris. This party was
+certainly no ingenuity of Daventry's.
+
+"We mustn't begin to live like a monk and a nun," he exclaimed. "We're
+too young and enjoy life too much for that."
+
+"Do monks and nuns live together? Since when?" said Rosamund, laughing
+at him.
+
+"Poor wretches! If only they did, how much--!"
+
+"Hush!" she said, with a smiling pretense of thinking of being shocked
+presently.
+
+She went to the writing-table.
+
+"Very well, then, we'll go if you want to."
+
+"Don't you?" he asked, following her.
+
+She had sat down and taken up a pen. Now she looked up at him with her
+steady eyes.
+
+"I'm sure I shall enjoy it when I'm there," she answered. "I generally
+enjoy things. You know that. You've seen me among people so often."
+
+"Yes. One would think you reveled in society if one only knew you in
+that phase."
+
+"Well, I don't _really_ care for it one bit. I can't, because I never
+miss it if I don't have it."
+
+"I believe you _really_ care for very few things and for very few
+people," he said.
+
+"Perhaps that's true about people."
+
+"How many people, I wonder?"
+
+"I don't think one always knows whom one cares for until something
+happens."
+
+"Something?"
+
+"Until one's threatened with loss, or until one actually does lose
+somebody one loves. I"--she hesitated, stretched out her hand, and drew
+some notepaper out of a green case which stood on the table--"I had
+absolutely no idea what I felt for my mother until she died. She died
+very suddenly."
+
+Tears rushed to her eyes and her whole face suddenly reddened.
+
+"Then I knew!" she said, in a broken voice.
+
+Dion had never before seen her look as she was looking now.
+
+For a moment he felt almost as if he were regarding a stranger. There
+was a sort of heat of anger in the face, which looked rebellious in its
+emotion; and he believed it was the rebellion in her face which made him
+realize how intensely she had been able to love her mother.
+
+"Now I must write to Mrs. Chetwinde," she said, suddenly bending over
+the notepaper, "and tell her we'll come, and I'll sing."
+
+"Yes."
+
+He stood a moment watching the moving pen. Then he bent down and just
+touched her shoulder with a great gentleness.
+
+"If you knew what I would do to keep every breath of sorrow out of your
+life!" he said, in a low voice.
+
+Without looking up she touched his hand.
+
+"I know you would. You could never bring sorrow into my life."
+
+From that day Dion realized what intensity of feeling lay beneath
+Rosamund's serene and often actively joyous demeanor. Perhaps she cared
+for very few people, but for those few she cared with a force surely
+almost abnormal. Her mother had now been dead for many years; never
+before had Rosamund spoken of her death to him. He understood the reason
+of that silence now, and from that day the desire to keep all sorrow
+from her became almost a passion in him. He even felt that its approach
+to her, that its cold touch resting upon her, would be a hateful and
+almost unnatural outrage. Yet he saw all around him people closely
+companioned by sorrow and did not think that strange. Sorrow even
+approached very near to Rosamund and to him in that very month of
+January, for Beatrice had a miscarriage and lost her baby. She said very
+little about it, but Dion believed that she was really stricken to the
+heart. He was very fond of Beatrice, he almost loved her; yet her sorrow
+was only a shadow passing by him, not a substance pressing upon him. And
+that fact, which he realized, made him know how little even imagination
+and quiet affection can help men feel the pains of others. The heart
+knoweth only its own bitterness and the bitterness of those whom it
+deeply and passionately loves.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+On January the fifteenth Rosamund put on the gown which had been bought
+for the Carlton dinner but not worn at it.
+
+Although she had not really wanted to go to Mrs. Chetwinde's party she
+looked radiantly buoyant, and like one almost shining with expectation,
+when she was ready to start for Lowndes Square.
+
+"You ought to go out every night," Dion said, as he put her cloak over
+her shoulders.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"To enjoy and to give enjoyment. Merely to look at you would make the
+dullest set of people in London wake up and scintillate. Don't tell me
+you're not looking forward to it, because I couldn't believe you."
+
+"Now that the war-paint is on I confess to feeling almost eager for the
+fray. How nicely you button it. You aren't clumsy."
+
+"How could I be clumsy in doing something for you? Where's your music?"
+
+"In my head. Jennie will meet us there."
+
+Jennie was Rosamund's accompanist, a clever Irish girl who often came to
+Little Market Street to go through things with Rosamund.
+
+"It will be rather delightful singing to people again," she added in a
+joyous voice as they got into the hired carriage. "I hope I've really
+improved."
+
+"How you love a thing for itself!" he said, as they drove off.
+
+"I think that's the only way to love."
+
+"Of course it is. You know the only way to everything beautiful and
+sane. What I have learnt from you!"
+
+"Dion," she said, in the darkness, "I think you are rather a dangerous
+companion for me."
+
+"How can I be?"
+
+"I'm not at all a piece of perfection. Take care you don't teach me to
+think I am."
+
+"But you're the least conceited--"
+
+"Hush, you encourager of egoism!" she interrupted seriously.
+
+"I'm afraid you'll find a good many more at Mrs. Chetwinde's."
+
+Dion thought he had been a true prophet half an hour later when, from a
+little distance, he watched and listened while Rosamund was singing her
+first song. Seeing her thus in the midst of a crowd he awakened to the
+fact that Robin had changed her very much. She still looked splendidly
+young but she no longer looked like a girl. The married woman and the
+mother were there quite definitely. Even he fancied that he heard them
+in her voice, which had gained in some way, perhaps in roundness,
+in mellowness. This might be the result of study; he was inclined to
+believe it the result of motherhood. She was wearing ear-rings--tiny,
+not long drooping things, they were green, small emeralds; and he
+remembered how he had loved her better when he saw her wearing ear-rings
+for the first time in Mr. Darlington's drawing-room. How definite she
+was in a crowd. Crowds effaced ordinary people, but when Rosamund was
+surrounded she always seemed to be beautifully emphasized, to be made
+more perfectly herself. She did not take, she gave, and in giving showed
+how much she had.
+
+She was giving now as she sang, "Caro mio ben."
+
+Towards the end of the song, when Dion was deeply in it and in her who
+sang it, he was disturbed by a woman's whisper coming from close behind
+him. He did not catch the beginning of what was communicated, but he did
+catch the end. It was this: "Over there, the famous Mrs. Clarke."
+
+But Mrs. Clarke was in Paris. Daventry had told him so. Dion looked
+quickly about the large and crowded room, but could not see Mrs.
+Clarke. Then he glanced behind him to see the whisperer, and beheld a
+hard-faced, middle-aged and very well-known woman--one of those women
+who, by dint of perpetually "going about," become at length something
+less than human. He was quite sure Mrs. Brackenhurst would not make
+a mistake about anything which happened at a party. She might fail to
+recognize her husband, if she met him about her house, because he was
+so seldom there; she would not fail to recognize the heroine of a
+resounding divorce case. Mrs. Clarke must certainly have returned from
+Paris and be somewhere in that room, listening to Rosamund and probably
+watching her. Dion scarcely knew whether this fact made him sorry or
+glad. He did know, however, that it oddly excited him.
+
+When "Caro mio ben" was ended people began to move. Rosamund was
+surrounded and congratulated, and Dion saw Esme Darlington bending to
+her, half paternally, half gallantly, and speaking to her emphatically.
+Mrs. Chetwinde drifted up to her; and three or four young men hovered
+near to her, evidently desirous of putting in a word. The success of
+her leaped to the eye. Dion saw it and glowed. But the excitement in him
+persisted, and he began to move towards the far side of the great room
+in search of Mrs. Clarke. If she had just come in she would probably
+be near the door by which the pathetic Echo stood on her pedestal of
+marble, withdrawn in her punishment, in her abasement beautiful and
+wistful. How different was Rosamund from Echo! Dion looked across at her
+joyous and radiant animation, as she smiled and talked almost with the
+eagerness and vitality of a child; and he had the thought, "How goodness
+preserves!" Women throng the secret rooms of the vanity specialists,
+put their trust in pomades, in pigments, in tinctures, in dyes; and the
+weariness and the sin become lustrous, perhaps, but never are hidden
+or even obscured. His Rosamund trusted in a wholesome life, with air
+blowing through it, with sound sleep as its anodyne, with purity on
+guard at its door; and radiance and youth sparkled up in her like
+fountain spray in the sunshine. And the wholesomeness of her was a lure
+to the many even in a drawing-room of London. He saw powdered women,
+women with darkened eyebrows, and touched-up lips, and hair that had
+forgotten long ago what was its natural color, looking at her, and
+he fancied there was a dull wonder in their eyes. Perhaps they were
+thinking: "Yes, that's the recipe--being gay in goodness!" And perhaps
+some of them were thinking, too: "We've lost the power to follow that
+recipe, if we ever had it." Poor women! With a sort of exultation he
+pitied them and their husbands. A chord was sounded on the piano. He
+stood still. The loud buzz of conversation died down. Was Rosamund
+going to sing again so soon? Perhaps some one had begged for something
+specially beloved. Jennie was playing a soft prelude as a gentle warning
+to a few of those who seem ever to find silence a physical difficulty.
+She stopped, and began to play something Dion did not know, something
+very modern in its strange atmospheric delicacy, which nevertheless
+instantly transported him to Greece. He was there, even before Rosamund
+began to sing in a voice that was hushed, in a far-off voice, not
+antique, but the voice of modernity, prompted by a mind looking away
+from what is near to what is afar and is deeply desired.
+
+     "A crescent sail upon the sea,
+     So calm and fair and ripple-free
+     You wonder storms can ever be;
+
+     A shore with deep indented bays,
+     And o'er the gleaming water-ways
+     A glimpse of Islands in the haze;
+
+     A faced bronzed dark to red and gold,
+     With mountain eyes that seem to hold
+     The freshness of the world of old;
+
+     A shepherd's crook, a coat of fleece,
+     A grazing flock--the sense of peace,
+     The long sweet silence--this is Greece."
+
+The accompaniment continued for a moment alone, whispering remoteness.
+Then, like a voice far off in a blue distance, there came again from
+Rosamund, more softly and with less pressure:
+
+              "----The sense of peace,
+     The long sweet silence--this is Greece!
+                  This is Greece!"
+
+It was just then that Dion saw Mrs. Clarke. She had, perhaps, been
+sitting down; or, possibly, some one had been standing in front of her
+and had hidden her from him; for she was not far off, and he wondered
+sharply why he had not seen her till now, why, till now, she had
+refrained from snatching him away from his land of the early morning.
+There was to him at this moment something actually cruel and painful in
+her instant suggestion of Stamboul. Yet she was not looking at him, but
+was directing upon Rosamund her characteristic gaze of consideration,
+in which there was a peculiar grave thoroughness. A handsome, fair
+young man, with a very red weak mouth, stood close to her. Echo was
+just beyond. Without speaking, Mrs. Clarke continued looking at Rosamund
+intently, when the music evaporated, and Greece faded away into the
+shining of that distance which hides our dreams. And Dion noted again,
+with a faint creeping of wonder and of doubt, the strange haggardness of
+her face, which, nevertheless, he had come to think almost beautiful.
+
+The fair young man spoke to her, bending and looking at her eagerly.
+She turned her head slowly, and as if reluctantly towards him, and
+was evidently listening to what he said, listening with that apparent
+intentness which was characteristic of her. She was dressed in black
+and violet, and wore a large knot of violets in her corsage. Round her
+throat was clasped an antique necklace of dull, unshining gold, and
+dim purple stones, which looked beautiful, but almost weary with
+age. Perhaps they had lain for years in some dim bazaar of Stamboul,
+forgotten under heaps of old stuffs. Dion thought of them as slumbering,
+made drowsy and finally unconscious by the fumes of incense and the
+exhalations from diapered perfume vials. As he looked at Mrs. Clarke,
+the bare and shining vision of Greece, evoked by the song Rosamund had
+just been singing, faded; the peculiar almost intellectually delicate
+atmosphere of Greece was gone; and he saw for a moment the umber mystery
+of Stamboul, lifted under tinted clouds of the evening beyond the waters
+of the Golden Horn; the great rounded domes and tapering speary minarets
+of the mosques, couchant amid the shadows and the trailing and gauzy
+smoke-wreaths, a suggestion of dense masses of cypresses, those trees of
+the night which only in the night can be truly themselves, guarding the
+innumerable graves of the Turkish cemeteries.
+
+From that moment he connected Mrs. Clarke in his mind with the cypress.
+Surely she must have spent very many hours wandering in those enormous
+and deserted gardens of the dead, where the very dust is poignant,
+and the cries of the sea come faintly up to Allah's children crumbling
+beneath the stone flowers and the little fezes of stone. Mrs. Clarke
+must love the cypress, for about her there was an atmosphere which
+suggested dimness and the gathering shadows of night.
+
+Greece and Stamboul, the land of the early morning and the wonder-city
+of twilight; Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke, standing there for a moment, in
+the midst of the shifting crowd, Dion traveled, compared, connected and
+was alone in the soul's solitude.
+
+Then Mrs. Chetwinde spoke to him, and he saw Bruce Evelin in the
+distance going towards Rosamund.
+
+Mrs. Chetwinde told him that Rosamund had made a great advance.
+
+"Now that she's given up singing professionally she's singing better
+than ever. That Grecian song is the distilled essence of Greece felt in
+our new way. For we've got our new way of feeling things. Rosamund tells
+us she repeated the words to Jennie Stileman, and Jennie had them set
+by a young Athenian who's over here studying English. He catches the
+butterfly, lets it flutter for a moment in his hand and go. He doesn't
+jab a pin into it as our composers would. Oh, there's Cynthia! I hope
+she heard the last thing."
+
+"Yes, she did."
+
+"Ah?"
+
+"I thought Mrs. Clarke was spending January in Paris."
+
+"She came back to-day, and sent round to ask if she might come."
+
+Mrs. Chetwinde wandered away, insouciant and observant as ever. Even at
+her own parties she always had an air of faintly detached indifference,
+never bothered about how "it" was "going." If it chose to stop it could,
+and her guests must put up with it.
+
+When she left him Dion hesitated. Mrs. Clarke had just seen him and sent
+him a grave nod of recognition. Should he go to her? But the fair young
+man was still at her side, was still, with his weak red mouth, talking
+into her ear. Dion felt a strange distaste as he saw those moving lips
+under the brushed-up, almost ridiculously small, golden mustache; and
+just as he was conscious of this distaste Mrs. Clarke got rid of the
+young man, and spoke to a woman. Then she moved forward slowly. Mr.
+Chetwinde spoke to her, moving his ample fan-shaped beard, which always
+looked Assyrian, though he was profoundly English and didn't know it.
+She drew nearer to Dion as she answered Mr. Chetwinde, but in a wholly
+unconscious manner. To-night she looked more haggard even than usual,
+no doubt because of the journey from Paris. But Mrs. Chetwinde had once
+said of her: "Cynthia is made of iron." Could that be true? She was
+quite close to Dion now, and he was aware of a strange faint perfume
+which reminded him of Stamboul; and he realized here in Lowndes Square
+that Stamboul was genuinely fascinating, was much more fascinating than
+he had realized when he was in it.
+
+Mrs. Clarke passed him without looking at him, and he felt sure quite
+unconscious of his nearness to her. Evidently she had forgotten all
+about him. Just after she had gone by he decided that of course he ought
+to go and speak to her, and that to-night he must introduce Rosamund
+to her. Not to do so would really be rude. Daventry was not there to be
+chivalrous. The illness of Beattie, and doubtless his own distress at
+the loss of his unborn child, had kept him away. Dion thought that he
+would be unchivalrous if he now neglected to make a point of speaking to
+Mrs. Clarke and of introducing his wife to her.
+
+Having made up his mind on this he turned to follow Mrs. Clarke, and at
+once saw that Esme Darlington, that smoother of difficult social places,
+was before him. A little way off he saw Mr. Darlington, with Rosamund
+well but delicately in hand, making for Mrs. Clarke somewhat with
+the gait of Agag. In a moment the thing was done. The two women were
+speaking to each other, and Rosamund had sent to Mrs. Clarke one of her
+inquiring looks. Then they sat down together on that red sofa to which
+Mrs. Clarke had led Dion for his first conversation with her. Esme
+Darlington remained standing before it. The full acquaintance was joined
+at last.
+
+Were they talking about the baby? Dion wondered, as for a moment he
+watched them, forgetting his surroundings. Rosamund was speaking with
+her usual swift vivacity. At home she was now often rather quiet,
+moving, Dion sometimes thought, in an atmosphere of wide serenity; but
+in society she was always full of sunshine and eager life. Something
+within her leaped up responsively at the touch of humanity, and to-night
+she had just been singing, and the whole of her was keenly awake. The
+contrast between her and Mrs. Clarke was almost startling: her radiant
+vitality emphasized Mrs. Clarke's curious, but perfectly natural,
+gravity; the rose in her cheeks, the yellow in her hair, the gaiety
+in her eyes, drew the attention to Mrs. Clarke's febrile and tense
+refinement, which seemed to have worn her body thin, to have drained
+the luster out of her hair, to have fixed the expression of observant
+distress in her large and fearless eyes. Animal spirits played through
+Rosamund to-night; from Mrs. Clarke they were absent. Her haggard
+composure, confronting Rosamund's pure sparkle, suggested the comparison
+of a hidden and secret pool, steel colored in the depths of a sunless
+forest, with a rushing mountain stream leaping towards the sea in a
+tangle of sun-rays. Dion realized for the first time that Mrs. Clarke
+never laughed, and scarcely ever smiled. He realized, too, that she
+really was beautiful. For Rosamund did not "kill" her; her delicacy of
+line and colorless clearness stood the test of nearness to Rosamund's
+radiant beauty. Indeed Rosamund somehow enhanced the peculiarly
+interesting character of Mrs. Clarke's personality, which was displayed,
+but with a sort of shadowy reticence, in her physique, and at the same
+time underlined its melancholy. So might a climbing rose, calling to the
+blue with its hundred blossoms, teach something of the dark truth of the
+cypress through which its branches are threaded.
+
+But Mrs. Clarke would certainly never be Rosamund's stairway towards
+heaven.
+
+Some one he knew spoke to Dion, and he found himself involved in a long
+conversation; people moving hid the two women from him, but presently
+the piano sounded again, and Rosamund sang that first favorite of hers
+and of Dion's, the "Heart ever faithful," recalling him to a dear day
+at Portofino where, in a cozy room, guarded by the wintry woods and the
+gray sea of Italy, he had felt the lure of a faithful spirit, and known
+the basis of clean rock on which Rosamund had built up her house of
+life. Bruce Evelin stood near to him while she sang it now, and once
+their eyes met and exchanged affectionate thoughts of the singer, which
+went gladly out of the gates eager to be read and understood.
+
+When the melody of Bach was finished many people, impelled thereto by
+the hearty giant whom Mrs. Chetwinde had most strangely married, went
+downstairs to the black-and-white dining-room to drink champagne and eat
+small absurdities of various kinds. A way was opened for Dion to Mrs.
+Clarke, who was still on the red sofa. Dion noticed the fair young man
+hovering, and surely with intention in his large eyes, in the middle
+distance, but he went decisively forward, took Mrs. Clarke's listless
+yet imperative hand, and asked her if she would care to go down with
+him.
+
+"Oh no; I never eat at odd times."
+
+"Do you ever eat at all?"
+
+"Yes, at my chosen moments. Do find another excuse."
+
+"For going to eat?"
+
+"Or drink."
+
+His reply was to sit down beside her. Mrs. Chetwinde's dining-room was
+large. People probably knew that, for the drawing-room emptied slowly.
+Even the fair young man went away to seek consolation below. Rosamund
+had descended with Bruce Evelin and Esme Darlington. There was a
+pleasant and almost an intimate hush in the room.
+
+"I heard you were to be in Paris this month," Dion said.
+
+"I came back to-day."
+
+"Aren't you tired?"
+
+"No. I want to speak to you about Jimmy, if you don't mind."
+
+"Please do," said Dion rather earnestly, struck by a sort of little pang
+as he remembered the boy's urgent insistence that his visitor was to
+come again soon.
+
+"I'm not quite satisfied with his tutor."
+
+She began to ask Dion's advice with regard to the boy's bringing up,
+explaining that her husband had left that matter in her hands.
+
+"He's very sorry and ashamed now, poor man, about his attacks on me, and
+tries to make up from a distance by trusting me completely with Jimmy. I
+don't bear him any malice, but of course the link between us is smashed
+and can't ever be resoldered. I'm asking you what I can't ask him
+because he's a weak man."
+
+The implication was obvious and not disagreeable to Dion. He gave
+advice, and as he did so thought of Robin at ten.
+
+Mrs. Clarke was a remarkably sensible woman, and agreed with his views
+on boys, and especially with his theory, suddenly discovered in the
+present heat of conversation, that to give them "backbone" was of even
+more importance than to develop their intellectual side. She spoke of
+her son in a way that was almost male.
+
+"He mustn't be small," she said, evidently comprehending both soul and
+body in the assertion. "D'you know Lord Brayfield who was talking to me
+just now?"
+
+"You mean a fair man?"
+
+"Yes, with a meaningless mouth. Jimmy mustn't grow up into anything of
+that kind."
+
+The conversation took a decidedly Doric turn as Mrs. Clarke developed
+her ideas of what a man ought to be. In the midst of it Dion remembered
+Dumeny, and could not help saying:
+
+"But that type"--they had been speaking of what he considered to be
+Rosamund's type of man, once described by her as "a strong soul in a
+strong body, and a soft heart but not a softy's heart"--"is almost the
+direct opposite of the artistic type of man, isn't it?"
+
+Her large eyes looked "Well?" at him, but she said nothing.
+
+"I thought you cared so very much for knowledge and taste in a man."
+
+"So I do. But Jimmy will never have knowledge and taste. He's the
+boisterous athletic type."
+
+"And you're glad?"
+
+"Not sorry, at any rate. He'll just be a thorough man, if he's brought
+up properly, and that will do very well."
+
+"I think you're very complex," Dion said, still thinking of Dumeny.
+
+"Because I make friends in so many directions?"
+
+"Well--yes, partly," he answered, wondering if she was reading his
+thought.
+
+"Jimmy's not a friend but my boy. I know very well Monsieur Dumeny, for
+instance, whom you saw, and I dare say wondered about, at the trial; but
+I couldn't bear that my boy should develop into that type of man. You'll
+say I am a treacherous friend, perhaps. It might be truer to say I was
+born acquisitive and too mental. I never really liked Monsieur Dumeny;
+but I liked immensely his musical talent, his knowledge, his sure taste,
+and his power of making almost everything flower into interestingness.
+Do you know what I mean? Some people take light from your day; others
+add to its light and paint in wonderful shadows. If I went to the
+bazaars alone they were Eastern shops; if I went with Dumeny they were
+the Arabian Nights. Do you understand?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"The touch of his mind on a thing gave it life. It stirred. One could
+look into its heart and see the pulse beating. I care to do that, so I
+cared to go about with Monsieur Dumeny. But one doesn't love people for
+that sort of thing. In the people one loves one needs character, the
+right fiber in the soul. You ought to know that."
+
+"Why?" he asked, almost startled.
+
+"I was introduced to your wife just now."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+There was a pause. Then Dion said:
+
+"I'm glad you have met."
+
+"So am I," said Mrs. Clarke, in a voice that sounded more husky even
+than usual. "She sang that Greek song quite beautifully. I've just been
+telling her that I want to show her some curious songs I have heard in
+Turkey, and Asia Minor, at Brusa. There was one man who used to sing to
+me at Brusa outside the Mosquee Verte. Dumeny took down the melody for
+me."
+
+"Did you like the 'Heart ever faithful'?"
+
+"Of course it's excellent in that sledge-hammer sort of way, a superb
+example of the direct. Stamboul is very indirect. Perhaps it has colored
+my taste. It's full of mystery. Bach isn't mysterious, except now and
+then--in rare bits of his passion music, for instance."
+
+"I wonder if my wife could sing those Turkish songs."
+
+"We must see. She sang that Greek song perfectly."
+
+"But she's felt Greece," said Dion. "And I think there's something in
+her that----"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I only mean," he said, with reserve in his voice, "that I think there's
+something of Greece in her."
+
+"She's got a head like a Caryatid."
+
+"Yes," he said, with much less reserve. "Hasn't she?"
+
+Mrs. Clarke had paid his Rosamund two noble compliments, he thought; and
+he liked her way of payment, casual yet evidently sincere, the simple
+utterance of two thoughts in a mind that knew. He felt a sudden glow of
+real friendship for her, and, on the glow as it were, she said:
+
+"Jimmy's quite mad about you."
+
+"Still?" he blurted out, and was instantly conscious of a false step.
+
+"He's got an extraordinary memory for a biceps, and then Jenkins talks
+about you to him."
+
+As they went on talking people began coming up from the black-and-white
+dining-room. Dion said he would come to see Jimmy again, would visit the
+gymnasium in the Harrow Road one day when Jimmy was taking his lesson.
+Did Jimmy ever go on a Saturday? Yes, he was going next Saturday at
+four. Dion would look in next Saturday. Now Mrs. Clarke and Rosamund had
+met, and Mrs. Clarke evidently admired Rosamund in two ways, Dion felt
+quite different about his acquaintance with her. If it had already been
+agreed that Mrs. Clarke should show Rosamund Turkish songs, there was
+no need for further holding back. The relief which had come to him made
+Dion realize how very uncomfortable he had been about Mrs. Clarke in
+the immediate past. He was now thoroughly and cordially at his ease with
+her. They talked till the big drawing-room was full again, till Rosamund
+reappeared in the midst of delightful friends; talked of Jimmy's future,
+of the new tutor who must be found,--a real man, not a mere bloodless
+intellectual,--and, again, of Constantinople, to which Mrs. Clarke would
+return in April, against the advice of her friends, and in spite of Esme
+Darlington's almost frantic protests, "because I love it, and because I
+don't choose to be driven out of any place by liars." Her last remark to
+him, and he thought it very characteristic of her, was this:
+
+"Liberty's worth bitterness. I would buy it at the price of all the
+tears in my body."
+
+It was, perhaps, also very characteristic that she made the statement
+with a perfectly quiet gravity which almost concealed the evidently
+tough inflexibility beneath.
+
+And then, when people were ready to go, Rosamund sung Brahm's
+"Wiegenlied."
+
+Dion stood beside Bruce Evelin while Rosamund was singing this. She sang
+it with a new and wonderful tenderness which had come to her with Robin,
+and in her face, as she sang, there was a new and wonderful tenderness.
+The meaning of Robin in Rosamund's life was expressed to Dion by
+Rosamund in this song as it had never been expressed before. Perhaps
+it was expressed also to Bruce Evelin, for Dion saw tears in his eyes
+almost brimming over, and his face was contracted, as if only by a
+strong, even a violent, effort he was able to preserve his self-control.
+
+As people began to go away Dion found himself close to Esme Darlington.
+
+"My dear fellow," said Mr. Darlington, with unusual abandon, "Rosamund
+has made a really marvelous advance--marvelous. In that 'Wiegenlied' she
+reached high-water mark. No one could have sung it more perfectly. What
+has happened to her?"
+
+"Robin," said Dion, looking him full in the face, and speaking with
+almost stern conviction.
+
+"Robin?" said Mr. Darlington, with lifted eyebrows.
+
+Then people intervened.
+
+In the carriage going home Rosamund was very happy. She confessed to the
+pleasure her success had given her.
+
+"I quite loved singing to-night," she said. "That song about Greece was
+for you."
+
+"I know, and the 'Wiegenlied' was for Robin."
+
+"Yes," she said.
+
+She was silent; then her voice came out of the darkness:
+
+"For Robin, but he didn't know it."
+
+"Some day he will know it."
+
+Not a word was said about Mrs. Clarke that night.
+
+On the following day, however, Dion asked Rosamund how she had liked
+Mrs. Clarke.
+
+"I saw you talking to her with the greatest animation."
+
+"Was I?" said Rosamund.
+
+"And she told me it had been arranged that she should--no, I don't mean
+that; but she said she wanted to show you some wonderful Turkish songs."
+
+"Did she? What a beautiful profile she has!"
+
+"Ah, you noticed that!"
+
+"Oh yes, directly."
+
+"Didn't she mention the Turkish songs?"
+
+"I believe she did, but only in passing, casually. D'you know, Dion,
+I've got an idea that Greece is our country, not Turkey at all. You hate
+Constantinople, and I shall never see it, I'm sure. We are Greeks, and
+Robin has to be a Greek, too, in one way--a true Englishman, of course,
+as well. Do you remember the Doric boy?"
+
+And off went the conversation to the hills of Drouva, and never came
+back to Turkey.
+
+When Friday dawned Dion thought of his appointment for Saturday
+afternoon at the gymnasium in the Harrow Road, and began to wish he had
+not made it. Rosamund had not mentioned Mrs. Clarke again, and he began
+to fear that she had not really liked her, although her profile was
+beautiful. If Rosamund had not liked Mrs. Clarke, his cordial enthusiasm
+at Mrs. Chetwinde's--in retrospect he felt that his attitude and manner
+must have implied that--had been premature, even, perhaps, unfortunate.
+He wished he knew just what impression Mrs. Clarke had made upon
+Rosamund, but something held him back from asking her. He had asked her
+already once, but somehow the conversation had deviated--was it to Mrs.
+Clarke's profile?--and he had not received a direct answer. Perhaps that
+was his fault. But anyhow he must go to the gymnasium on the morrow.
+To fail in doing that after all that had happened, or rather had not
+happened, in connexion with Mrs. Clarke would be really rude. He did
+not say anything about the gymnasium to Rosamund on Friday, but on the
+Saturday he told her what had been arranged.
+
+"Her son, Jimmy Clarke, has taken a boyish fancy to me, it seems. I said
+I'd look in and see his lesson just for once."
+
+"Is he a nice boy?"
+
+"Yes, first-rate, I should think, rather a pickle, and likely to develop
+into an athlete. The father is awfully ashamed now of what he did--that
+horrible case, I mean--and is trying to make up for it."
+
+"How?" said Rosamund simply.
+
+"By giving her every chance with the boy."
+
+"I'm glad the child likes you."
+
+"I've only seen him once."
+
+"Twice won't kill his liking," she returned affectionately.
+
+And then she went out of the room. She always had plenty to do. Small
+though he was, Robin was a marvelous consumer of his mother's time.
+
+When Dion got to the gymnasium Mrs. Clarke and Jimmy were already there,
+and Jimmy, in flannels and a white sweater, his dark hair sticking up in
+disorder, and his face scarlet with exertion, was performing feats with
+an exerciser fixed to the wall, while Mrs. Clarke, seated on a hard
+chair in front of a line of heavy weights and dumb-bells, was looking
+on with concentrated attention. Jenkins was standing in front of
+Jimmy, loudly directing his movements with a stentorian:
+"One--two--one--two--one--two! Keep it up! No slackening! Put some guts
+into it, sir! One--two--one--two!"
+
+As Dion came in Mrs. Clarke looked round and nodded; Jimmy stared,
+unable to smile because his mouth and lower jaw were working, and he had
+no superfluous force to spare for polite efforts; and Jenkins uttered a
+gruff, "Good day, sir."
+
+"How are you, Jenkins?" returned Dion, in his most off-hand manner.
+
+Then he jerked his hand at Jimmy with an encouraging smile, went over to
+Mrs. Clarke, shook her hand and remained standing beside her.
+
+"Do you think he's doing it well?" she murmured, after a moment.
+
+"Stunningly."
+
+"Hasn't he broadened in the chest?"
+
+"Rather!"
+
+She looked strangely febrile and mental in the midst of the many
+appliances for developing the body. Rosamund, with her splendid physique
+and glowing health, would have crowned the gymnasium appropriately,
+have looked like the divine huntress transplanted to a modern city
+where still the cult of the body drew its worshipers. The Arcadian
+mountains--Olympia in Elis,--Jenkins's "gym" in the Harrow
+Road--differing shrines but the cult was the same. Only the conditions
+of worship were varied. Dion glanced down at Mrs. Clarke. Never had she
+seemed more curiously exotic. Yet she did not look wholly out of place;
+and it occurred to him that a perfectly natural person never looks
+wholly out of place anywhere.
+
+"Face to the wall, sir!" cried Jenkins.
+
+Jimmy found time for a breathless and half-inquiring smile at Dion as he
+turned and prepared for the most difficult feat.
+
+"His jaw always does something extraordinary in this exercise," said
+Mrs. Clarke. "It seems to come out and go in again with a click. Jenkins
+says it's because Jimmy gets his strength from there."
+
+"I know. Mine used to do just the same."
+
+"Jimmy doesn't mind. It amuses him."
+
+"That's the spirit!"
+
+"He finishes with this."
+
+"Already?" said Dion, surprised.
+
+"You must have been a little late. How did you come?"
+
+"On my bicycle. I had a puncture. That must have been it. And there was
+a lot of traffic."
+
+"Keep it up, sir!" roared Jenkins imperatively. "What's the matter with
+that left arm?"
+
+Click went Jimmy's lower jaw.
+
+"Dear little chap!" muttered Dion, full of sympathetic interest. "He's
+doing splendidly."
+
+"You really think so?"
+
+"Couldn't be better."
+
+"You understand boys?"
+
+"Better than I understand women, I expect," Dion returned, with a sudden
+thought of Rosamund at home and the wonderful Turkish songs Mrs. Clarke
+wished to show to her.
+
+Mrs. Clarke said nothing, and just at that moment Jenkins announced:
+
+"That'll do for to-day, sir."
+
+In a flood of perspiration Jimmy turned round, redder than ever, his
+chest heaving, his mouth open, and his eyes, but without any conceit,
+asking for a word of praise from Dion, who went to clap him on the
+shoulder.
+
+"Capital! Hallo! What muscles we're getting! Eh, Jenkins?"
+
+"Master Jimmy's not doing badly, sir. He puts his heart into it. That I
+must say."
+
+Jimmy shone through the red and the perspiration.
+
+"He sticks it," continued Jenkins, in his loud voice. "Without grit
+there's nothing done. That's what I always tell my pupils."
+
+"I say"--began Jimmy, at last finding a small voice--"I say, Mr. Leith,
+you haven't hurried over it."
+
+"Over what?"
+
+"Letting me see you again. Why, it's--"
+
+"Run along to the bath, sir. You've got to have it before you cool
+down," interposed the merciless Jenkins.
+
+And Jimmy made off with an instant obedience which showed his private
+opinion of the god who was training him.
+
+When he was gone Jenkins turned to Dion and looked him over.
+
+"Haven't seen much of you, sir, lately," he remarked.
+
+"No, I've been busy," returned Dion, feeling slightly uncomfortable as
+he remembered that the reason for his absence from the Harrow Road was
+listening to the conversation.
+
+"Going to have a round with the gloves now you are here, sir?" pursued
+Jenkins.
+
+Dion looked at Mrs. Clarke.
+
+"Well, I hadn't thought of it," he said, rather doubtfully.
+
+"Just as you like, sir."
+
+"Do, Mr. Leith," said Mrs. Clarke, getting up from the hard chair, and
+standing close to the medicine ball with her back to the vaulting-horse.
+"Jimmy and I are going in a moment. You mustn't bother about us."
+
+"Well, but how are you going home?"
+
+"We shall walk. Of course have your boxing. It will do you good."
+
+"You're right there, ma'am," said Jenkins, with a sort of stern
+approval. "Mr. Leith's been neglecting his exercises lately."
+
+"Oh, I've been doing a good deal in odd times with the Rifle Corps."
+
+"I don't know anything about that, sir."
+
+"All right, I'll go and change," said Dion, who always kept a singlet
+and flannels at the gymnasium. "Then----" he turned to Mrs. Clarke as if
+about to say good-by.
+
+"Oh, Jimmy will want to see you for a moment after his bath. We'll say
+good-by then."
+
+"Yes, I should like to see him," said Dion, and went off to the dressing
+cubicles.
+
+When he returned ready for the fray, with his arms bared to the
+shoulder, he found Jimmy, in trousers and an Eton jacket, with still
+damp hair sleeked down on his head, waiting with his mother, but not to
+say good-by.
+
+"We aren't going," he announced, in a voice almost shrill with
+excitement, as Dion came into the gymnasium. "The mater was all for a
+trot home, but Jenkins wishes me to stay. He says it'll be a good lesson
+for me. I mean to be a boxer."
+
+"Why not?" observed the great voice of Jenkins. "It's the best sport in
+the world bar none."
+
+"There!" said Jimmy. "And if I can't be anything else I'll be a bantam,
+that's what I'll be."
+
+"Oh, you'll grow, sir, no doubt. We may see you among the heavy-weights
+yet."
+
+"What's Mr. Leith? Is he a heavy-weight?" vociferated Jimmy. "Just look
+at his arms."
+
+"You'll see him use them in a minute," observed Jenkins, covering Dion
+with a glance of almost grim approval, "and then you can judge for
+yourself."
+
+"You can referee us, Jimmy," said Dion, smiling, as he pulled on the
+gloves.
+
+"I say, by Jove, though!" said Jimmy, looking suddenly overwhelmed and
+very respectful.
+
+He shook his head and blushed, then abruptly grinned.
+
+"The mater had better do that."
+
+They all laughed except Mrs. Clarke. Even Jenkins unbent, and his
+bass "Ha ha!" rang through the large vaulted room. Mrs. Clarke smiled
+faintly, scarcely changing the expression of her eyes. She looked
+unusually intent and, when the smile was gone, more than usually grave.
+
+"I hope you don't mind our staying just for a few minutes," she said to
+Dion. "You see what he is!"
+
+She looked at her boy, but not with deprecation.
+
+"Of course not, but I'm afraid it will bore you."
+
+"Oh no, it won't. I like to see skill of any kind."
+
+She glanced at his arms.
+
+"I'll get out of your way. Come, Jimmy!"
+
+She took him by the arm and went back to the hard chair, while Dion and
+Jenkins in the middle of the floor stood up opposite to one another.
+
+"Have you got a watch, Master Jimmy?" said Jenkins, looking over his
+shoulder at his pupil.
+
+"Rather!" piped Jimmy.
+
+"Well, then, you'd better time us if you don't referee us."
+
+Jimmy sprang away from his mother.
+
+"Keep out of our road, or you may chance to get a kidney punch that'll
+wind you. Better stand here. That's it. Three-minute rounds. Keep your
+eye on the watch."
+
+"Am I to say 'Go'?" almost whispered Jimmy, tense with a fearful
+importance such as Caesar and Napoleon never felt.
+
+"Who else? You don't expect us to order ourselves about, do you?"
+
+After a pause Jimmy murmured, "No" in a low voice. So might a mortal
+whisper a reply when interrogated from Olympus as to his readiness to be
+starter at a combat of the immortal gods.
+
+"Now, then, watch in hand and no favoritism!" bellowed Jenkins, whose
+sense of humor was as boisterous as his firmness was grim. "Are we
+ready?"
+
+Dion and he shook hands formally and lifted their arms, gazing at each
+other warily. Mrs. Clarke leaned forward in the chair which stood among
+the dumb-bells. Jimmy perspired and his eyes became round. He had his
+silver watch tight in his right fist. Jenkins suddenly turned his head
+and stared with his shallow and steady blue eyes, looking down from
+Olympus upon the speck of a mortal far below.
+
+"Go!" piped Jimmy, in the voice of an ardent, but awestruck mouse.
+
+Homeric was that combat in the Harrow Road; to its starter and
+timekeeper a contest of giants, awful in force, in skill, in agility, in
+endurance. Dion boxed quite his best that day, helped by his gallery. He
+fought to win, but he didn't win. Nobody won, for there was no knock-out
+blow given and taken, and, when appealed to for a decision on points,
+Jimmy, breathing stertorously from excitement, was quite unable to give
+the award. He could only stare at the two glorious heroes before him and
+drop the silver watch, glass downwards of course, on the floor, where
+its tinkle told of destruction. Later on, when he spoke, he was able to
+say:
+
+"By Jove!" which he presently amplified into, "I say, mater, by
+Jove--eh, wasn't it, though?"
+
+"Not so bad, sir!" said Jenkins to Dion, after the latter had taken the
+shower bath. "You aren't as stale as I expected to find you, not near as
+stale. But I hope you'll keep it up now you've started with it again."
+
+And Dion promised he would, put his bicycle on the top of a fourwheeler,
+sent it off to Westminster, and walked as far as Claridge's with Mrs.
+Clarke and Jimmy.
+
+The boy made him feel tremendously intimate with Mrs. Clarke. The
+hero-worship he was receiving, the dancing of the blood through his
+veins, the glow of hard exercise, the verdict of Jenkins on his physical
+condition--all these things combined spurred him to a joyous exuberance
+in which body and mind seemed to run like a matched pair of horses in
+perfect accord. Although not at all a conceited man, the feeling that
+he was being admired, even reverenced, was delightful to him, and warmed
+his heart towards the jolly small boy who kept along by his side through
+the busy streets. He and Jimmy talked in a comradely spirit, while
+Mrs. Clarke seemed to listen like one who has things to learn. She was
+evidently a capital walker in spite of her delicate appearance. To-day
+Dion began to believe in her iron health, and, in his joy of the body,
+he liked to think of it. After all delicacy, even in a woman, was a
+fault--a fault of the body, a sort of fretful imperfection.
+
+"Are you strong?" he said to her, when Jimmy's voice ceased for a moment
+to demand from him information or to pour upon him direct statement.
+
+"Oh yes. I've never been seriously ill in my life. Don't I look strong?"
+she asked.
+
+"I don't think you do, but I feel as if you are."
+
+"It's the wiry kind of strength, I suppose."
+
+"The mater's a stayer," quoth Jimmy, and forthwith took up the wondrous
+tale with his hero, who began to consult him seriously on the question
+of "points."
+
+"If you'd had to give a decision, Jimmy, which of us would have got it,
+Jenkins or I?"
+
+Jimmy looked very grave and earnest.
+
+"It's jolly difficult to tell a thing like that, isn't it?" he said,
+after a longish pause. "You see, you're both so jolly strong, aren't
+you?"
+
+His dark eyes gazed at the bulk of Dion.
+
+"Well, which is the quicker?" demanded Dion.
+
+But Jimmy was not to be drawn.
+
+"I think you're both as quick as--as cats," he returned diplomatically,
+seeking anxiously for the genuine sporting comparison that would be
+approved at the ring-side. "Don't you, mater?"
+
+Mrs. Clarke huskily agreed. They were now nearing Claridge's, and Jimmy
+was insistent that Dion should come in and have a real jam tea with
+them.
+
+"Do, Mr. Leith, if you have the time," said Mrs. Clarke, but without any
+pressure.
+
+"The strawberry they have is ripping, I can tell you!" cried Jimmy, with
+ardor.
+
+But Dion refused. Till he was certain of Rosamund's attitude he felt he
+simply couldn't accept Mrs. Clarke's hospitality. He was obliged to get
+home that day. Mrs. Clarke did not ask why, but Jimmy did, and had to
+be put off with an evasion, the usual mysterious "business," which, of
+course, a small boy couldn't dive into and explore.
+
+Dion thought Mrs. Clarke was going to say good-by without any mention of
+Rosamund, but when they reached Claridge's she said:
+
+"Your wife and I didn't decide on a day for the Turkish songs. You
+remember I mentioned them to you the other night? I can't recollect
+whether she left it to me to fix a time, or whether I left it to her.
+Can you find out? Do tell her I was stupid and forgot. Will you?"
+
+Dion said he would.
+
+"I think they'll interest her. Now, Jimmy!"
+
+But Jimmy hung on his god.
+
+"I say, you'll come again now! You promise!"
+
+What could Dion do?
+
+"You put your honor into it?" pursued Jimmy, with desperate earnestness.
+"You swear?"
+
+"If I swear in the open street the police will take me up," said Dion
+jokingly.
+
+"Not they! One from the shoulder from you and I bet they lose enough
+claret to fill a bucket. You've given your honor, hasn't he, mater?"
+
+"Of course we shall see him again," said Mrs. Clarke, staring at Dion.
+
+"What curious eyes she has!" Dion thought, as he walked homeward.
+
+Did they ever entirely lose their under-look of distress?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+That evening Dion told Rosamund what Mrs. Clarke had said when he parted
+from her at Claridge's.
+
+"I promised her I'd find out which it was," he added. "Do you remember
+what was said?"
+
+After a minute of silence, during which Rosamund seemed to be
+considering something, she answered:
+
+"Yes, I do."
+
+"Which was it?"
+
+"Neither, Dion. Mrs. Clarke has made a mistake. She certainly spoke of
+some Turkish songs for me, but there was never any question of fixing a
+day for us to try them over together."
+
+"She thinks there was."
+
+"It's difficult to remember exactly what is said, or not said, in the
+midst of a crowd."
+
+"But you remember?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then you'd rather not try them over?"
+
+"After what you've told me about Constantinople I expect I should be
+quite out of sympathy with Turkish music," she answered, lightly and
+smiling. "Let us be true to our Greek ideal."
+
+She seemed to be in fun, but he detected firmness of purpose behind the
+fun.
+
+"What shall I say to Mrs. Clarke?" he asked.
+
+"I should just leave it. Perhaps she'll forget all about it."
+
+Dion was quite sure that wouldn't happen, but he left it. Rosamund had
+determined not to allow Mrs. Clarke to be friends with her. He wished
+very much it were otherwise, not because he really cared for Mrs.
+Clarke, but because he liked her and Jimmy, and because he hated the
+idea of hurting the feelings of a woman in Mrs. Clarke's rather unusual
+situation. He might, of course, have put his point of view plainly to
+Rosamund at once. Out of delicacy he did not do this. His great love for
+Rosamund made him instinctively very delicate in all his dealings with
+her; it told him that Rosamund did not wish to discuss her reasons for
+desiring to avoid Mrs. Clarke. She had had them, he believed, before
+Mrs. Clarke and she had met. That meeting evidently had not lessened
+their force. He supposed, therefore, that she had disliked Mrs. Clarke.
+He wondered why, and tried to consider Mrs. Clarke anew. She was
+certainly not a disagreeable woman. She was very intelligent,
+thoroughbred, beautiful in a peculiar way,--even Rosamund thought
+that,--ready to make herself pleasant, quite free from feminine malice,
+absolutely natural, interested in all the really interesting things.
+Beattie liked her; Daventry rejoiced in her; Mrs. Chetwinde was her
+intimate friend; Esme Darlington had even made sacrifices for her; Bruce
+Evelin----
+
+There Dion's thought was held up, like a stream that encounters a
+barrier. What did Bruce Evelin think of Mrs. Clarke? He had not gone
+to the trial. But since he had retired from practise at the Bar he had
+never gone into court. Dion had often heard him say he had had enough
+of the Law Courts. There was no reason why he should have been drawn
+to them for Mrs. Clarke's sake, or even for Daventry's. But what did he
+think of Mrs. Clarke? Dion resolved to tell him of the rather awkward
+situation which had come about through his own intimacy--it really
+amounted to that--with Mrs. Clarke, and Rosamund's evident resolve to
+have nothing to do with her.
+
+One day Dion went to Great Cumberland Place and told Bruce Evelin all
+the facts, exactly what Mrs. Clarke had said and done, exactly what
+Rosamund had said and done. As he spoke it seemed to him that he was
+describing a sort of contest, shadowy, perhaps, withdrawn and full of
+reserves, yet definite.
+
+"What do you think of it?" he said, when he had told the comparatively
+little there was to tell.
+
+"I think Rosamund likes to keep her home very quiet, don't you?"
+
+"Yes, I do."
+
+"Even her friends complain that she shuts them out."
+
+"I know they do."
+
+"She may not at all dislike Mrs. Clarke. She may simply not wish to add
+to her circle of friends."
+
+"The difficulty is, that Mrs. Clarke is such friends with Beattie and
+Guy, and that I've got to know her quite well. Then there's her boy;
+he's taken a fancy to me. If Mrs. Clarke and Rosamund could just
+exchange calls it would be all right, but if they don't it really looks
+rather as if Rosamund--well, as if she thought the divorce case had left
+a slur on Mrs. Clarke. What I mean is, that I feel Mrs. Clarke will take
+it in that way."
+
+"She may, of course."
+
+"I wonder why she is so determined to make friends with Rosamund,"
+blurted out Dion abruptly.
+
+"You think she is determined?" said Bruce Evelin quietly.
+
+"Yes. Telling you had made me feel that quite plainly."
+
+"Anyhow, she'll be gone back to Constantinople in April, and then your
+little difficulty will come to an end automatically."
+
+Dion looked rather hard at Bruce Evelin. When he spoke to Rosamund of
+Mrs. Clarke, Rosamund always seemed to try for a gentle evasion. Now
+Bruce Evelin was surely evading the question, and again Mrs. Clarke was
+the subject of conversation. Bruce Evelin was beginning to age rather
+definitely. He had begun to look older since Beattie was married. But
+his dark eyes were still very bright and keen, and one could not be
+with him for even a few minutes without realizing that his intellect was
+sharply alert.
+
+"Isn't it strange that she should go back to live in Constantinople?"
+Dion said.
+
+"Yes. Not many women in her position would do it."
+
+"And yet there's reason in her contention that an innocent woman who
+allows herself to be driven away from the place she lived in is a bit of
+a coward."
+
+"Beadon Clarke's transferred to Madrid, so Mrs. Clarke's reason--it was
+a diplomatic one--for living in Constantinople falls to the ground."
+
+"Yes, that's true. But of course her husband and she have parted.
+
+"Naturally. So she has the world to choose from."
+
+"For a home, you mean? Yes. It's an odd choice, Constantinople. But
+she's not an ordinary woman."
+
+"No, I suppose not," said Bruce Evelin.
+
+Again Dion was definitely conscious of evasion. He got up to go away,
+feeling disappointed.
+
+"Then you advise me to do nothing?" he said.
+
+"What about, my boy?"
+
+"About Mrs. Clarke."
+
+"What could you do?"
+
+Dion was silent.
+
+"I think it's better to let women settle these little things among
+themselves. They have a deep and comprehensive understanding of trifles
+which we mostly lack. How's Robin?"
+
+Robin again! Was he always to be the buffer between 5 Little Market
+Street and Mrs. Clarke?
+
+"He's well and tremendously lively, and I honestly think he's growing
+better looking."
+
+"Dear little chap!" said Bruce Evelin, with a very great tenderness in
+his voice. "Dion, we shall have to concentrate on Robin."
+
+Dion looked at him with inquiry.
+
+"Poor Beattie, I don't think she'll have a child."
+
+"Beattie! Not ever?"
+
+"I'm afraid not."
+
+Dion was shocked and startled.
+
+"But I haven't heard a word--" he began.
+
+"No. Both Beattie and Guy feel it terribly. I had a talk with Beattie's
+doctor to-day."
+
+"How dreadful! I'm sorry. But----" He paused.
+
+He didn't like to ask intimate questions about Beattie.
+
+"I'm afraid it is so," said Bruce Evelin. "You must let us all have a
+share in your Robin."
+
+He spoke very quietly, but there was a very deep, even intense, feeling
+in his voice.
+
+"Poor Beattie!" Dion said.
+
+And that, too, was an evasion.
+
+He went away from Great Cumberland Place accompanied by a sense of
+walking, not perhaps in darkness, but in a dimness which was not
+delicately beautiful like the dimness of twilight, but was rather akin
+to the semi-obscurity of fog.
+
+Not a word more was said about Mrs. Clarke between Rosamund and Dion,
+and the latter never let Mrs. Clarke know about the Turkish songs, never
+fulfilled his undertaking to go and see Jimmy again. In a contest
+he could only be on Rosamund's side. The whole matter seemed to him
+unfortunate, even almost disagreeable, but, for him, there could be no
+question as to whether he wished Rosamund's or Mrs. Clarke's will to
+prevail. Whatever Rosamund's reason was for not choosing to be friends
+with Mrs. Clark he knew it was not malicious or petty. Perhaps she
+had made a mistake about Mrs. Clarke. If so it was certainly an honest
+mistake. It was when he thought of his promise to Jimmy that he felt
+most uncomfortable about Rosamund's never expressed decision. Jimmy had
+a good memory. He would not forget. As to Mrs. Clarke, of course she now
+fully understood that Mrs. Dion Leith did not want to have anything
+to do with her. She continued to go often to Beattie and Daventry,
+consolidated her friendship with them. But Dion never met her in
+De Lorne Gardens. From Daventry he learnt that Mrs. Clarke had been
+extraordinarily kind to Beattie when Beattie's expectation of motherhood
+had faded away. Bruce Evelin's apprehension was well founded. For
+reasons which Daventry did not enter into Beattie could never now hope
+to have a child. Daventry was greatly distressed about it, but rather
+for Beattie's sake than for his own.
+
+"I married Beattie because I loved her, not because I wanted to become a
+father," he said.
+
+After a long pause he added, almost wistfully.
+
+"As to Beattie's reasons for marrying me, well, Dion, I haven't asked
+what they were and I never shall. Women are mysterious, and I believe
+it's wisdom on our part not to try to force the locks and look into
+the hidden chambers. I'll do what I can to make up to Beattie for this
+terrible disappointment. It won't be nearly enough, but that isn't my
+fault. Rosamund and you can help her a little."
+
+"How?"
+
+"She--she's extraordinarily fond of Robin."
+
+"Extraordinarily?" said Dion, startled almost by Daventry's peculiar
+emphasis on the word.
+
+"Yes. Let her see a good deal of Robin if you can. Poor Beattie! She'll
+never have a child of her own to live in."
+
+Dion told Rosamund of this conversation, and they agreed to encourage
+Beattie to come to Little Market Street as often as possible.
+Nevertheless Beattie did not come very often. It was obvious that she
+adored Robin, who was always polite to her; but perhaps delicacy of
+feeling kept her from making perpetual pilgrimages to the shrine before
+which an incense not hers was forever ascending; or perhaps she met
+a gaunt figure of Pain in the home of her sister. However it was, her
+visits were rather rare, and no persuasion availed to make her come
+oftener. At this time she and Dion's mother drew closer together, The
+two women loved and understood each other well. Perhaps between them
+there was a link of loneliness, or perhaps there was another link.
+
+Early in April Dion received one morning the following letter:
+
+
+"CLARIDGE'S HOTEL 6 April
+
+"DEAR MR. LEITH,--I feel pretty rotten about you. I thought when once
+a clever boxer gave his honor on a thing it was a dead cert. The mater
+wouldn't let me write before, though I've been at her over it every day
+for weeks. But now we're going away, so she says I may write and just
+tell you. If you want to say good-by could you telephone, she says.
+P'raps you don't. P'raps you've forgotten us. I can tell you Jenkins is
+sick about it all and your never going to the Gim. He said to me to-day,
+'I don't know what's come over Mr. Leith.' No more do I. The mater says
+you're a busy man and have a kid. I say a true friend is never too
+busy to be friendly. I really do feel rotten over it, and now we are
+going.--Your affectionate JIMMY."
+
+
+Dion showed Rosamund the letter, and telephoned to say he would call on
+the following day. Jimmy's voice answered on the telephone and said:
+
+"I say, you have been beastly to us. The mater says nothing, but we
+thought you liked us. Jenkins says that between boxers there's always
+a--"
+
+At this point Jimmy was cut off in the flow of his reproaches.
+
+On arriving at Claridge's Dion found Jimmy alone. Mrs. Clarke was out
+but would return in a moment. Jimmy received his visitor not stiffly but
+with exuberant and vociferous reproaches, and vehement demands to know
+the why and wherefore of his unsportsmanlike behavior.
+
+"I've ordered you a real jam tea all the same," he concluded, with a
+magnanimity which did him honor, and which, as he was evidently aware,
+proved him to be a true sportsman.
+
+"You're a trump," said Dion, pulling the boy down beside him on a sofa.
+
+"Oh, well--but I say, why didn't you come?"
+
+He stared with the mercilessly inquiring eyes of boyhood.
+
+"I don't think I ever said on my honor that I would come."
+
+"But you did. You swore."
+
+"No. I was afraid of the policeman."
+
+"I say, what rot! As if you could be afraid of any one! Why, Jenkins
+says you're the best pupil he's ever had. Why didn't you? Don't you like
+us?"
+
+"Of course I do."
+
+"The mater says you're married, and married men have no time to bother
+about other people's kids. Is that true?"
+
+"Well, of course there's a lot to be done in London, and I go to
+business every day."
+
+"You've got a kid, haven't you?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"It's a boy, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I say, how old is it?"
+
+"A year and a month old, or a little over."
+
+Jimmy's face expressed satire.
+
+"A year and a month!" he repeated. "Is that all? Then it can't be much
+good yet, can it?"
+
+"It can't box or do exercise as you can. You are getting broad."
+
+"Rather! Box? I should think not! A kid of a year old boxing! I should
+like to see it with Jenkins."
+
+He begin to giggle. By the time Mrs. Clarke returned and they sat down
+to the real jam tea, the ice was in fragments.
+
+"I believe you were right, mater, and it was all the kid that prevented
+Mr. Leith from sticking to his promise," Jimmy announced, as he helped
+Dion to "the strawberry," with a liberality which betokened an affection
+steadfast even under the stress of blighting circumstances.
+
+"Of course I was right," returned his mother gravely.
+
+Dion was rather glad that she looked away from him as she said it.
+
+Her manner to him was unchanged. Evidently she was a woman not quick to
+take offense. He liked that absence of all "touchiness" from her, and
+felt that a man could rest comfortably on her good breeding. But this
+very good breeding increased within him a sense of discomfort which
+amounted almost to guilt. He tried to smother it by being very jolly
+with Jimmy, to whom he devoted most of his attention. When tea was over
+Mrs. Clarke said to her son:
+
+"Now, Jimmy, you must go away for a little while and let me have a talk
+with Mr. Leith."
+
+"Oh, mater, that's not fair. Mr. Leith's my pal. Aren't you, Mr. Leith?
+Why, even Jenkins says--"
+
+"I should rather think so. Why--"
+
+"You shall see Mr. Leith again before he goes."
+
+He looked at his mother, suddenly became very grave, and went slowly out
+of the room. It was evident to Dion that Mrs. Clarke knew how to make
+people obey her when she was in earnest.
+
+As soon as Jimmy had gone Mrs. Clarke rang for the waiter to take away
+the tea-table.
+
+"Then we shan't be bothered," she remarked. "I hate people coming in and
+out when I'm trying to have a quiet talk."
+
+"So do I," said Dion.
+
+The waiter rolled the table out gently and shut the door.
+
+Mrs. Clarke sat down on a sofa.
+
+"Do light a cigar," she said. "I know you want to smoke, and I'll have a
+cigarette."
+
+She drew out of a little case which lay on a table beside her a Turkish
+cigarette and lit it, while Dion lighted a cigar.
+
+"So you're really going back to Constantinople?" he began. "Are you
+taking Jimmy with you?"
+
+"Yes, for a time. My husband raises no objection. In a year I shall send
+Jimmy to Eton. Lady Ermyntrude is furious, of course, and has tried to
+stir up my husband. But her influence with him is dead. He's terribly
+ashamed at what she made him do."
+
+"The action?"
+
+"Yes. It was she who made him think me guilty against his real inner
+conviction. Now, poor man, he realizes that he dragged me through the
+dirt without reason. He's ashamed to show his face in the Clubs, and
+nearly resigned from diplomacy. But he's a valuable man, and they've
+persuaded him to go to Madrid."
+
+"Why go back to Constantinople?"
+
+"Merely to show I'm not afraid to and that I won't be driven from my
+purpose by false accusations."
+
+"And you love it, of course."
+
+"Yes. My flat will be charming, I think. Some day you'll see it."
+
+Dion was silent in surprise.
+
+"Don't you realize that?" she asked, staring at him.
+
+"I think it very improbable that I shall ever go back to
+Constantinople."
+
+"And I'm sure you will."
+
+"Why are you sure?"
+
+"That I can't tell you. Why is one sometimes sure that certain things
+will come about?"
+
+"Do you claim to be psychic?" said Dion.
+
+"I never make verbal claims. Now about Jimmy."
+
+She discussed for a little while seriously her plans for the boy's
+education while he stayed with her. She had found a tutor, a young
+Oxford man, who would accompany them to Turkey, but she wanted Dion's
+advice on certain points. He gave it, wondering all the time why she
+consulted him after his neglect of her and of her son, after his
+failure to accept invitations and to fulfil pledges (or to stick to the
+understandings which were almost pledges), after the tacit refusals of
+Rosamund. Did it not show a strange persistence, even a certain lack of
+pride in her? Perhaps she heard the haunting questions which he did not
+utter, for she suddenly turned from the topic of the boy and said:
+
+"You're surprised at my bothering you with all this when we really know
+each other so slightly. It is unconventional; but I shall never learn
+the way to conventionality in spite of all poor Esme's efforts to
+shepherd me into the path he thinks narrow and I find broad--a way that
+leads to destruction. I feel you absolutely understand boys, and know by
+instinct the best way with them. That's why I _still_ come to you."
+
+She paused. She had deliberately driven home her meaning by a stress on
+one word. Now she sat looking at him, with a wide-eyed and deeply
+grave fixity, as if considering what more she should say. Dion murmured
+something about being very glad if he could help her in any way with
+regard to Jimmy.
+
+"You can be conventional," she remarked. "Well, why not? Most English
+people are perpetually playing for safety."
+
+"I wish you wouldn't go back to Constantinople," said Dion.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I believe it's a mistake. It seems to me like throwing down a defiance
+to your world."
+
+"But I never play for safety."
+
+"But think of the danger you've passed through."
+
+The characteristic distressed look deepened in her eyes till they seemed
+to him tragic. Nevertheless, fearlessness still looked out of them.
+
+"What shall I gain by doing that?" she asked.
+
+"Esme Darlington once said you were a wild mind in an innocent body. I
+believe he was right. But it seems to me that some day your wild mind
+may get you into danger again and that perhaps you won't escape from it
+unscathed a second time."
+
+"How quiet and safe it must be at Number 5!" she rejoined, without any
+irony.
+
+"You wouldn't care for that sort of life. You'd find it humdrum," said
+Dion, with simplicity.
+
+"You never would," she said, still without irony, without even the hint
+of a sneer. "And the truth is that the humdrum is created not by a way
+of living but by those who follow it. Your wife and the humdrum could
+never occupy the same house. I shall always regret that I didn't see
+something of her. Do give her a cordial 'au revoir' from me. You'll hear
+of me again. Don't be frightened about me in your kind of chivalrous
+heart. I am grateful to you for several things. I'm not going to give
+the list now. That would either bore you, or make you feel shy. Some
+day, perhaps, I shall tell you what they are, in a caique on the sweet
+waters of Asia or among the cypresses of Eyub."
+
+With the last sentence she transported Dion, as on a magic carpet, to
+the unwise life. Her husky voice changed a little; her face changed
+a little too; the one became slower and more drowsy; the other less
+haggard and fixed in its expression of distress. This woman had her
+hours of happiness, perhaps even of exultation. For a moment Dion
+envisaged another woman in her. And when he had bidden her good-by, and
+had received the tremendous farewells of Jimmy, he realized that she had
+made upon him an impression which, though soft, was certainly deep. He
+thought of how a cushion looks when it lies on a sofa in an empty room,
+indented by the small head of a woman who has been thinking, thinking
+alone. For a moment he was out of shape, and Mrs. Clarke had made him
+so.
+
+In the big hall, as he passed out, he saw Lord Brayfield standing in
+front of the bureau speaking to the hall porter.
+
+"Some day, perhaps, I shall tell you what they are, in a caique on the
+sweet waters of Asia or among the cypresses of Eyub."
+
+Dion smiled as he recalled Mrs. Clarke's words, which had been spoken
+fatalistically. Then his face became very grave.
+
+Suddenly there dawned upon him, like a vision in the London street, one
+of the vast Turkish cemeteries, dusty, forlorn, disordered, yet full
+of a melancholy touched by romance; and among the thousands of graves,
+through the dark thickets of cypresses, he was walking with Mrs. Clarke,
+who looked exactly like Echo.
+
+A newsboy at the corner was crying his latest horror--a woman found
+stabbed in Hyde Park. But to Dion his raucous and stunted voice sounded
+like a voice from the sea, a strange and sad cry lifted up between
+Europe and Asia.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III -- LITTLE CLOISTERS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+More than a year and a half passed away, and in the autumn of 1899 the
+Boer War broke out and the face of England was changed; for the heart of
+England began to beat more strongly than usual, and the soul of England
+was stirred. The winter came, and in many Englishmen a hidden conflict
+began; in their journey through life they came abruptly to a parting of
+the ways, stood still and looked to the right and the left, balancing
+possibilities, searching their natures and finding within them strange
+hesitations, recoils, affirmations, determined nobilities.
+
+Dion had followed the events which led up to the fateful decision of
+Wednesday, October the eleventh, with intense interest. As the October
+days drew on he had felt the approach of war. It came up, this footfall
+of an enemy, it paced at his side. Would he presently be tried by this
+enemy, would it test him and find out exactly what metal he was made of?
+He wondered, but from the moment when the first cloud showed itself on
+the horizon he had a presentiment that this distant war was going to
+have a strong effect on his life.
+
+On the afternoon of October the eleventh he walked slowly home from
+the City alone. There was excitement in the air. The voices of the
+newsvendors sounded fateful in his ears; the faces of the passers-by
+looked unusually eager and alert. As he made his way through the crowd
+he did not debate the rights and wrongs of the question about to
+be decided between Briton and Boer. His mind avoided thoughts about
+politics. For him, perhaps strangely, the issue had already narrowed
+down to a personal question: "What is this war going to mean to me?"
+
+He asked himself this; he put the question again and again. Nevertheless
+it was answered somewhere within him almost as soon as it was put. If
+there came a call for volunteers he would be one of the many who would
+answer it. The call might not come, of course; the war might be short, a
+hole-and-corner affair soon ended. He told himself that, and, as he did
+so, he felt sure that the call would come.
+
+He knew he would not hold back; but he knew also that his was not the
+eagerness to go of the man assumed by journalists to be the typical
+Englishman. He was not mad to plunge into the great game, reckless of
+the future and shouting for the fray. He was not one of the "hard-bitten
+raw-boned men with keen eyes and ready for anything" beloved of the
+journalists, who loom so large in the public eye when "big things are
+afoot." On that autumn evening, as he walked homeward, Dion knew the
+bunkum that is given out to the world as truth, knew that brave men have
+souls undreamed of in newspaper offices. He perceived the figure of
+war just then as a figure terribly austere, grim, cold, harsh--a figure
+stripped of all pleasant flesh and sweet coloring, of all softness and
+warm humanity. It accompanied him like an iron thing which nevertheless
+was informed with life. Joy withered beside it, yet it had the power to
+make things bloom. Already he knew that as he had not known it before.
+
+In the crowded Strand the voices of the newsvendors were insistently
+shrill, raucous, almost fierce. As he heard them he faced tests. Many
+things were going to be put to the test in the almost immediate future.
+Among them perhaps would be Rosamund's exact feeling for him.
+
+Upon the hill of Drouva they had slept in the same tent, husband and
+wife, more than three years ago; in green and remote Elis they had sat
+together before the Hermes, hidden away from the world and hearing
+the antique voices; in Westminster Robin was theirs; yet this evening,
+facing in imagination the tests of war, Dion knew that Rosamund's exact
+feeling for him was still a secret from him. If he went to South Africa
+that secret must surely be revealed. Rosamund would inevitably find out
+then the nature of her feeling for him, how much she cared, and even if
+she did not tell him how much she cared he would know, he could not help
+knowing.
+
+He knew with a terrible thoroughness this evening how much he cared for
+her.
+
+He considered Robin.
+
+Robin was now more than two and a half years old; a personage in a
+jersey and minute knickerbockers, full of dancing energy and spirits,
+full of vital interest in the smaller problems of life. He was a fidget
+and he was a talker. Out of a full mind he poured forth an abundant
+stream of words, carelessly chosen at times, yet on the whole apt to
+the occasion. His intelligence was marked, of course,--what very young
+child's is not?--and he had inherited an ample store of the _joie de
+vivre_ which distinguished his mother. The homeliness of feature which
+had marked him out in the baldhead stage of his existence had given
+place to a dawning of what promised to be later on distinct good looks.
+Already he was an attractive-looking child, with a beautiful mouth, a
+rather short and at present rather snub nose, freckled on the bridge,
+large blue eyes, and a forehead, temples and chin which hinted at
+Rosamund's. His hair was now light brown, and had a bold, almost an
+ardent, wave in it. Perhaps Robin's most marked characteristic at this
+time was ardor. Occasionally the mildly inquiring expression which Dion
+had been touched by in the early days came to his little face. He could
+be very gentle and very clinging, and was certainly sensitive. Often
+imagination, in embryo as it were, was shown by his eyes. But ardor
+informed and enveloped him, he swam in ardor and of ardor he was all
+compact. Even the freckles which disfigured, or adorned, the bridge of
+his nose looked ardent. Rosamund loved those freckles in a way she could
+never have explained, loved them with a strength and tenderness which
+issued from the very roots of her being. To her they were Robin, the
+dearest part of the dearest thing on earth. Many of her kisses had gone
+to those little freckles.
+
+Dion might have to part not only from Rosamund but also from Robin.
+
+He had become very fond of his little son. The detachment which had
+perhaps marked his mental attitude to the baby did not mark his
+mental attitude to the boy. In the Robin of to-day, the jerseyed and
+knickerbockered person, with the incessantly active legs, the eager
+eyes, the perpetually twittering voice, Dion was conscious of the spirit
+of progress. Already he was able to foresee the small school-boy, whom
+only a father could properly help and advise in regard to many aspects
+of the life ahead; already he was looking forward to the time when he
+could take a hand in the training of Robin. It would be very hard to go
+away from that little bit of quicksilver, very hard indeed.
+
+But the thought which made his heart sink, which brought with it almost
+a sensation of mortal sickness to his soul, was the thought of parting
+from Rosamund. As he walked down Parliament Street he imagined the
+good-by to her on the eve of sailing for South Africa. That acute moment
+might never come. This evening he felt it on the way. Whatever happened
+it would be within his power to stay with Rosamund, for there was no
+conscription in England. If he went to South Africa then the action
+of leaving her would be deliberate on his part. Was there within him
+something that was stronger than his love for her? There must be, he
+supposed, for he knew that if men were called for, and if Rosamund
+asked, or even begged him not to go, he would go nevertheless.
+
+Vaporous Westminster, dark and leaning to the great river, for how long
+he had not seen it, or realized what it meant to him! Custom had blinded
+his eyes and had nearly closed his mind to it. The day's event had
+given him back sight and knowledge. This evening his familiarity with
+Westminster bred in him intensity of vision and apprehension. It seemed
+to him that scales had fallen from his eyes, that for the first time
+he really saw Parliament Street, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster
+Bridge, the river. The truth was, that for the first time he really
+felt them, felt that he belonged to them and they to him, that their
+blackness in the October evening was part of the color of him, that the
+Westminster sounds, chimes, footfalls, the dull roar of traffic, human
+voices from street, from bridge, from river, harmonized with the voices
+in him, in the very depths of him. This was England, this closeness,
+this harmony of the outer to and with the inner, this was England saying
+to one of her sons, "You belong to me and I to you." The race spoke and
+the land, they walked with Dion in the darkness.
+
+For he did not go straight home. He walked for a long time beside the
+river. By the river he kissed Robin and he said good-by to Rosamund,
+by the river he climbed upon the troopship, and he saw the fading of
+England on the horizon, and he felt the breath of the open sea. And
+in the midst of a crowd of men going southward he knew at last what
+loneliness was. The lights that gleamed across the river were the last
+lights of England that he would see for many a day, perhaps forever;
+the chime from the clock-tower was the last of the English sounds. He
+endured in imagination a phantom bitterness of departure which seemed
+abominably real; then suddenly he was recalled from a possible future to
+the very definite present.
+
+He met by the river two men, sleek people in silk hats, with plump
+hands--hands which looked as if they were carefully fed on very
+nutritious food every day by their owners--warmly covered. As they
+passed him one of those know-alls said to the other:
+
+"Oh, it'll only be a potty little war. What can a handful of peasants do
+against our men? I'll lay you five to one in sovereigns two months will
+see it out."
+
+"I dare say you will," returned the other, in a voice that was surely
+smiling, "but I won't take you."
+
+"By Jove, what a plunger I am!" thought Dion. "Racing ahead like a horse
+that's lost his wits. Ten to one they'll never want volunteers."
+
+But Westminster still looked exceptional, full of the inner meaning, and
+somewhere within him a voice still said, "You will go." Nevertheless he
+was able partly to put off his hybrid feeling, half-dread, half-desire.
+The sleek people in the silk hats had made their little effect on the
+stranger. "The man in the street is often right," Dion said to himself;
+though he knew that the man in the street is probably there, and remains
+there, because he is so often wrong.
+
+When he reached Little Market Street Dion told Rosamund there would
+be war in South Africa, but he did not even hint at his thought that
+volunteers might be called for, at his intention, if they were, to offer
+himself. To do that would not only be absurdly premature, but might
+even seem slightly bombastic, an uncalled-for study in heroics. He kept
+silence. The battles of Ladysmith, of Magersfontein, of Stormberg, of
+Colenso, unsettled the theories of sleek people in silk hats. England
+came to a very dark hour when Robin was playing with a new set of bricks
+which his Aunt Beattie had given him. Dion began to understand the
+rightness of his instinct that evening by the river, when Westminster
+had spoken to him and England had whispered in his blood. As he had
+thought of things, so they were going to be. The test was very great. It
+was as if already it stood by him, a living entity, and touched him
+with an imperious hand. Sometimes he looked at Rosamund and saw great
+stretches of sea rolling under great stretches of sky. The barrier! How
+would he be able to bear the long separation from Rosamund? The habit of
+happiness in certain circumstances can become the scourge of a man. Men
+who were unhappy at home could go to war with a lighter heart than he.
+
+Just before Christmas the call for men came, and in Dion a hesitation
+was born. Should he go and offer himself at once without telling
+Rosamund, or should he tell her what he wished to do and ask her
+opinion? Suppose she were against his going out? He could not ask her
+advice if he was not prepared to take it. What line did he wish her
+to take? By what course of action would such a woman as Rosamund prove
+depth of love? Wouldn't it be natural for a woman who loved a man
+to raise objections to his going out to fight in a distant country?
+Wouldn't she prove her love by raising objections? On the other hand,
+wouldn't a woman who loved a man in the greatest way be driven by the
+desire to see him rise up in an emergency and prove his manhood at
+whatever cost to her?
+
+Dion wanted one thing of Rosamund at this moment, wanted it terribly,
+with longing and with fear,--the proof absolute and unhesitating of her
+love for him.
+
+He decided to volunteer without telling her before hand that he meant to
+do so. He told no one of his intention except his Uncle Biron, whom he
+was obliged to consult as they were partners in business.
+
+"You're right, my boy," said his uncle. "We'll get on as best we can
+without you. We shall miss you, of course. Since you've been married
+your energy has been most praiseworthy, but, of course, the nation comes
+before the firm. What does your mother say?"
+
+Dion was struck with a sense of wonder by this question. Why didn't his
+uncle ask him what Rosamund had said?
+
+"I haven't spoken to her," he answered.
+
+"She'll wish you to go in spite of all," said his uncle gravely.
+
+"I haven't even spoken to Rosamund of my intention to enlist."
+
+His uncle looked surprised, even for a moment astonished, but he only
+said:
+
+"She's rather on heroic lines, I should judge. There's something
+spacious in her nature."
+
+"Yes," said Dion.
+
+He pledged his uncle to silence. Then they talked business.
+
+From that moment Dion wondered how his mother would take his decision.
+That he had not wondered before proved to himself the absorbing
+character of his love for his wife. He loved his mother very much, yet,
+till his uncle had spoken about her in the office, he had only thought
+about Rosamund in connection with his decision to enlist. The very
+great thing had swallowed up the big thing. There is something ruthless,
+almost at moments repellent, in the very great thing which rules in a
+man's life. But his mother would never know.
+
+That was what he said to himself, unconscious of the fact that his
+mother had known and had lived alone with her knowledge for years.
+
+He offered himself for service in South Africa with the City Imperial
+Volunteers. The doctor passed him. He was informed that he would be
+sworn in at the Guildhall on 4th January. The great step was taken.
+
+Why had he taken it without telling Rosamund he was going to take it?
+
+As he came out into the dark winter evening he wondered about that
+almost vaguely. He must have had a driving reason, but now he did not
+know what it was. How was Rosamund going to take it? Suddenly he felt
+guilty, as if he had done her a wrong. They were one flesh, and in such
+a vital matter he had not consulted her. Wasn't it abominable?
+
+As soon as he was free he went straight home.
+
+This time, as he walked homeward, Dion held no intercourse with
+Westminster. If he heard the chimes, the voices, the footfalls, he was
+not conscious of hearing them; if he saw the vapors from the river,
+the wreaths of smoke from the chimneys, the lights gleaming in the near
+houses and far away across the dark mystery of the water, he did not
+know that he saw them. In himself he was imprisoned, and against the
+great city in which he walked he had shut the doors.
+
+He arrived at his house and put his hand in his pocket to get his
+latch-key. Before he was able to draw it forth the green door was opened
+and Beatrice came out.
+
+"Dion!" she said, startled.
+
+"You nearly ran over me!"
+
+"What is it?" she asked. "What have you done?"
+
+"But--"
+
+"I know!" she interrupted.
+
+She put out her hand and took hold of his coat sleeve. The action was
+startlingly impulsive in Beatrice, who was always so almost plaintive,
+so restrained, so dim.
+
+"But you can't!"
+
+"I do. You are going to South Africa."
+
+He said nothing. How could he tell Beatrice before he told Rosamund?
+
+"When are you going?"
+
+"Is Rosamund in the house, Beattie?" he asked, very gently.
+
+Beatrice flushed deeply, painfully, and took her hand from his sleeve.
+
+"Yes. I've been playing with Robin, building castles with the new
+bricks. Good-by, Dion."
+
+She went past him and down the small street rather quickly. He stood for
+a moment looking after her; then he turned into the house. As he shut
+the door he heard a chord struck on the piano upstairs in Rosamund's
+sitting-room. He took off his coat and hat and came into the little
+hall. As he did so he heard Rosamund's voice beginning to sing Brahms's
+"Wiegenlied" very softly. He guessed that she was singing to an audience
+of Robin. The bricks had been put away after the departure of Aunt
+Beattie, and now Robin was being sung towards sleep. How often would he
+be sung to by Rosamund in the future when his father would not be there
+to listen!
+
+Robin was going to have his mother all to himself, and Rosamund was
+going to have her little son all to herself. But they did not know that
+yet. The long months of their sacred companionship stretched out before
+the father as he listened to the lullaby, which he could only just hear.
+Rosamund had mastered the art of withdrawing her voice and yet keeping
+it perfectly level.
+
+When the song was finished, whispered away into the spaces where music
+disperses to carry on its sweet mission, Dion went up the stairs, opened
+the door of Rosamund's room, and saw something very simple, and, to him,
+very memorable. Rosamund had turned on the music-stool and put her
+right arm round Robin, who, in his minute green jersey and green
+knickerbockers, stood leaning against her with the languid happiness and
+half-wayward demeanor of a child who has been playing, and who already
+feels the soothing influence of approaching night with its gift of
+profound sleep. Robin's cheeks were flushed, and in his blue eyes there
+was a curious expression, drowsily imaginative, as if he were welcoming
+dreams which were only for him. With a faint smile on his small rosy
+lips he was listening while Rosamund repeated to him in English the
+words of the song she had just been singing. Dion heard her say:
+
+     "Sink to slumber, good-night,
+     And angels of light
+     With love you shall fold
+     As the Christ Child of old."
+
+"There's Fa!" whispered Robin, sending to Dion a semi-roguish look.
+
+Dion held up his hand and formed "Hush!" with his lips. Rosamund
+finished the verse:
+
+     "While the stars dimly shine
+     May no sorrow be thine."
+
+She bent and kissed Robin on the top of his head just in the middle,
+choosing the place, and into his hair she breathed a repetition of the
+last words, "May no sorrow be thine."
+
+And Dion was going to the war.
+
+Robin slipped from his mother's arm gently and came to his father.
+
+"'Allo, Fa!" he observed confidentially.
+
+Dion bent down.
+
+"Hallo, Robin!"
+
+He picked the little chap up and gave him a kiss. What a small bundle
+of contentment Robin was at that moment. In South Africa Dion often
+remembered just how Robin had felt to him then, intimate and a mystery,
+confidential, sleepy with happiness, a tiny holder of the Divine, a
+willing revelation and a soft secret. So much in so little!
+
+"You've been playing with Aunt Beattie."
+
+Robin acknowledged it.
+
+"Auntie's putty good at bricks."
+
+"Did you meet Beattie, Dion?" asked Rosamund.
+
+"On the doorstep."
+
+He thought of Beattie's question. There was no question in Rosamund's
+face. But perhaps his own face had changed.
+
+A tap came to the door.
+
+"Master Robin?" said nurse, in a voice that held both inquiry and an
+admonishing sound.
+
+When Robin had gone off to bed, walking vaguely and full of the
+forerunners of dreams, Dion knew that his hour had come. He felt a sort
+of great stillness within him, stillness of presage, perhaps, or of
+mere concentration, of the will to be, to do, to endure, whatever
+came. Rosamund shut down the lid of the piano and came away from the
+music-stool. Dion looked at her, and thought of the maidens of the porch
+and of the columns of the Parthenon.
+
+"Rosamund," he said,--that stillness within him forbade any preparation,
+any "leading up,"--"I've joined the City Imperial Volunteers."
+
+"The City Imperial Volunteers?" she said.
+
+He knew by the sound of her voice that she had not grasped the meaning
+of what he had done. She looked surprised, and a question was in her
+brown eyes.
+
+"Why? What are they? I don't understand. And the Artists' Rifles?"
+
+"I've got my transfer from them. I've joined for the war."
+
+"The war? Do you mean----?"
+
+She came up to him, looking suddenly intent.
+
+"Do you mean you have volunteered for active service in South Africa?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Without consulting me?"
+
+Her whole face reddened, almost as it had reddened when she spoke to him
+about the death of her mother.
+
+"Yes. I haven't signed on yet, but the doctor has passed me. I'm to be
+sworn in at the Guildhall on the fourth, I believe. We shall sail very
+soon, almost directly, I suppose. They want men out there."
+
+He did not know how bruskly he spoke; he was feeling too much to know.
+
+"I didn't think you could do such a thing without speaking to me first.
+My husband, and you----!"
+
+She stopped abruptly, as if afraid of what she might say if she went on
+speaking. Two deep lines appeared in her forehead. For the first time in
+his life Dion saw an expression of acute hostility in her eyes. She had
+been angry, or almost angry with him for a moment in Elis, when he broke
+off the branch of wild olive; but she had not looked like this. There
+was something piercing in her expression that was quite new to him.
+
+"I felt I ought to do it," he said dully.
+
+"Did you think I should try to prevent you?"
+
+"No. I scarcely knew what I thought."
+
+"Have you told your mother?"
+
+"No. I had to tell Uncle Biron because of the business. Nobody else
+knows."
+
+And then suddenly he remembered Beattie.
+
+"At least I haven't told any one else."
+
+"But some one else does know--knew before I did."
+
+"I saw Beattie just now, as I said. I believe she guessed. I didn't tell
+her."
+
+"But how could she guess such a thing if you gave her no hint?"
+
+"That's just what I have been wondering."
+
+Rosamund was silent. She went away from him and stood by the fire,
+turning her back to him. He waited for a moment, then he went to the
+hearth.
+
+"Don't you think perhaps it's best for a man to decide such a thing
+quite alone? It's a man's job, and each man must judge for himself what
+he ought to do in such a moment. If you had asked me not to go I should
+have felt bound to go all the same."
+
+"But I should have said 'Go.' Then you never understood me in Greece?
+All our talks told you nothing about me? And now Robin is here--you
+thought I should ask you not to go!"
+
+She turned round. She seemed almost passionately surprised.
+
+"Perhaps--in a way--I wished to think that."
+
+"Why? Did you wish to despise me?"
+
+"Rosamund! As if I could ever do that."
+
+"If you did a despicable thing I should despise you."
+
+"Don't! I haven't much more time here."
+
+"I never, never shall be able to understand how you could do this
+without telling me beforehand that you were going to do it."
+
+"It wasn't from any want of respect or love for you."
+
+"I can't talk about it any more just now."
+
+The flush on her face deepened. She turned and went out of the room.
+
+Dion was painfully affected. He had never before had a serious
+disagreement with Rosamund. It was almost intolerable to have one now
+on the eve of departure from her. He felt like one who had committed an
+outrage out of the depths of a terrible hunger, a hunger of curiosity.
+He knew now why he had volunteered for active service without consulting
+Rosamund. Obscurely his nature had spoken, saying, "Put her to the test
+and make the test drastic." And he had obeyed the command. He had wanted
+to know, to find out suddenly, in a moment, the exact truth of years.
+And now he had roused a passion of anger in Rosamund.
+
+Her anger wrapped him in pain such as he had never felt till now.
+
+The house seemed full of menace. In the little room the atmosphere was
+changed. He looked round it and his eyes rested on the Hermes. He went
+up to it and stood before it.
+
+Instantly he felt again the exquisite calm of Elis. The face of the
+Hermes made the thought of war seem horrible and ridiculous. Men had
+learnt so much when Praxiteles created his Hermes, and they knew so
+little now. The enigma of their violence was as great as the enigma of
+the celestial calm which the old Greeks had perpetuated to be forever
+the joy and the rest of humanity. And he, Dion, was going to take an
+active part in violence. The unchanging serenity of the Hermes, which
+brought all Elis before him, with its green sights and its wonderful
+sounds, of the drowsy insects in the sunshine, of the sheep-bells, and
+of the pines whose voices hold within them all the eternal secrets,
+increased the intensity of his misery. He realized how unstable are the
+foundations of human happiness, and his house of life seemed crumbling
+about him.
+
+Presently he went downstairs to his room and wrote letters to his mother
+and to Bruce Evelin, telling them what he had done.
+
+When he had directed and stamped these letters he thought of Beattie
+and Guy. Beattie knew. What was it which had led her so instantly to
+a knowledge denied to Rosamund? Rosamund had evidently not noticed any
+difference in him when he came in that evening. But, to be sure, Robin
+had been there.
+
+Robin had been there.
+
+Dion sat before the writing-table for a long while doing nothing. Then
+a clock struck. He had only half an hour to spare before dinner would be
+ready. Quickly he wrote a few words to Beattie:
+
+
+"MY DEAR BEATTIE,--You were right. I have volunteered for active service
+and shall soon be off to South Africa. I don't know yet exactly when we
+shall start, but I expect they'll hurry us off as quickly as they can.
+Men are wanted out there badly. Lots of fellows are coming forward.
+I'll tell you more when I see you again. Messages to Guy.--Yours
+affectionately,
+
+"DION"
+
+
+It was not an eloquent letter, but Beattie would understand. Beattie was
+not a great talker but she was a great understander. He went out to put
+the three letters into the pillar-box. Then he hurried upstairs to his
+dressing-room. For the first time in his life he almost dreaded spending
+an evening alone with Rosamund.
+
+He did not see her till he came into the drawing-room. As he opened the
+door he saw her sitting by the fire reading, in a dark blue dress.
+
+"I'm afraid I'm late," he said, as he walked to the hearth. "I wrote to
+mother, Beattie and godfather to tell them what I was going to do."
+
+"What you had done," she said quietly, putting down the book.
+
+"I haven't actually been sworn in yet, but of course it is practically
+the same thing."
+
+He looked at her almost surreptitiously. She was very grave, but there
+was absolutely nothing hostile or angry in her expression or manner.
+They went into the dining-room, and talked together much as usual during
+dinner. As soon as dinner was over, and the parlor-maid had gone out,
+having finished her ministrations, which to Dion that night had seemed
+innumerable and well-nigh unbearable, he said:
+
+"I'm dreadfully sorry about to-day. I did the wrong thing in
+volunteering without saying anything to you. Of course you were hurt and
+startled----"
+
+He looked at her and paused.
+
+"Yes, I was. I couldn't help it, and I don't think you ought to have
+done what you did. But you have made a great sacrifice--very great. I
+only want to think of that, Dion, of how much you are giving up, and of
+the cause--our cause."
+
+She spoke very earnestly and sincerely, and her eyes looked serious and
+very kind.
+
+"Don't let us go back to anything sad, or to any misunderstanding now,"
+she continued. "You are doing an admirable thing, and I shall always be
+glad you had the will to do it, were able to do it. Tell me everything.
+I want to live in your new life as much as I can. I want you to feel me
+in it as much as you can."
+
+"She has prayed over it. While I was writing my letters she was praying
+over it."
+
+Suddenly Dion knew this as if Rosamund had opened her heart to him and
+had told it. And immediately something which was like a great light
+seemed not only to illumine the present moment but also to throw a
+piercing ray backwards upon all his past life with Rosamund. In the
+light of this ray he discerned a shadowy something, which stood between
+Rosamund and him, keeping them always apart. It was a tremendous
+Presence; his feeling was that it was the Presence of God. Abruptly he
+seemed to be aware that God had always stood, was standing now, between
+him and his wife. He remembered the words in the marriage service,
+"Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder." "But God,"
+he thought, "did not join us. He stood between us always. He stands
+between us now." It was an awful thought. It was like a great blasphemy.
+He was afraid of it. And yet he now felt that it was an old, old thought
+in his mind which only now had he been able to formulate. He had known
+without knowing consciously, but now he consciously knew.
+
+He took care at this moment not to look at Rosamund. If he looked,
+surely she would see in his eyes his terrible thought, the thought he
+was going to carry with him to South Africa. Making a great effort
+he began to tell her all that he knew about the C.I.V. They discussed
+matters in a comradely spirit. Rosamund said many warm-hearted things,
+showed herself almost eagerly solicitous. They went up to sit by the
+fire in her little room. Dion smoked. They talked for a long time. Had
+any one been there to listen he would probably have thought, "This man
+has got the ideal wife. She's a true comrade as well as a wife." But
+all the time Dion kept on saying to himself, "This is the result of her
+prayers before dinner. She is being good." Only when it was late, past
+their usual hour for going to bed, did he feel that the strong humanity
+in Rosamund had definitely gained ground, that she was being genuinely
+carried away by warm impulses connected with dear England, our men, and
+with him.
+
+When they got up at last to go to bed she exclaimed:
+
+"I shall always love what you have done, Dion. You know that."
+
+"But not the way of my doing it!" trembled on his lips.
+
+He did not say it, however. Why lead her back even for a moment to
+bitterness?
+
+That night he lay with his thoughts, and in the darkness the ray was
+piercing bright and looked keen like a sharpened sword.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+On the fourth of January Dion and about nine hundred other men were
+sworn in at the Guildhall; on January the seventeenth, eight hundred
+of them, including Dion, were presented with the Freedom of the City
+of London; on the nineteenth they were equipped and attended a farewell
+service at St. Paul's Cathedral, after which they were entertained at
+supper, some at Gray's Inn and some at Lincoln's Inn; on the twentieth
+they entrained for Southampton, from which port they sailed in the
+afternoon for South Africa. Dion was on board of the "Ariosto."
+
+Strangely, perhaps, he was almost glad when the ship cast off and the
+shores of England faded and presently were lost beyond the horizon line.
+He was alone now with his duty. Life was suddenly simplified. It was
+better so. In the last days he had often felt confused, beset, had often
+felt that he was struggling in a sea of complications which threatened
+to overwhelm him. There had been too much to do and there had been too
+much to endure; he had been obliged to be practical when he was feeling
+intensely emotional. The effort to dominate and to conceal his emotion
+had sometimes almost exhausted him in the midst of all he had had to
+do. He had come to the knowledge of the fact that it is the work of the
+spirit which leaves the whole man tired. He was weary, not from hard
+energies connected with his new profession, not from getting up at
+dawn, marching through dense crowds of cheering countrymen, traveling,
+settling in on shipboard, but from farewells. He looked back now upon a
+sort of panorama of farewells, of partings from his mother, his uncle,
+Bruce Evelin, Guy, Beatrice, Robin, Rosamund.
+
+Quite possibly all these human companions had vanished out of his life
+for ever. It was a tremendous thought, upon which he was resolved not to
+dwell lest his courage and his energies might be weakened.
+
+Through good-bys a man may come to knowledge, and Dion had, in these
+last few days, gone down to the bedrock of knowledge concerning some of
+those few who were intimately in his life--knowledge of them and also
+of himself. Nobody had traveled to Southampton to see him off. He had a
+very English horror of scenes, and had said all his good-bys in private.
+With Bruce Evelin he had had a long talk; they had spoken frankly
+together about the future of Rosamund and Robin in the event of his not
+coming back. Dion had expressed his views on the bringing up of the boy,
+and, in doing so had let Bruce Evelin into secrets of Greece. The father
+did not expect, perhaps did not even desire, that the little son should
+develop into a paragon, but he did desire for Rosamund's child the
+strong soul in the strong body, and the soft heart that was not a
+softy's heart.
+
+In that conversation Bruce Evelin had learnt a great deal about Dion.
+They had spoken of Rosamund, perhaps more intimately than they had ever
+spoken before, and Dion had said, "I'm bothering so much about Robin
+partly because her life is bound up with Robin's."
+
+"Several lives are bound up with that little chap's," Bruce Evelin had
+said.
+
+And a sudden sense of loneliness had come upon Dion. But he had only
+made some apparently casual remark to the effect that he knew Bruce
+Evelin would do his best to see that Robin came to no harm. No absurd
+and unnecessary promises had been exchanged between the old and the
+young man. Their talk had been British, often seemingly casual, and
+nearly always touched with deep feeling. It had not opened to Dion new
+vistas of Bruce Evelin. For a long time Dion had felt that he knew
+Bruce Evelin. But it had given him a definite revelation of the strong
+faithfulness, the tenacity of faithfulness in friendship, which was
+perhaps the keynote of Bruce Evelin's character.
+
+The parting from Guy had been less eventful. Nevertheless it had helped
+to get rid of certain faint misunderstandings which neither of the
+friends had ever acknowledged. Since the Mrs. Clarke episode Dion had
+been aware that Guy's feeling towards him had slightly changed. They
+were such old and tried friends that they would always care for each
+other, but Guy could not help resenting Rosamund's treatment of Mrs.
+Clarke, could not help considering Dion's acquiescence in it a sign of
+weakness. These feelings, unexpressed, but understood by Dion, had set
+up a slight barrier between the two young men; it had fallen when they
+said good-by. Mrs. Clarke had been forgotten then by Guy, who had only
+remembered the gifts of war, and that possibly this was his final sight
+of old Dion. All their common memories had been with them when the last
+hand-clasp was given, and perhaps only when their hands fell apart had
+they thoroughly tested at last the strength of the link between them.
+They were friends for life without knowing exactly why. Thousands of
+Englishmen were in the same case.
+
+Dion had gone to De Lorne Mansions to bid good-by to Beattie, and with
+her, too, he had talked about Robin. Beattie had known when Dion was
+coming, and had taken care to be alone. Always quiet, she had seemed
+to Dion quieter even than usual in that final hour by the fire, almost
+singularly timid and repressed. There had even been moments when she had
+seemed to him cold. But the coldness--if really there had been any--had
+been in her manner, perhaps in her voice, but had been absent from her
+face. They had sat in the firelight, which Beattie was always fond of,
+and Dion had not been able to see her quite clearly. If the electric
+light had been turned on she might have told him more; but she surely
+would not have told him of the quiet indifference which manner and voice
+and even inexpressive attitude had seemed to be endeavoring to convey
+to him. For Beattie's only half-revealed face had looked eloquent in the
+firelight, eloquent of a sympathy and even of a sorrow she had said very
+little about. Whenever Dion had begun to feel slightly chilled he had
+looked at her, and the face in the firelight had assured him. "Beattie
+does care," he had thought; and he had realized how much he wanted
+Beattie to care, how he had come to depend upon Beattie's sisterly
+affection and gentle but deep interest in all the course of his life.
+
+Quickly, too quickly, the moment had come for him to say the last word
+to Beattie, and suddenly he had felt shy. It had seemed to him that
+something in Beattie--he could not have said what--had brought about
+this unusual sensation in him. He had got up abruptly with a "Well, I
+suppose I must be off now!" and had thrust out his hand. He had felt
+that his manner and action were almost awkward and hard. Beattie had got
+up too in a way that looked listless.
+
+"Are you well, Beattie?" he had asked.
+
+"Quite well."
+
+"Perhaps you are tired?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I fancied--well, good-by, Beattie."
+
+"Good-by, Dion."
+
+That had been all. At the door he had looked round, and had seen Beattie
+standing with her back to him and her face to the firelight, stooping
+slightly, and he had felt a strong impulse to go to her again, and
+to--he hardly knew what--to say good-by again, perhaps, in a different,
+more affectionate or more tender way. But he had not done it. Instead he
+had gone out and had shut the door behind him very quietly. It was odd
+that Beattie had not even looked after him. Surely people generally did
+that when a friend was going away, perhaps for ever. But Beattie was
+different from other people, and somehow he was quite sure she cared.
+
+The three last good-bys had been said to his mother, Robin and Rosamund,
+in Queen Anne's Mansions and Little Market Street. He had stayed with
+his mother for nearly two hours. She had a very bad cold, unbecoming,
+complicated with fits of sneezing, a cold in the "three handkerchiefs an
+hour" stage. And this commonplace malady had made him feel very tender
+about her, and oddly pitiful about all humanity, including, of course,
+himself. While they talked he had thought several times, "It's hard to
+see mother in such a state when perhaps I shall never see her again. I
+don't want to remember her with a cold." And the thought, "I shan't be
+here to see her get well," had pained him acutely.
+
+"I'm looking and feeling glazed, dee-ar," had been her greeting to him.
+"My nose is shiny and my mind is woolly. I don't think you ought to kiss
+me or talk to me."
+
+And then he had kissed her, and they had talked, intimately, sincerely.
+In those last hours mercifully Dion had not felt shy with his mother.
+But perhaps this was because she was never shy, not even in tenderness
+or in sorrow. She was not afraid of herself. They had even been able to
+discuss the possibility of his being killed in the war, and Mrs. Leith
+had been quite simple about it, laying aside all her usual elaboration
+of manner.
+
+"The saddest result of such an honorable and noble end would be the loss
+to Robin, I think," she had said.
+
+"To Robin? But he's got such a mother!"
+
+"Do you think he doesn't need, won't need much more later on, the father
+he's got? Dion, my son, humility is a virtue, no doubt, but I don't
+believe in excess even in the practice of virtue, and sometimes I think
+you do."
+
+"I didn't know it."
+
+"This going to the war is a splendid thing for you. I wouldn't have you
+out of it even though----"
+
+Here she had been overcome by a tremendous fit of sneezing from which
+she had emerged with the smiling remark:
+
+"I'm not permitted to improve the occasion."
+
+"I believe I know what you mean. Perhaps you're right, mother. You're
+cleverer than I am. Still I can't help seeing that Robin's got a mother
+such as few children have. Look round at all the mothers you know in
+London!"
+
+"Yes. Rosamund was created to be a mother. But just to-day I want to
+look at Robin's father."
+
+And so they had talked of him.
+
+That talk had done Dion good. It had set his face towards a shining
+future. If he came back from the war he now felt, through the feeling
+of his mother, that he would surely come back tempered, tried, better
+fitted to Robin's uses, more worthy of any woman's gift of herself.
+Without preaching, even without being remarkably definite, his mother
+had made him see in this distant war a great opportunity, not to win a
+V.C. or any splashing honor that would raise him up in the eyes of the
+world, but to reach out and grip hold of his own best possibilities. Had
+his mother done even more than this? Had she set before him some other
+goal which the war might enable him to gain if he had not already gained
+it? Had she been very subtle when seeming to be very direct? Even when
+she held him in her arms--despite the cold!--and gave him the final kiss
+and blessing, he was not sure. If it had been done it had been done with
+extraordinary delicacy, with the marvelous cunning of clever love which
+knows how to avoid all the pitfalls. And it had been done, too, with
+the marvelous unselfishness of which, perhaps, only the highest type of
+mother-love is capable.
+
+After he had left his mother, and was just going out of the flat, Dion
+had heard through the half-open door a sound, a ridiculous sound, which
+had made him love her terribly, and with the sudden yearning which
+is the keenest pain of the heart because it defines all the human
+limitations: she was sneezing again violently. As he shut the front
+door, "If she were to die while I'm away, and I were to come back!" had
+stabbed his mind. Outside in the court he had gazed up at the towering
+rows of lighted windows and had said another good-by out there.
+
+Shutting his eyes for a moment as the "Ariosto" plowed her way onwards
+through a rather malignant sea, Dion saw again those rows of lighted
+windows, and he wondered, almost as earnestly as a child wonders,
+whether his mother's cold was better. What he had done, volunteering
+for active service and joining the C.I.V. battalion, had made him feel
+simpler than usual; but he did not know it, did not look on at his own
+simplicity.
+
+And then, last of all, had come the parting from Robin and Rosamund.
+
+Rosamund and Dion had agreed not to make very much of his departure
+to Robin. Father was going way for a time, going over the sea
+picturesquely, with a lot of friends, all men, all happy to be together
+and to see wonderful things in a country quite different from England.
+Some day, when Robin was a big as his father, perhaps he, too, would
+make such a voyage with his friends. Robin had been deeply interested,
+and had shown his usual ardor in comment and--this was more
+embarrassing--in research. He had wanted to know a great deal about
+his father's intentions and the intentions of father's numerous male
+friends. What were they going to do when they arrived in the extremely
+odd country which had taken it into its head to be different from
+England? How many male friends was father taking with him? Why hadn't
+they all been to "see us?" Was Uncle Guy one of them? Was Mr. Thrush
+going too? Why wasn't Mr. Thrush going? If he was too old to go was
+Uncle Guy too old? Did Mr. Thrush want to go? Was he disappointed at
+father's not being able to take him? Was it all a holiday for father?
+Would mummy have liked to go? No lies had been told to Robin, but
+some of the information he had sought had been withheld. Dion had made
+skilful use of Mr. Thrush when matters had become difficult, when Robin
+had nearly driven him into a corner. The ex-chemist, though seldom seen,
+loomed large in Robin's world, on account of his impressive coloring and
+ancient respectabilities. Robin regarded him with awful admiration, and
+looked forward to growing like him in some far distant future. Dion had
+frequently ridden off from difficult questions on Mr. Thrush. Even in
+the final interview between father and son Mr. Thrush had been much
+discussed.
+
+The final interview had taken place in the nursery among Aunt Beattie's
+bricks, by which Robin was still obsessed. Dion had sat on the floor and
+built towers with his boy, and had wondered, as he handled the bricks
+in the shining of the nursery fire, whether he would come back to help
+Robin with his building later on. He was going out to build, for England
+and for himself, perhaps for Robin and Rosamund, too. Would he be
+allowed to see the fruits of his labors?
+
+The towers of bricks had grown high, and with it Dion had built up
+another tower, unknown to Robin, a tower of hopes for the child. So much
+ardor in so tiny a frame! It was a revelation of the wonder of
+life. What a marvel to have helped to create that life and what a
+responsibility. And he was going away to destroy life, if possible.
+The grotesqueness of war had come upon him then, as he had built up the
+tower with Robin. And he had longed for a released world in which his
+boy might be allowed to walk as a man. The simplicity of Robin, his
+complete trustfulness, his eager appreciation of human nature, his
+constant reaching out after kindness without fear of being denied,
+seemed to imply a world other than the world which must keep on letting
+blood in order to get along. Robin, and all the other Robins, female
+and male, revealed war in its true light. Terrible children whose
+unconscious comment on life bites deep like an acid! Terrible Robin in
+that last hour with the bricks!
+
+When the tower had become a marvel such as had been seen in no nursery
+before, Dion had suggested letting it be. Another brick and it must
+surely fall. The moment was at hand when he must see the last of Robin.
+He had had a furtive but strong desire to see the tower he and his
+son had built still standing slenderly erect when he went out of the
+nursery. Just then he had been the man who seeks a good omen. Robin had
+agreed with his suggestion after a long moment of rapt contemplation of
+the tower.
+
+"I wish Mr. Thrush could see it," he had observed, laying down the brick
+he had taken up to add to the tower just before his father had spoken.
+"He _would_ be pleased."
+
+The words had been lifted out on a sigh, the sigh of the wonder-worker
+who had achieved his mission. And then they had talked of Mr. Thrush,
+sitting carefully, almost motionless, beside the tower, and speaking
+softly "for fear." The firelight had danced upon the yellow bricks and
+upon the cream-colored nursery walls, filtering through the high
+nursery "guard" which protected Robin from annihilation by fire, and
+the whisper, whisper of their voices had only emphasized the quiet. And,
+with every moment that went by, the lit-up tower had seemed more like a
+symbol to Dion. Then at last the cuckoo-clock had chimed and the wooden
+bird, with trembling tail, had made its jerky obeisance.
+
+"Cuckoo!"
+
+Dion had put his arm round the little figure in the green jersey and the
+tiny knickerbockers, and had whispered, still governed by the tower:
+
+"I must go now, Robin."
+
+"Good-by, Fa," Robin had whispered back, with his eyes on the tower.
+
+With a very careful movement he had lifted his face to be kissed, and
+on his soft lips Dion had felt a certain remoteness. Did the tower stand
+between him and his little son as he said good-by to Robin?
+
+Just as he had reluctantly let Robin go and, with his legs crossed, had
+been about to perform the feat of getting up without touching the floor
+with his hands, and without shaking the bricks in their places,--moved
+to this trifling bodily feat by the desire to confront his emotion with
+an adversary,--the door behind him had been opened. Already in movement
+he had instinctively half-turned round. Something had happened,--he
+never knew exactly what,--something had escaped from his physical
+control because his mind had abruptly been deflected from its task of
+vigilance; there had been a crash and a cry of "Oh, _Fa_!" from Robin,
+and he had met Rosamund's eyes as the tower toppled down in ruin. Not so
+much as one brick had been left upon another.
+
+Robin had been greatly distressed. Tears had come into his eyes, and
+for a moment he had looked reproachfully at his father. Then, almost
+immediately, something chivalrous had spoken within him, admonishing
+him, and he had managed a smile.
+
+"It'll be higher next time, Fa, won't it?" he had murmured, still
+evidently fighting a keen disappointment.
+
+And Dion had caught him up, given him a hug, whispered "My boy!" to him,
+put him down and gone straight out of the room with Rosamund, who had
+not spoken a word.
+
+And that had been the last of Robin for his father.
+
+In the evening, when Robin was asleep, Dion had said good-by to
+Rosamund. The catastrophe of the tower of bricks had haunted his mind.
+As he had chosen to make of the tower an omen, in its destruction he had
+found a presage of evil which depressed him, which even woke in him ugly
+fears of the future. He had had a great deal out of life, not all he had
+wanted, but still a great deal. Perhaps he was not going to have
+much more. He had not spoken of his fears to Rosamund, but had been
+resolutely cheerful with her in their last conversation. Neither of them
+had mentioned the possibility of his not coming back. They had talked
+of what probably lay before him in South Africa, and of Robin, and
+presently Rosamund had said:
+
+"I want to make a suggestion. Will you promise to tell me if you dislike
+it?"
+
+"Yes. What is it?"
+
+"Would you mind if I succeeded in letting this house and went into the
+country with Robin to wait for your coming back?"
+
+"Letting it furnished, do you mean?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But won't you be dull in the country, away from mother, and Beattie,
+and godfather, and all our friends?"
+
+"I could never be dull with Robin and nature, never, and I wouldn't go
+very far from London. I thought of something near Welsley."
+
+"So that you could go in to Cathedral service when 'The Wilderness' was
+sung!"
+
+He had smiled as he had said it, but his own reference to Rosamund's
+once-spoken-of love of the wilderness had, in a flash, brought the hill
+of Drouva before him, and he had faced man's tragedy--remembered joys of
+the past in a shadowed present.
+
+"Go into the country, Rose. I only want you to be happy, but"--he had
+hesitated, and then had added, almost in spite of himself--"but not too
+happy."
+
+Not too happy! That really was the great fear at his heart now that
+he was voyaging towards South Africa, that Rosamund would be too happy
+without him. He no longer deceived himself. This drastic change in his
+life had either taught him to face realities, or simply prevented him
+from being able to do anything else. He told himself the truth, and it
+was this, that Rosamund did not love him at all as he loved her. She
+was fond of him, she trusted him, she got on excellently with him, she
+believed in him, she even admired him for having been able to live as he
+had lived before their marriage, but she did not passionately love
+him. He might have been tempted to think that, with all her fine, even
+splendid, qualities, she was deprived of the power of loving intensely
+if he had not seen her with Robin, if he had not once spoken with her
+about her mother.
+
+If he were killed in South Africa would Rosamund be angry at his death?
+That was her greatest tribute, anger, directed surely not against
+any human being, but against the God Whom she loved and Who, so she
+believed, ruled the world and directed the ways of men. Once Rosamund
+had said that she knew it was possible for human beings to hurt God. She
+had doubtless spoken out of the depths of her personal experience. She
+had felt sure that by her anger at the death of her mother she had
+hurt God. Such a conviction showed how she thought of God, in what a
+closeness of relation with God she felt herself to be. Dion knew now
+that she had loved her mother, that she loved Robin, as she did not love
+him. If he were to die she would be very sorry, but she would not be
+very angry. No, she would be able to breathe out a "farewell!" simply,
+with a resignation comparable to that of the Greeks on those tombs which
+she loved, and then--she would concentrate on Robin.
+
+If he, Dion, were to be shot, and had time for a thought before dying,
+he knew what his thought would be: that the Boer's bullet had only hit a
+man, not, like so many bullets fired in war, a man and a woman. And that
+thought would add an exquisite bitterness to the normal bitterness of
+death.
+
+So Dion, on the "Ariosto," voyaged towards South Africa, companioned
+by new and definite knowledge--new at any rate in the light and on the
+surface, definite because in the very big moments of life truth becomes
+as definite as the bayonet piercing to the man who is pierced.
+
+His comrades were a mixed lot, mostly quite young. The average age was
+about twenty-five. Among them were barristers, law students, dentists,
+bank clerks, clerks, men of the Civil Service, architects, auctioneers,
+engineers, schoolmasters, builders, plumbers, jewelers, tailors, Stock
+Exchange men, etc., etc. There were representatives of more than a
+hundred and fifty trades, and adherents to nine religions, among the men
+of the C.I.V. Their free patriotism welded them together, the thing they
+had all spontaneously done abolished differences between Baptists
+and Jews, Methodists and Unitarians, Catholics and Protestants. The
+perfumery manager and the marine engineer comprehended each other's
+language; the dentist and the insurance broker "hit it off together" at
+first sight; printers and plumbers, pawnbrokers and solicitors, varnish
+testers and hop factors--they were all friendly and all cheerful
+together. Each one of them had done a thing which all the rest secretly
+admired. Respect is a good cement, and can stand a lot of testing.
+In his comrades Dion was not disappointed. Among them were a few
+acquaintances, men whom he had met in the City, but there was only one
+man whom he could count as a friend, a barrister named Worthington, a
+bachelor, who belonged to the Greville Club, and who was an intimate of
+Guy Daventry's. Worthington knew Daventry much better than he knew
+Dion, but both Dion and he were glad to be together and to exchange
+impressions in the new life which they had entered so abruptly, moved
+by a common impulse. Worthington was a dark, sallow, narrow-faced man,
+wiry, with an eager intellect, fearless and energetic, one of the most
+cheerful men of the battalion. His company braced Dion.
+
+The second day at sea was disagreeable; the ship rolled considerably,
+and many officers and men were sea-sick. Dion was well, but Worthington
+was prostrated, and did not show on deck. Towards evening Dion went down
+to have a look at him, and found him in his bunk, lead-colored, with
+pinched features, but still cheerful and able to laugh at his own
+misery. They had a small "jaw" together about people and things at home,
+and in the course of it Worthington mentioned Mrs. Clarke, whom he had
+several times met at De Lorne Gardens.
+
+"You know she's back in London?" he said. "The winter's almost
+impossible at Constantinople because of the winds from the Black Sea."
+
+"Yes, I heard she was in London, but I haven't seen her this winter."
+
+"I half thought--only half--she'd send me a wire to wish me good luck
+when we embarked," said Worthington, shifting uneasily in his bunk, and
+twisting his white lips. "But she didn't. She's a fascinating woman. I
+should have liked to have had a wire from her."
+
+"By Jove!" exclaimed Dion.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"I've just remembered I got some telegrams when we were going off. I
+read one, from my wife, and stuffed the others away. There was such a
+lot to do and think of. I believe they're here."
+
+He thrust a hand into one of his pockets and brought out four telegrams,
+one, Rosamund's, open, the rest unopened. Worthington lay staring at him
+and them, glad perhaps to be turned for a moment from self-contemplation
+by any incident, however trifling.
+
+"I'll bet I know whom they're from," said Dion. "One's from old Guy,
+one's from Bruce Evelin, and one's from----" He paused, fingering the
+telegrams.
+
+"Eh?" said Worthington, still screwing his lips about.
+
+"Perhaps from Beattie, my sister-in-law, unless she and Guy have clubbed
+together. Well, let's see."
+
+He tore open the first telegram.
+
+
+"May you have good luck and come back safe and soon.--BEATTIE--GUY."
+
+
+He opened the second. It was from Bruce Evelin.
+
+
+"May you be a happy warrior.--BRUCE EVELIN."
+
+
+Dion read it more than once, and his lips quivered for a second. He shot
+a glance at Worthington, and said, rather bruskly:
+
+"Beatrice and Guy Daventry and Bruce Evelin!"
+
+Worthington gave a little faint nod in the direction of the telegram
+that was still unopened.
+
+"Your mater!"
+
+"No; she wrote to me. She hates telegrams, says they're public property.
+I wonder who it is."
+
+He pushed a forefinger under the envelope, tore it and pulled out the
+telegram.
+
+
+"The forgotten do not always forget. May Allah have you and all brave
+men in His hand.--CYNTHIA CLARKE."
+
+
+Dion felt Worthington's observant eyes upon him, looked up and met them
+as the "Ariosto" rolled and creaked in the heavy gray wash of the sea.
+
+"Funny!" he jerked out.
+
+Worthington lifted inquiring eyebrows but evidently hesitated to speak
+just then.
+
+"It's from Mrs. Clarke."
+
+"Beastly of her!" tipped out Worthington. "What--she say?"
+
+"Just wishes me well."
+
+And Dion stuck the telegram back into the flimsy envelope.
+
+When he looked at it again that night he thought the woman from
+Stamboul was a very forgiving woman. Almost he wished that she were less
+forgiving. She made him now, she had made him in days gone by, feel as
+if he had behaved to her almost badly, like a bit of a brute. Of course
+that wasn't true. If he hadn't been married, no doubt they might
+have been good friends. As things were, friendship between them was
+impossible. He did not long for friendship with Mrs. Clarke. His life
+was full. There was no room in it for her. But he slightly regretted
+that he had met her, and he regretted more that she had wished to know
+Rosamund and him better than Rosamund had wished. He kept her telegram,
+with the rest of the telegrams he had received on his departure; now and
+then he looked at it, and wondered whether its wording was not the
+least bit indelicate. It would surely have been wiser if Mrs. Clarke had
+omitted the opening six words. They conveyed a reproach; they conveyed,
+too, a curious suggestion of will power, of quiet persistence. When
+he read them Dion seemed to feel the touch--or the grip--of Stamboul,
+listless apparently, yet not easily to be evaded or got rid of.
+
+That telegram caused him to wonder whether he had made a really strong
+impression upon Mrs. Clarke, such as he had not suspected till now,
+whether she had not, perhaps, liked him a good deal more than she
+liked most people. "May Allah have you and all brave men in His hand."
+Worthington would have been glad to have had that message. Dion had
+discovered that Worthington was half in love with Mrs. Clarke. He
+chaffed Dion about Mrs. Clarke's telegram with a rather persistent
+gaiety which did not hide a faint, semi-humorous jealousy. One day he
+even said, "To him that hath shall be given. It's so like a woman to
+sent her word of encouragement to the man who's got a wife to encourage
+him, and to leave the poor beggar who's got no one out in the cold. It's
+a cruel world, and three-quarters of the cruelty in it is the production
+of women." He spoke with a smile, and the argument which followed was
+not serious. They laughed and bantered each other, but Dion understood
+that Worthington really envied him because Mrs. Clarke had thought of
+him at the moment of departure. Perhaps he had been rather stupid in
+letting Worthington know about her telegram. But Worthington had been
+watching him; he had had the feeling that Worthington had guessed whom
+the telegram was from. The matter was of no importance. If Mrs. Clarke
+had cared for him, or if he had cared for her, he would have kept her
+message secret; as they were merely acquaintances who no longer met
+each other, her good wishes from a distance meant very little, merely
+a kindly thought, for which he was grateful and about which no mystery
+need be made.
+
+Of course he must write a letter of thanks to Mrs. Clarke.
+
+One day, after he had written to Rosamund, to Robin, to his mother, to
+Beattie and to Bruce Evelin, Mrs. Clarke's turn came. His letter to her
+was short and cheery, but he was slow in writing it. There was a noise
+of men, a turmoil of activity all about him. In the midst of it he heard
+a husky, very individual voice, he saw a pair of wide-open distressed
+eyes looking directly at him. And an odd conviction came to him that
+life would bring Mrs. Clarke and him together again. Then he would come
+back from South Africa? He had no premonition about that. What he felt
+as he wrote his letter was simply that somehow, somewhere, Mrs. Clarke
+and he would get to know each other better than they knew each other
+now. Kismet! In the vast Turkish cemeteries there were moldering bodies
+innumerable. Why did he think of them whenever he thought of Mrs.
+Clarke? No doubt because she lived in Constantinople, because much of
+her life was passed in the shadow of the towering cypresses. He had
+thought of her as a cypress. Did she keep watch over bodies of the dead?
+
+A bugle rang out. He put his letter into the envelope and hastily
+scribbled the address. Mrs. Clarke was again at Claridge's.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Every man who loves very deeply wishes to conquer the woman he loves, to
+conquer the heart of her and to have it as his possession. Dion had left
+England knowing that he had won Rosamund but had never conquered
+her. This South African campaign had come upon him like a great blow
+delivered with intention; a blow which does not stun a man but which
+wakes the whole man up. If this war had not broken out his life would
+have gone on as before, harmoniously, comfortably, with the daily work,
+and the daily exercise, and the daily intercourse with wife and child
+and friends. And would he ever have absolutely known what he knew now,
+what--he was certain of it!--his mother knew, what perhaps Beattie and
+even Bruce Evelin knew?
+
+He had surely failed in a great enterprise, but he was resolved to
+succeed if long enough life were given to him. He was now awake and
+walked in full knowledge. Surely, Rosamund being what she was, the issue
+lay with himself. If God had stood between them that must be because he,
+Dion, was not yet worthy of the full happiness which was his greatest
+earthly desire. Dion was certain that God did not stand between Rosamund
+and Robin.
+
+He had dreams of returning to England a different, or perhaps a
+developed, man. The perfect lovers ought to stand together on the same
+level. Rosamund and he had never done that yet. He resolved to gain in
+South Africa, to get a grip on his best possibilities, to go back to
+England, if he ever went back, a bigger soul, freer, more competent,
+more generous, more fearless. He could never be a mystic. He did
+not want to be that. But surely he could learn in this interval of
+separation which, like a river, divided his life from Rosamund's, to
+match her mysticism with something which would be able to call it out
+of its mysterious understanding. Instead of retreating to God alone she
+might then, perhaps, take him with her; instead of praying over him she
+might pray with him. If, after he returned from South Africa, Rosamund
+were ever again to be deliberately good with him, making such an effort
+as she had made on that horrible evening in Little Market Street when
+he had told her he was going on active service, he felt that he simply
+couldn't bear it.
+
+He put firmly aside the natural longings for home which often assailed
+him, and threw himself heart and soul into his new duties. Already he
+felt happier, for he was "out" to draw from the present, from the whole
+of it, all the building material it contained, and was resolute to use
+all that material in the construction of a palace, a future based on
+marble, strong, simple, noble, a Parthenon of the future. Only the weak
+man looks to omens, is governed in his mind, and so in his actions, by
+them. That which he had not known how to win in an easy life he must
+learn to win in a life that was hard. This war he would take as a gift
+to him, something to be used finely. If he fell in it still he would
+have had his gift, the chance to realize some of his latent and best
+possibilities. He swept out of his mind an old thought, the creeping
+surmise that perhaps Rosamund had given him all she had to give in
+lover's love, that she knew how to love as child and as mother, but that
+she was incapable of being a great lover in man's sense of the term when
+he applies it to woman.
+
+Madeira was passed on January the twenty-fifth, and the men, staring
+across the sea, saw its lofty hills rising dreamily out of the haze,
+watchers of those who would not stop, who had no time for any eating of
+the lotus. Heat came upon the ship, and there were some who pretended
+that they heard sounds, and smelled perfumes wafted, like messages, from
+the hidden shores on which probably they would never land. Every one
+was kept busy, after a sail bath, with drilling, musketry instruction,
+physical drill, cleaning of accouterments, a dozen things which made the
+hours go quickly in a buzz of human activities. Some of the men, Dion
+among them, were trying to learn Dutch under an instructor who knew the
+mysteries. A call came for volunteers for inoculation, and both Dion
+and Worthington answered it, with between forty and fifty other men.
+The prick of the needle was like the touch of a spark; soon after came a
+mystery of general wretchedness, followed by pains in the loins, a rise
+of temperature and extreme, in Dion's case even intense, weakness.
+He lay in his bunk trying to play the detective on himself, to stand
+outside of his body, saying to himself, "This is I, and I am quite
+unaffected by my bodily condition." For what seemed to him a long time
+he was fairly successful in his effort; then the body began to show
+definitely the power of its weakness upon the Ego, to asset itself by
+feebleness. His will became like an invalid who is fretful upon the
+pillows. Soon his strong resolutions, cherished and never to be parted
+from till out of them the deeds had blossomed, lost blood and fell
+upon the evil day of anemia. He had a sensation of going out. When the
+midnight came he could not sleep, and with it came a thought feeble but
+persistent: "If she loves me it's because I've given her Robin." And in
+the creaking darkness, encompassed by the restlessness of the sea, again
+and again he repeated to himself the words--"it's because I've given her
+Robin." That was the plain truth. If he was loved, he was loved because
+of something he had done, not because of something that he was. Towards
+dawn he felt so weak that his hold on life seemed relaxing, and at last
+he almost wished to let it go. He understood why dying people do not
+usually fear death.
+
+Three days later he was quite well and at work, but the memory of his
+illness stayed with him all through the South African campaign. Often at
+night he returned to that night on shipboard, and said to himself, "The
+doctor's needle helped me to think clearly."
+
+The voyage slipped away with the unnoticed swiftness that is the child
+of monotony. The Southern Cross shone above the ship. When the great
+heat set in the men were allowed to sleep on deck, and Dion lay all
+night long under the wheeling stars, and often thought of the stars
+above Drouva, and heard Rosamund's voice saying, "I can see the
+Pleiades."
+
+The ship crossed the line. Early in February the moon began to show a
+benign face to the crowd of men. One night there was a concert which was
+followed by boxing. Dion boxed and won his bout easily on points.
+
+This little success had upon him a bracing effect, and gave him a
+certain prestige among his comrades. He did well also at revolver and
+musketry practice--better than many men who, though good enough shots at
+Bisley, found sectional practice with the service rifle a difficult job,
+were adepts at missing a mark with the revolver, and knew nothing of
+fire discipline. Because he had set an aim before him on which he knew
+that his future happiness depended, he was able to put his whole heart
+into everything he did. In the simplest duty he saw a means to an end
+which he desired intensely. Everything that lay to hand in the life
+of the soldier was building material which he must use to the best
+advantage. He knew fully, for the first time, the joy of work.
+
+On a day in the middle of February the "Ariosto" passed the mail-boat
+from the Cape bound for England, sighted Table Mountain, and came to
+anchor between Robben Island and the docks. On the following morning
+the men of the C.I.V. felt the earth with eager feet as they marched to
+Green Point Camp.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+"Robin," said Rosamund, "would you like to go and live in the country?"
+
+Robin looked very serious and, after a moment of silent consideration,
+remarked:
+
+"Where there's no houses?"
+
+"Some houses, but not nearly so many as here."
+
+"Would Mr. Thrush be there?"
+
+"Well no, I'm afraid he wouldn't."
+
+Robin began to look decidedly adverse to the proposition.
+
+"You see Mr. Thrush has always lived in London," began Rosamund
+explanatorily.
+
+"But so've we," interrupted Robin.
+
+"But we aren't as old as Mr. Thrush."
+
+"Is he very old, mummie? How old is he?"
+
+"I don't know, but he's a very great deal older than you are."
+
+"I s'poses," observed Robin meditatively, slightly wrinkling his little
+nose where the freckles were. "Well, mummie?"
+
+"Old people don't generally like to move about much, but I think it
+would be very good for you and me to go into the country while father's
+away."
+
+And taking Robin on her knees, and putting her arms round him, Rosamund
+began to tell him about the country, developing enthusiasm as she
+talked, bending over the little fair head that was so dear to her--the
+little fair head which contained Robin's dear little thoughts, funny and
+very touching, but every one of them dear.
+
+She described to Robin the Spring as it is in the English country, frail
+and fragrant, washed by showers that come and go with a waywardness
+that seems very conscious, warmed by sunbeams not fully grown up and
+therefore not able to do the work of the sunbeams of summer. She told
+him of the rainbow that is set in the clouds like a promise made from
+a very great distance, and of the pale and innocent flowers of Spring:
+primroses, periwinkles, violets, cowslips, flowers of dells in the
+budding woods, and of clearings round which the trees stand on guard
+about the safe little daisies and wild hyacinths and wild crocuses;
+flowers of the sloping meadows that go down to the streams of Spring.
+And all along the streams the twigs are budding; the yellow "lambs'
+tails" swing in the breeze, as if answering to the white lambs' tails
+that are wagging in the fields. The thrush sings in the copse, and in
+his piercing sweet note is the sound of Spring.
+
+Bending over Robin, Rosamund imitated the note of the thrush, and Robin
+stared up at her with ardent eyes.
+
+"Does Mr. Thrush ever do that?"
+
+"I've never heard him do it."
+
+And she went on talking about the Spring.
+
+How she loved that hour talking of Spring in the country with her human
+Spring in her arms. What was the war to her just then? Robin abolished
+war. While she had him there was always the rainbow, the perfect
+rainbow, rising from the world to the heavens and falling from the
+heavens to the world. The showers were fleeting Spring showers, and the
+clouds were fleecy and showed the blue.
+
+"Robin, Robin, Robin!" she breathed over her child, when they had lived
+in the Spring together, the pure and exquisite Spring.
+
+And Robin, all glowing with the ardor he had caught from her, declared
+for the country.
+
+A few days later Rosamund wrote to Canon Wilton, who happened to be in
+residence at Welsley out of his usual time, and asked him if he knew of
+any pretty small house, with a garden, in the neighborhood, where she
+and Robin could settle down till Dion came back from the war. In answer
+she got a letter from the Canon inviting her to spend a night or two at
+his house in the Precincts. In a P.S. he wrote:
+
+
+"If you can come next week I think I can arrange with Mr. Soames, our
+precentor, for Wesley's 'Wilderness' to be sung at one of the afternoon
+services; but let me know by return what days you will be here."
+
+
+Rosamund replied by telegraph. Aunt Beatrice was installed in Little
+Market Street for a couple of nights as Robin's protector, and Rosamund
+went down to Welsley, and spent two days with the Canon.
+
+She had never been alone with him before, except now and then for a few
+minutes, but he was such a sincere and plain-spoken man that she had
+always felt she genuinely knew him. To every one with whom he spoke he
+gave himself as he was. This unusual sincerity in Rosamund's eyes was a
+great attraction. She often said that she could never feel at home with
+pretense even if the intention behind it was kindly. Perhaps, however,
+she did not always detect it, although she possessed the great gift of
+feminine intuition.
+
+She arrived by the express, which reached Welsley Station in the
+evening, and found Canon Wilton at the station to meet her. His greeting
+was:
+
+"The 'Wilderness,' Wesley, at the afternoon service to-morrow."
+
+"That's good of you!" she exclaimed, with the warm and radiant
+cordiality that won her so many friends. "I shall revel in my little
+visit here. It's an unexpected treat."
+
+The Canon seemed for a moment almost surprised by her buoyant
+anticipation, and a look that was sad flitted across his face; but she
+did not notice it.
+
+As they drove in a fly to his house in the Precincts she looked out at
+the busy provincial life in the narrow streets of the old country town,
+and enjoyed the intimate concentration of it all.
+
+"I should like to poke about here," she said. "I should feel at home as
+I never do in London. I believe I'm thoroughly provincial at heart."
+
+In the highest tower of the Cathedral, which stood in the heart of
+the town, the melodious chimes lifted up their crystalline voices, and
+"Great John" boomed out the hour in a voice of large authority.
+
+"Seven o'clock," said the Canon. "Dinner is at eight. You'll be all
+alone with me this evening."
+
+"To-morrow too, I hope," Rosamund said, with a smile.
+
+"No, to-morrow we shall be the awkward number--three. Mr. Robertson,
+from Liverpool, is coming to stay with me for a few days. He preaches
+here next Sunday evening."
+
+Rosamund's thought was carried back to a foggy night in London, when she
+had heard a sermon on egoism, and a quotation she had never forgotten:
+_"Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat."_
+
+"Can you manage with two clergymen?" said Canon Wilton.
+
+"I'll try. I don't think they'll frighten me, and I've been wishing to
+meet Mr. Robertson for a long time."
+
+"He's a good man," said Canon Wilton very simply. But the statement as
+he made it was like an accolade.
+
+Rosamund enjoyed her quiet evening with the Canon in the house with the
+high green gate, the elm trees and the gray gables. As they talked, at
+first in the oak-paneled dining-room, later in the Canon's library by a
+big wood fire, she was always pleasantly conscious of being enclosed,
+of being closely sheltered in the arms of the Precincts, which held also
+the mighty Cathedral with its cloisters, its subterranean passages, its
+ancient tombs, its mysterious courts, its staircases, its towers hidden
+in the night. The ecclesiastical flavor which she tasted was pleasant
+to her palate. She loved the nearness of those stones which had been
+pressed by the knees of pilgrims, of those walls between which so many
+prayers had been uttered, so many praises had been sung. A cosiness
+of religion enwrapped her. She had a delicious feeling of safety. They
+could hear the chimes where they sat encompassed by a silence which was
+not like ordinary silences, but which to Rosamund seemed impregnated
+with the peace of long meditations and of communings with the unseen.
+
+"This rests me," she said to her host. "Don't you love your time here?"
+
+"I'm fond of Welsley, but I don't think I should like to pass all my
+year in it. I don't believe in sinking down into religion, or into
+practises connected with it, as a soft old man sinks down into a feather
+bed. And that's what some people do."
+
+"Do they?" said Rosamund abstractedly.
+
+Just then a large and murmurous sound, apparently from very far off, had
+begun to steal upon her ears, level and deep, suggestive almost of the
+vast slumber of a world and of the underthings that are sleepless but
+keep at a distance.
+
+"Is it the organ?" she asked, in a listening voice.
+
+Canon Wilton nodded.
+
+"Dickinson practising."
+
+They sat in silence for a long time listening. In that silence the Canon
+was watching Rosamund. He thought how beautiful she was and how good,
+but he almost disliked the joy which he discerned in her expression, in
+her complete repose. He rebuked himself for this approach to dislike,
+but his rebuke was not efficacious. In this enclosed calm of the
+precincts of Welsley where, pacing within the walls by the edge of
+the velvety lawns, the watchman would presently cry out the hour Canon
+Wilton was conscious of a life at a distance, the life of a man he had
+met first in St. James's Square. The beautiful woman in the chair by the
+fire had surely forgotten that man.
+
+Presently the distant sound of the organ ceased.
+
+"I love Welsley," said Rosamund, on a little sigh. "I just love it. I
+should like to live in the Precincts."
+
+That brought them to a discussion of plans in which Dion was talked of
+with warm affection and admiration by Rosamund; and all the time she was
+talking, Canon Wilton saw the beautiful woman in the chair listening
+to the distant organ. He knew of a house that was to be let in the
+Precincts, but that night he did not mention it. Something prevented him
+from doing so--something against which he struggled, but which he failed
+to overcome.
+
+When they separated it was nearly eleven o'clock. As Rosamund took
+her silver candlestick from the Canon at the foot of the shallow oak
+staircase she said:
+
+"I've had _such_ a happy evening!"
+
+It was a very sweet compliment very sweetly paid. No man could have been
+quite indifferent to it. Canon Wilton was not. As he looked at Rosamund
+a voice within him said:
+
+"That's a very dear woman."
+
+It spoke undeniable truth. Yet another voice whispered:
+
+"Oh, if I could change her!"
+
+But that was impossible. The Canon knew that, for he was very sincere
+with himself; and he realized that the change he wanted to see could
+only come from within, could never be imposed by him from without upon
+the mysterious dweller in the Temple of Rosamund.
+
+That night Rosamund undressed very slowly and "pottered about" in her
+room, doing dreamily unnecessary things. She heard the chimes, and she
+heard the watchman calling the midnight hour near her window as "Great
+John" lifted up his voice. In the drawers where her clothes were laid
+the Canon's housekeeper had put lavender. She smelt it as she listened
+to the watchman's voice, shutting her eyes. Presently she drew aside
+curtain and blind and looked out of the window. She saw the outline of
+part of the great Cathedral with the principal tower, the home of "Great
+John"; she felt the embracing arms of the Precincts; and when she knelt
+down to say her prayers she thought:
+
+"Here is a place where I can really pray."
+
+Nuns surely are helped by their convents and monks by the peace of their
+whitewashed cells.
+
+"It is only in sweet places of retirement that one can pray as one ought
+to pray," thought Rosamund that night as she lay in bed.
+
+She forgot that the greatest prayer ever offered up was uttered on a
+cross in the midst of a shrieking crowd.
+
+On the following day she went to the morning service in the
+Cathedral, and afterwards heard something which filled her with joyful
+anticipation. Canon Wilton told her there was a house to let in the
+Precincts.
+
+"I'll take it," said Rosamund at once. "Esme Darlington has found me a
+tenant for No. 5, an old friend of his, or rather two old friends, Sir
+John and Lady Tenby. Where is it?"
+
+He took her to see it.
+
+The house in question had been occupied by the widow of a Dean, who had
+recently been driven by her health to "relapse upon Bournemouth." It was
+a small old house with two very large rooms--one was the drawing-room,
+the other a bed-room.
+
+The house stood at right angles to the east end of the Cathedral, from
+which it was only divided by a strip of turf broken up by fragments
+of old gray ruins, and edged by an iron railing, and by a paved
+passage-way, which led through the Dark Entry from the "Green Court,"
+where the Deanery and Minor Canons' houses were situated, to the
+pleasaunce immediately around the Cathedral. To the green lawns of this
+wide pleasaunce the houses of the residentiary Canons gave access. One
+projecting latticed window of the drawing-room of Mrs. Browning's house,
+another of the big bedroom above it, and the windows of the kitchen and
+the servants' quarters looked on to the passage-way and the Cathedral;
+all the other windows looked into an old garden surrounded by a very
+high brick wall, a garden of green turf like moss, of elm trees, and, in
+summer, of gay herbaceous borders, a garden to which the voices of the
+chimes dropped down, and to which the Cathedral organ sent its message,
+as if to a place that knew how to keep safely all things that were
+precious. Even the pure and chill voices of the boy choristers found
+a way to this hidden garden, in which there were straight and narrow
+paths, where nuns might have loved to walk unseen of the eyes of men.
+
+The Dean's widow had left behind all her furniture, and was now adorning
+a Bournemouth hotel, in which her sprightly invalidism and close
+knowledge of the investments of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and of
+the habits and customs of the lesser clergy, were greatly appreciated.
+Some of the furniture did not wholly commend itself to Rosamund. There
+were certain settees and back-to-backs, certain whatnots and occasional
+tables, which seemed to stamp the character of the Dean's widow
+as meretricious. But these could easily be "managed." Rosamund was
+enchanted with the house, and went from room to room with Canon Wilton
+radiantly curious, and almost as excited as a joyous schoolgirl.
+
+"I must poke my nose into everything!" she exclaimed.
+
+And she did it, and made the Canon poke his too.
+
+Presently, opening the lattice of the second window in the big,
+low-ceiled drawing-room, she leaned out to the moist and secluded
+garden. She was sitting sideways on the window-seat, of which she had
+just said, "I won't have this dreadful boudoir color on _my_ cushions!"
+Canon Wilton was standing behind her, and presently heard her sigh
+gently, and almost voluptuously, as if she prolonged the sigh and did
+not want to let it go.
+
+"Yes?" he said, with a half-humorous inflection of the voice.
+
+Rosamund looked round gravely.
+
+"Did you say something?"
+
+"Only--yes?--in answer to your sigh."
+
+"Did I? Yes, I must have. I was thinking----"
+
+She hesitated, while he stood looking at her with his strong, steady
+gray-blue eyes.
+
+"I was thinking of a life I shall never live."
+
+He came up to the window-seat.
+
+"Some of it might have been passed in just such a garden as this within
+sound of bells."
+
+With a change of voice she added:
+
+"How Robin will love it!"
+
+"The life you will never live?" said the Canon, smiling gravely.
+
+"No, the garden."
+
+"Then you haven't a doubt?"
+
+"Oh no. When I know a thing there's no room in me for hesitation. I
+shall love being here with Robin as I have never loved anything yet."
+
+The quarter struck in the Cathedral tower.
+
+"Very different from South Africa!" said Canon Wilton.
+
+Rosamund knitted her brows for a moment.
+
+"I wonder whether Dion will come back altered," she said.
+
+"D'you wish him to?"
+
+She got up from the window-seat, put out her hand, and softly pulled the
+lattice towards her.
+
+"Not in most ways. He's so dear as he is. It would all depend on the
+alteration."
+
+She latched the window gently, and again looked at the garden through
+it.
+
+"I may be altered, too, by living here!" she said. "All alone with
+Robin. I think I shall be."
+
+Canon Wilton made no comment. He was thinking:
+
+"And when the two, altered, come together again, if they ever do, what
+then?"
+
+He had noticed that Rosamund never seemed to think of Dion's death in
+South Africa as a possibility. When she spoke of him she assumed his
+return as a matter of course. Did she never think of death, then? Did
+she, under the spell of her radiant and splendidly healthy youth, forget
+all the tragic possibilities? He wondered, but he did not ask.
+
+Mr. Robertson arrived at the Canon's house just in time for the
+afternoon service--"my Wilderness service," as Rosamund called it. The
+bells were ringing as he drove up with his modest luggage, and Rosamund
+had already gone to the Cathedral and was seated in a stall.
+
+"I should like to have half an hour's quiet meditation in church before
+the service begins," she had remarked to Canon Wilton. And the Canon had
+put her in a stall close to where he would presently be sitting, and had
+then hurried back to meet Father Robertson.
+
+"My Welsley!" was Rosamund's thought as she sat in her stall, quite
+alone, looking up at the old jeweled glass in the narrow Gothic windows,
+at the wonderful somber oak, age-colored, of the return stalls and
+canopy beneath which Canon Wilton, as Canon-in-Residence, would soon be
+sitting at right angles to her, at the distant altar lifted on high and
+backed by a delicate marble screen, beyond which stretched a further,
+tranquilly obscure vista of the great church. The sound of the bells
+ringing far above her head in the gray central tower was heard by her,
+but only just heard, as we hear the voices of the past murmuring of
+old memories and of deeds which are almost forgotten. Distant footsteps
+echoed among the great tombs of stone and of marble, which commemorated
+the dead who had served God in that place in the gray years gone by.
+In her nostrils there seemed to be a perfume, like an essence of
+concentrated prayers sent up among these stone traceries, these pointed
+arches, these delicate columns, by generations of believers. She felt
+wrapped in a robe never woven by hands, in a robe that gave warmth to
+her spirit.
+
+A few people began stealing quietly in through the narrow archway in
+the great screen which shut out the raised choir from the nave. Only
+one bell sounded now in the gray tower. A faint noise, like an oncoming
+sigh, above Rosamund's head heralded the organ's awakening, and was
+followed by the whisper of its most distant voice, a voice which made
+her think--she knew not why--of the sea whispering about a coral reef in
+an isle of the Southern Seas, part of God's world, mysteriously linked
+to "my Welsley." She shut her eyes, seeking to feel more strongly the
+sensation of unity. When she opened them she saw, sitting close to her
+in the return stalls, Father Robertson. His softly glowing eyes were
+looking at her, and did not turn away immediately. She felt that he knew
+she was his fellow-guest, and was conscious of a delicious sensation of
+sympathy, of giving and taking, of cross currents of sympathy between
+the Father and herself.
+
+"I love this hour--I love all this!" she said to herself.
+
+If only little Robin were submerged in the stall beside her!
+
+The feet of the slow procession were heard, and the silver wand of the
+chief verger shone out of the delicate gloom.
+
+When the anthem was given out Rosamund looked across at Canon Wilton,
+and her eyes said to him, "Thank you." Then she stood up, folded her
+hands on the great cushion in front of her, and looked at the gray
+vistas and at the dim sparkle of the ancient glass in the narrow
+windows.
+
+
+"The wilderness and the solitary places . . ."
+
+
+She had spoken of this to Dion as they looked at Zante together, before
+little Robin had come, and she had said that if she had committed a
+great sin she would like to take her sin into the Wilderness, because
+purification might be found there. And she had meant what she said,
+had spoken out of her heart sincerely. But now, as she listened to this
+anthem, she saw a walled-in garden, with green turf like moss, old elm
+trees and straight narrow paths. Perhaps she had been mistaken when
+she had spoken of the sin and the Wilderness, perhaps she would find
+purification with fewer tears and less agony in the cloister, within the
+sound of the bells which called men to the service of God, and of the
+human voices which sang His praises. Saints had fled into the Wilderness
+to seek God there, but was He not in the Garden between the sheltering
+walls, ready there, as in the farthest desert, to receive the submission
+of the soul, to listen to the cry, "I have sinned"?
+
+As in Elis the spell of the green wild had been upon Rosamund, so
+now the spell of these old Precincts was upon her, and spoke to her
+innermost being, and as in Elis Dion had been woven into her dream of
+the Wilderness, so now in Welsley Robin was woven into it. But Dion had
+seemed a forerunner, and little Robin seemed That for which she had long
+waited, the fulfilment of the root desire of her whole being as applied
+to human life.
+
+When the service was over and the procession had gone out Rosamund sat
+very still listening to the organ. She believed that Canon Wilton had
+given the organist a hint that he would have an attentive hearer, for he
+was playing one of Bach's greatest preludes and fugues. Father Robertson
+stayed on in his place. All the rest of the small congregation drifted
+away through the archway in the rood-screen and down the steps to the
+nave. The fugue was a glorious, sturdy thing, like a great solid
+body inhabited by a big, noble, unquestioning soul--a soul free from
+hesitations, that knew its way to God and would not be hindered from
+taking it. A straight course to the predestined end--that was good, that
+was glorious! The splendid clamor of the organ above her, growing in
+sonorous force, filled Rosamund with exultation. She longed to open
+her mouth and sing; the blood came to her cheeks; her eyes shone; she
+mounted on the waves of sound; she was wound up with the great fugue,
+and felt herself part of it. The gradual working up thrilled her whole
+being; she was physically and spiritually seized hold of and carried
+along towards a great and satisfying end. At last came the trumpet with
+its sound of triumphant flame, and the roar of the pedals was like the
+roaring of the sea. Already the end was there, grandly inherent in
+the music, inevitably, desired by all the voices of the organ. All the
+powers of the organ thundered towards it, straining to be there.
+
+It came, like something on the top of the world.
+
+"If I were a man that's the way I should like to go to God!" said
+Rosamund to herself, springing up. "That's the way, in a chariot of
+fire."
+
+Unconscious of what she was doing she stretched out her hands with a
+big gesture and opened her lips to let out a breath; then, in the gray
+silence of the now empty Cathedral, she saw Father Robertson's eyes.
+
+He stepped down from his stall and went out through the archway, and
+she followed him. On the steps, just beyond the rood-screen, she met
+a small, determined-looking man with hot cheeks and shining eyes. She
+guessed at once that he was the organist, went up to him and thanked him
+enthusiastically.
+
+The organist was the first person she captivated in Welsley, where she
+was to have so many warm adherents very soon.
+
+Father Robertson went back to Canon Wilton's house while Rosamund talked
+to the organist, with whom she walked as far as a high wooden gate
+labeled "Mr. Dickinson."
+
+"You've got a walled garden too!" she remarked, as her companion took
+off his hat with an "I live here."
+
+The organist looked inquiring. Rosamund laughed.
+
+"How could you know? It's only that I've been visiting a delicious old
+house, with a walled garden, to-day. It's to let."
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Duncan Browning's!" said Mr. Dickinson. "I--I'm sure I hope
+you're going to take it."
+
+"I may!" said Rosamund. "Good-by, and thank you again for your splendid
+music. It's done me good."
+
+"My dear!" exclaimed Mr. Dickinson, about a minute later,
+bursting--rather than going--into his wife's small drawing-room,
+"I've just met the most delightful woman, a goddess to look at, and as
+charming as a siren brought up to be a saint."
+
+"More epigrams, Henry!" murmured Mrs. Dickinson.
+
+"She's staying with Canon Wilton. She's a thorough musician such as one
+seldom comes across. There's a chance--I hope it materializes--of her
+taking--"
+
+"Your tea is nearly cold, Henry."
+
+"Her name is Mrs. Dion Leith. If she really does come here we must be
+sure to--"
+
+"Scones, Henry?"
+
+Thus urged, Mr. Dickinson's body for the moment took precedence of his
+soul.
+
+Rosamund knew she was going to like Mr. Robertson as she liked very few
+people. She felt as if already she was his friend, and when they shook
+hands in Canon Wilton's drawing-room she cordially told him so, and
+referred to the Sunday evening when she had heard him preach. The rooks
+were cawing among the elms in the Canon's garden. She could hear their
+voices in the treetops while she was speaking. A wind was stirring
+as the afternoon waned, and there came a patter of rain on the lofty
+windows. And the voices of the rooks, in the windy treetops, the patter
+of the rain, and the sigh of the wind were delightful to Rosamund,
+because she was safely within the Precincts, like a bird surrounded by
+the warmth of its nest.
+
+"I'm coming to live here," she said to Mr. Robertson, as she poured out
+tea for the two clergymen. "My husband has gone to South Africa with the
+City Imperial Volunteers. He's in business, so we live in London. But
+while he's away I mean to stay here."
+
+And eagerly almost as a child, she told him about the house of the
+Dean's widow, and described to him the garden.
+
+"It's like a convent garden, isn't it?" she asked Canon Wilton, who
+assented. "That's why I love it. It gives me the feeling of enclosed
+peace that must be so dear to nuns."
+
+Something in her voice and look as she said this evidently struck Mr.
+Robertson, and when she presently left the room he said to Canon Wilton:
+
+"If I didn't know that sweet woman had a husband I should say she was
+born with the vocation for a religious life. From the first moment I
+spoke to her, looked at her, I felt that, and the feeling grows upon me.
+Can't one see her among sisters?"
+
+"I don't wish to," said Canon Wilton bluntly. "Shall we go to my study?"
+
+With the composed gentleness that was characteristic of him Father
+Robertson assented, and they went downstairs. When they were safely
+shut up in the big room, guarded by multitudes of soberly bound volumes,
+Canon Wilton said:
+
+"Robertson, I want to talk to you in confidence about my guest, who, as
+you say, is a very sweet woman. You could do something for her which I
+couldn't do. I have none of your impelling gentleness. You know how to
+stir that which dwells in the inner sanctuary, to start it working for
+itself; I'm more apt to try to work for it, or at it. Perhaps I can
+rouse up a sinner and make him think. I've got a good bit of the
+instinct of the missioner. But my dear guest there isn't a sinner,
+except as we all are! She's a very good woman who doesn't quite
+understand. I think perhaps you might help her to understand. She
+possesses a great love, and she doesn't know quite how to handle it, or
+even to value it."
+
+The clock struck seven when they stopped talking.
+
+That evening, after dinner, Canon Wilton asked Rosamund to sing. Almost
+eagerly she agreed.
+
+"I shall love to sing in the Precincts," she said, as she went to the
+piano.
+
+Father Robertson, who had been sitting with his back to the piano,
+moved to the other side of the room. While Rosamund sang he watched her
+closely. He saw that she was quite unconscious of being watched, and her
+unconsciousness of herself made him almost love her. Her great talent he
+appreciated fully, for he was devoted to music; but he appreciated much
+more the moral qualities she showed in her singing. He was a man who
+could not forbear from searching for the soul, from following its
+workings. He had met all sorts and conditions of men, and with few
+he had not been friends. He had known, knew now, scientists for whose
+characters and lives he had strong admiration, and who felt positive
+that the so-called soul of man was merely the product of the brain,
+resided in the brain, and must cease with the dispersal of the brain at
+death. He was not able to prove the contrary. That did not trouble him
+at all. It was not within the power of anything or of any one to trouble
+this man's faith. He did not mind being thought a fool. Indeed, being
+without conceit, and even very modest, he believed himself to be
+sometimes very foolish. But he knew he was not a fool in his faith,
+which transcended forms, and swore instinctively brotherhood with all
+honest beliefs, and even with all honest disbeliefs. In his gentle,
+sometimes slightly whimsical way, he was as sincere as Canon Wilton; but
+whereas the Canon showed the blunt side of sincerity, he usually showed
+the tender and winning side. He found good in others as easily and as
+surely as the diviner finds the spring hidden under the hard earth's
+surface. His hazel twig twisted if there was present only one drop of
+the holy water.
+
+He discerned many drops in Rosamund. In nothing of her was her
+enthusiasm for what was noble and clean and sane and beautiful more
+apparent than in her singing. Her voice and her talent were in service
+when she sang, in service to the good. Music can be evil, neurotic,
+decadent and even utterly base. She never touched musical filth, which
+she recognized as swiftly as dirt on a body or corruption in a soul.
+
+"We must have Bach's 'Heart ever faithful,'" said Canon Wilton strongly,
+when Rosamund, after much singing, was about to get up from the piano.
+
+Almost joyfully she obeyed his smiling command. When at last she shut
+the piano she said to Father Robertson:
+
+"That's Dion's--my husband's--best-loved melody."
+
+"I should like to know your husband," said Father Robertson.
+
+"You must, when he comes back."
+
+"You have no idea, I suppose, how long he will be away?"
+
+"No, nor has he."
+
+"Then what are you going to do about Mrs. Browning's house?" said the
+Canon's bass.
+
+"Oh--well----"
+
+Two lines appeared in her forehead.
+
+"I thought of taking it for six months, and then I can see. My little
+house in Westminster is let for six months from the first of March." She
+had turned to Father Robertson: "I'm only afraid----" She paused. She
+looked almost disturbed.
+
+"What are you afraid of?" asked Canon Wilton.
+
+"I'm afraid of getting too fond of Welsley."
+
+The Canon looked across at Father Robertson on the other side of the
+fireplace.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Rosamund went back to Robin and London on the following afternoon. In
+the morning she took Father Robertson to see Mrs. Browning's house.
+Canon Wilton was busy. After the morning service in the Cathedral he had
+to go to a meeting of the Chapter, and later on to a meeting in the City
+about something connected with education.
+
+"I shall be in bonds till lunch," he said, "unless I burst them, as I'm
+afraid I sometimes feel inclined to do when people talk at great length
+on subjects they know nothing about."
+
+"Perhaps Mrs. Leith will kindly take me to see her house and garden,"
+observed Father Robertson.
+
+Rosamund was frankly delighted.
+
+"Bless you for calling them mine!" she said. "That's just what I'm
+longing to do."
+
+The wind and the rain were till hanging about in a fashion rather
+undecided. It was a morning of gusts and of showers. The rooks swayed in
+the elm tops, or flew up under the scudding clouds of a treacherous
+sky. There was a strong smell of damp earth, and the turf of the wide
+spreading lawns looked spongy.
+
+"Oh, how English this is!" said Rosamund enthusiastically to the Father
+as they set forth together. "It's like the smell of the soul of England.
+I love it. I should like to lie on the grass and feel the rain on my
+face."
+
+"You know nothing of rheumatism evidently," said Father Robertson, in a
+voice that was smiling.
+
+"No, but I suppose I should if I gave way to my impulse. And the rooks
+would be shocked."
+
+"Do you mean the Cathedral dignitaries?"
+
+They were gently gay as they walked along, but very soon Rosamund,
+in her very human but wholly unconscious way, put her hand on Father
+Robertson's arm.
+
+"There it is!"
+
+"Your house?"
+
+"Yes. Isn't it sweet? Doesn't it look peacefully old? I should like to
+grow old like that, calmly, unafraid and unrepining. I knew you'd love
+it."
+
+He had not said so, but that did not matter.
+
+"There's a dear old caretaker, with only one tooth in front and such
+nice eyes, who'll let us in. Not an electric bell!"
+
+She gave him a look half confidential, half humorous, and wholly
+girlish.
+
+"We have to pull it. That's so much nicer!"
+
+She pulled, and the dear old caretaker, a woman in Cathedral black, with
+the look of a verger's widow all over her, showed the tooth in a smile
+as she peeped round the door.
+
+"And now the garden!" said Rosamund, in the withdrawn voice of an
+intense anticipation, half an hour later, when Father Robertson had
+seen, and been consulted, about everything from kitchen to attic.
+
+She turned round to Mrs. Soper, as the verger's widow--indeed she was
+that!--was called.
+
+"Shall you mind if we stay a good while in the garden, Mrs. Soper? It's
+so delightful there. Will it bother you?"
+
+"Most pleased, ma'am! I couldn't wish for anything else. You do hear
+the chimes most beautiful from there. But it's very damp. That we must
+allow."
+
+"Are you afraid of the damp, Father?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+"I knew you wouldn't be," she said, almost exultantly.
+
+Mrs. Soper took her stand by the drawing-room window and gazed through
+the lattice with the deep interest which seems peculiar to provincial
+towns, and which is seldom manifested in capitals, where the curiosity
+is rather of the surface than of the very entrails of humanity. She
+showed the tooth as she stood, but not in a smile. She was far too
+interested in the lady and the white-haired clergyman to smile.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder but what they're going to be married!" was her
+feminine thought, as she watched them walking about the garden, and
+presently pacing up and down one of the narrow paths, to the far-off
+wall that bordered one end of the Bishop's Palace, and back again to the
+wall near the Dark Entry. Canon Wilton had not mentioned Rosamund's name
+to the verger's widow, who had no evil thoughts of bigamy. Presently the
+chimes sounded in the tower, and Mrs. Soper saw the two visitors pause
+in their walk to listen. They both looked upwards towards the Cathedral,
+and on the lady's face there was a rapt expression which was remarked by
+Mrs. Soper.
+
+"She do look religious," murmured that lady to the tooth. "She might be
+a bishop's lady when she a-stands like that."
+
+The chimes died away, the visitors resumed their pacing walk, and
+Mrs. Soper presently retired to the kitchen, which looked out on the
+passage-way, to cook herself "a bit of something" for the midday staying
+of her stomach.
+
+In the garden that morning Rosamund and Father Robertson became friends.
+Rosamund had never had an Anglican confessor, though she had sometimes
+wished to confess, not because she was specially conscious of a burden
+of sin, but rather because she longed to speak to some one of those
+inmost thoughts which men and women seldom care to discuss with those
+who are always in their lives. In Father Robertson she had found the
+exceptional man with whom she would not mind being perfectly frank
+about matters which were not for Dion, not for Beattie, not for
+godfather--matters which she could never have hinted at even to Canon
+Wilton, whose strong serenity she deeply admired. Had any of her nearest
+and dearest heard Rosamund's talk with Father Robertson that day, they
+would have realized, perhaps with astonishment, how strong was the
+reserve which underlay her forthcoming manner and capacious frankness
+about the ordinary matters of everyday existence.
+
+"Father, a sermon from you changed my life, I think," she said, when
+they had paced up and down the path only two or three times; and,
+without any self-consciousness, she told him of Dion's proposal on that
+foggy afternoon in London, of her visit to St. Mary's, Welby Street, and
+of the impression the sermon had made upon her. She described her
+return home, and the painful sensation which had beset her when she
+lost herself in the fog--the sensation of desertion, of a horror of
+loneliness.
+
+"The next day I accepted my husband," she said. "I resolved to take the
+path of life along which I could walk with another. I decided to share.
+Do you remember?"
+
+She looked at him gently, earnestly, and he understood the allusion to
+his sermon.
+
+"Yes, I remember. But,"--his question came very gently--"in coming to
+that decision, were you making a sacrifice?"
+
+"Yes, I was."
+
+And then Rosamund made a confession such as she had never yet made to
+any one, though once she had allowed Dion to know a little of what
+was in her heart. She told Father Robertson of the something almost
+imperious within her which had longed for the religious life. He
+listened to the story of a vocation; and he was able to understand it
+as certainly Canon Wilton could not have understood it. For Rosamund's
+creeping hunger had been not for the life of hard work among the poor
+in religion, not for the dedication of all her energies to the lost
+and unreclaimed, who are sunk in the mire of the world, but for that
+peculiar life of the mystic who leaves the court of the outer things for
+the court of the mysteries, the inner things, who enters into prayer as
+into a dark shell filled with the vast and unceasing murmur of the voice
+which is not human.
+
+"I wished to sing in public for a time. Something made me long to use
+my voice, to express myself in singing noble music, in helping on its
+message. But I meant to retire while I was still quite young. And always
+at the back of my mind there was the thought--'then I'll leave the
+world, I'll give myself up to God.' I longed for the enclosed life of
+perpetual devotion. I didn't know whether there was any community in our
+Church which I could join, and in which I could find what I thought I
+needed. I didn't get so far as that. You see I meant to be a singer at
+first."
+
+"Yes, I quite understand. And the giving up of this mystical dream was a
+great sacrifice?"
+
+"Really it was. I had a sort of absolute hunger in me to do eventually
+what I have told you."
+
+"I understand that hunger," said Father Robertson.
+
+Just then the chimes sounded in the Cathedral, and they stopped on the
+narrow path to listen, looking up at the great gray tower which held the
+voices sweet to their souls.
+
+"I understand that hunger," he repeated, when the chimes died away. "It
+can be fierce as any hunger after a sin. In your case you felt it was
+not free from egoism, this strong desire?"
+
+"Your sermon made me look into my heart, and I did think that perhaps I
+was an egoist in my religious feeling, that I was selfishly intent on my
+own soul, that in my religion, if I did what I longed presently to do, I
+should be thinking almost solely of myself."
+
+Rather abruptly Father Robertson put a question:
+
+"There was nothing else which drew you towards marriage?"
+
+"I liked and admired Dion very much. I thought him an exceptional sort
+of man. I knew he cared for me in a beautiful sort of way. That
+touched me. And"--she slightly hesitated, and a soft flush came to her
+cheeks--"I felt that he was a good man in a way--I believe, I am almost
+sure, that very few young men are good in the particular way I mean. Of
+all the things in Dion that was the one which most strongly called to
+me."
+
+Father Robertson understood her allusion to physical purity.
+
+"I couldn't have married him but for that," she added.
+
+"If I had known you when you were a girl I believe I should not have
+expected you to marry," said Father Robertson.
+
+Afterwards, when he had seen Rosamund with Robin, he thought he had been
+very blind when he had said that.
+
+"You understand me," she said, very simply. "But I knew you would."
+
+"You have given up something. Many people, perhaps most people, would
+deny that. But I know how difficult it is"--his voice became lower--"to
+give up retirement, to give up that food which the soul instinctively
+longs to find, thinks perhaps it only can find, in silence, perpetual
+meditation, perpetual prayer, in the world that is purged of the
+insistent clamor of human voices. But"--he straightened himself with
+a quick movement, and his voice became firmer--"a man may wish to draw
+near to God in the Wilderness, or in the desert, and may find Him most
+surely in"--and here he hesitated slightly, almost as a few minutes
+before Rosamund had hesitated--"in the Liverpool slums. What a blessing
+it is, what an unspeakable blessing it is, when one has learnt the
+lesson that God is everywhere. But how difficult it is to learn!"
+
+They walked together for a long time in the garden, and Rosamund felt
+strangely at ease, like one who has entered a haven and has found the
+desired peace. She had given up something, but how much had been given
+to her! In the shelter of the gray towers, and within the enclosing
+walls, she would go again to some of her dreams, while the chimes marked
+the passing of the quiet hours, and the watchman's voice was lifted up
+to the stars which looked down on Welsley.
+
+And Robin would be with her.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+A little more than six months later, when a golden September lay over
+the land, Rosamund could scarcely believe that she had ever lived out of
+Welsley. Dion was still in South Africa, in good health and "without a
+scratch." In his last letter home he had written that he had no idea how
+long the C.I.V.'s would be kept in South Africa. The war dragged on, and
+despite the English successes which had followed such bitter defeats
+no one could say when it would end. There was no immediate reason,
+therefore, for Rosamund to move back to London.
+
+She dreaded that return. She loved Welsley and could not now imagine
+herself living anywhere else. Robin, too was a pronounced, even an
+enthusiastic, "Welsleyite," and had practically forgotten "old London,"
+as he negligently called the greatest city in the world. They were
+very happy in Welsley. In fact, the Dean's widow was the only rift in
+Rosamund's lute, that lute which was so full of sweet and harmonious
+music.
+
+Rosamund's lease of the house in the Precincts, "Little Cloisters," as
+it was deliciously named, had been for six months, from the 1st of March
+till the 1st of September. As Dion was not coming home yet, and as he
+wrote begging her to live on at Welsley if she preferred it to London,
+she was anxious to "renew" for another six months. The question whether
+Mrs. Duncan Browning would, or would not, renew really tormented
+Rosamund, and the uncertainty in which she was living, and the misery it
+caused her, showed her how much of her heart had been given to Welsley.
+
+The Dean's widow was capricious and swayed by fluctuations of health.
+She was "up and down," whatever that betokened. At one moment she "saw
+the sun,"--her poetical way of expressing that she began to feel pretty
+well,--and thought she had had enough of the "frivolous existence one
+leads in an hotel"; at another a fit of sneezing,--"was not the early
+morning sneeze but the real thing,"--a pang of rheumatism, or a touch
+of bronchitis, made her fear for the damp of Welsley. She would and she
+would not, and Rosamund could not induce her to come to a decision, and
+suffered agonies at the thought of being turned out of Little Cloisters.
+When Dion came back, of course, a flitting from Welsley would have to be
+faced, but to be driven away without that imperative reason would indeed
+be gall and wormwood. There were days when Rosamund felt unchristian
+towards Mrs. Dean, upon whom she had never looked, but with whom she had
+exchanged a great many cordial letters.
+
+In August, under the influence of a "heavy cold, which seems the worse
+because of the heat," Mrs. Browning had agreed to let Rosamund stay on
+for another month, September; and now Rosamund was anxiously awaiting
+a reply to her almost impassioned appeal for a six months' extension of
+her lease. Canon Wilton was again in residence in the Precincts, and
+one afternoon he called at Little Cloisters, after the three o'clock
+service, to inquire what was the result of this appeal. Beatrice was
+staying with her sister for a few days, and when the Canon was shown in
+she was alone in the drawing-room, having just come up from the garden,
+where she had been playing with Robin, whose chirping high voice was
+audible, floating up from below.
+
+"Is your sister busy?" asked the Canon, after greeting Beatrice.
+
+Beatrice smiled faintly.
+
+"She's in her den. What do you think she is doing?"
+
+The Canon looked hard at her, and he too smiled.
+
+"Not writing again to Mrs. Browning?"
+
+Beatrice nodded, and sat gently down on the window-seat.
+
+"Begging and praying for an extension."
+
+"I've never seen any one so in love with a place as your sister is with
+Welsley."
+
+He sat down near Beatrice.
+
+"But it is attractive, isn't it?" she said.
+
+She turned her head slowly and looked out of the open window to the
+enclosed garden which was bathed in mellow sunshine. The sky above the
+gray Cathedral towers was a clear and delicate, not deep, blue. Above
+the mossy red wall of the garden appeared the ruined arches of the
+cloisters which gave to the house its name. Among them some doves were
+cooing. Up in the blue, about the pinnacles of the towers, the
+rooks were busily flying. Robin, in a little loose shirt, green
+knickerbockers, and a tiny soft white hat set well on the back of
+his head, was gardening just below the window with the intensity that
+belongs to the dawn. His bare brown legs moved rapidly, as he ran from
+place to place carrying earth, a plant, a bright red watering-pot. The
+gardener, a large young man, with whom Robin was evidently on the most
+friendly, and even intimate, terms, was working with him, and apparently
+under his close and constant supervision. A thrush with very bright eyes
+looked on from an adjacent elder bush. Upon the wall, near the end of
+the Bishop's Palace, a black cat was sunning itself and lazily attending
+to its toilet.
+
+"It's the very place for Rosamund," said Beatrice, after a pause, during
+which she drank in Welsley. "She seems to know and love every stick and
+stone in it."
+
+"And almost every man, woman and child," said the Canon. "She began by
+captivating the Precincts,--not such an easy task either, for a bishop
+usually has not the taste of a dean, and minor canons think very lightly
+of the praises of an archdeacon,--and she has ended by captivating
+the whole city. Even the wives of the clergy sing her praises with one
+accord. It's the greatest triumph in the history of the church."
+
+"You see she likes them and is thoroughly interested in all their little
+affairs."
+
+"Yes, it's genuine sympathy. She makes Welsley her world, and so Welsley
+thinks the world of her."
+
+He looked across at Beatrice for a moment meditatively, and then said:
+
+"And when her husband comes back?"
+
+"Dion! Well, then, of course----"
+
+She hesitated, and in the silence the drawing-room door opened and
+Rosamund came in, holding an open letter in her hand, knitting her
+brows, and looking very grave and intense. She greeted the Canon with
+her usual warm cordiality, but still looked grave and preoccupied.
+
+"I've been writing to Mrs. Browning, about the house," she said
+earnestly. "It _is_ damp, isn't it?"
+
+"Damp?" said the Canon. "I've never noticed it. But then do you think
+the house is unwholesome?"
+
+"Not for _us_. What I feel is, that for a bronchial person it might be."
+
+She paused, looking at her letter.
+
+"I've put just what I feel here, in a letter to Mrs. Browning. I know
+the house is considered damp; by the Precincts, I mean. Mrs. Murry told
+me so, and Mrs. Tiling-Smith thinks the same. Even the Bishop--why are
+you smiling, Canon Wilton?"
+
+But she began to smile too.
+
+"What does the Bishop say about the danger to health of Little
+Cloisters?"
+
+Her lips twitched, but she replied with firm sweetness:
+
+"The Bishop says that all, or nearly all, old houses are apt to be damp
+in winter."
+
+"A weighty utterance! But I'm afraid Mrs. Browning--by the way, have you
+put the Bishop into your letter?"
+
+"I had thought of reading it to you both, but now I shall not."
+
+She put the letter into an envelope, sealed it up with practical
+swiftness, rang the bell for Annie and sent it to the postbox round the
+corner.
+
+"I put the Bishop in," she added, with a mockery of defiance that was
+almost girlish, when Annie had gone out.
+
+"That was a mistake," said the Canon sonorously.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Bishops never carry weight with the wives, or widows, of deans."
+
+"But why not?" asked Rosamund, with a touch of real anxiety.
+
+"Because the wives of deans always think their husbands ought to be
+bishops instead of those who are bishops, and the widows of deans always
+consider that they ought to be the widows of bishops. They therefore
+very naturally feel that bishops are not entitled by merit to the
+positions they hold, and could be treated with a delicate disdain."
+
+"I never thought of that. I wonder if Annie----"
+
+"Too late!" said the Canon. "You'll have to turn out of Little
+Cloisters, I foresee that."
+
+Rosamund sat down, leaned towards him with her hands clasped tightly
+together, and, in her absolutely unself-conscious way, began to tell him
+and Beattie what she felt about Welsley, or something of what she felt.
+A good deal she could only have told to Father Robertson. When she had
+finished, Canon Wilton said, in his rather abrupt and blunt way:
+
+"Well, but if your husband comes home unexpectedly? You can't stay here
+then, can you?"
+
+Beatrice, who was still on the window seat, leaned out, and began to
+speak to Robin below her in a quiet voice which could scarcely be heard
+within the room.
+
+"But Dion sees no prospect of coming home yet."
+
+"I heard to-day from some one in London that the C.I.V. may be back
+before Christmas."
+
+"Dion doesn't say so."
+
+"It mayn't be true."
+
+"Dion writes that no one out there has any idea when the war will end."
+
+"Probably not. But the C.I.V. mayn't be needed all through the war.
+Most of them are busy men who've given up a great deal out of sheer
+patriotism. Fine fellows! They've done admirable work, and the War
+Office may decide that they've done enough. Things out there have taken
+a great turn since Roberts and Kitchener went out. The C.I.V. may come
+marching home long before peace is declared."
+
+He spoke with a certain pressure, a certain intensity, and his eyes
+never left Rosamund's face.
+
+"I'm glad my Dion's one of them," she said. "And Robin will be glad,
+too, some day."
+
+She said nothing more about Mrs. Browning and Little Cloisters. But when
+Canon Wilton had gone she said to her sister:
+
+"Beattie, does it ever strike you that Canon Wilton's rather abrupt and
+unexpected sometimes in what he says?"
+
+"He doesn't beat about the bush," replied Beatrice. "Do you mean that?"
+
+"Perhaps I do. Now I'm going down to Robin. How strong he's getting
+here! Hark at his voice! Can't you hear even in his voice how much good
+Welsley had done him?"
+
+Robin's determined treble was audible as he piped out:
+
+"Oh no, Fipper! Not by the Bish's wall! Why, I say, the slugs always
+comes there. They do, weally! You come and see! Come quick! I'll
+show----"
+
+The voice faded in the direction of the Palace.
+
+"I must go down and see if it's true about the slugs," exclaimed
+Rosamund.
+
+And with beaming eyes she hastened out of the room.
+
+Beatrice looked after her and sighed. Dion's last letter from South
+Africa was lying on the writing-table close to her. Rosamund had already
+given it to her to read. Now she took it up and read it carefully again.
+The doves cooed in the cloisters; the bells chimed in the tower; the
+mellow sunshine--already the sunshine not of full summer, but of the
+dawning autumn, with its golden presage of days not golden, and of
+nights heavy with dews and laden with floating leaves,--came in through
+the lattice, and lay over her soft and wistful melancholy, as she read
+of hardship, and dust, and blood and death, told truthfully, but always
+cheerfully, as a soldier tells a thing to a woman he loves and wishes to
+be sincere with.
+
+Dion was not in the peace. Dear Rosamund! Did she quite realize? And
+then Beattie pulled herself up. A disloyal thought surely leaves a stain
+on the mind through which it passes. Beattie did not want to have a
+stain on her mind. She cared for it as a delicately refined woman cares
+for her body, bathing it every day.
+
+She put Dion's letter down.
+
+That evening Rosamund sang at a charity concert in the City Hall.
+Her music was already a legend in Welsley and the neighborhood. Mr.
+Dickinson, who always accompanied her singing, declared it emphatically
+to be "great." The wife of the Bishop, Mrs. Mabberley, pronounced the
+verdict, "She sings with her soul rather than with her voice," without
+intention of paying a left-handed compliment. The Cathedral Choir boys
+affirmed that "our altos are a couple of squeaks beside her." Even Mrs.
+Dickinson, "the cold douche," as she was named in the Precincts, had
+long ago "come round" about Mrs. Dion Leith, and had been heard to
+say of her, "She's got more than a contralto, she's got a heart, and I
+couldn't say that of some women in high positions." This was "aimed"
+at the Dean's wife, Mrs. Jasper, who gave herself musical airs, and
+sometimes tried to "interfere with the Precentor's arrangements," which
+meant falling foul of "Henry."
+
+As Rosamund looked down upon the rows of friendly and familiar faces
+from the platform, as she heard the prolonged applause which greeted her
+before she sang, and the cries of "Encore!" which saluted her when she
+finished, she felt that she had given her heart irrevocably to Welsley,
+and the thought came to her, "How can I leave it?" This was cozy,
+and London could never be cozy. She could identify herself with the
+concentrated life here, without feeling it a burden upon her. For she
+was so much beloved that people even respected her privacy, and fell in
+with what she called "my absurd little ways." In London, however many
+people you knew, you saw strangers all the time, strangers with hard,
+indifferent eyes and buttoned-up mouths. And one could never say of
+London "my London."
+
+When the concert was over she wound a veil about her pale yellow hair,
+wrapped a thin cloak round her shoulders, took up her music case and
+asked for Beattie. An eager boy with a smiling round face, one of the
+Cathedral Choristers, darted off to find Mrs. Daventry, the sister of
+"our Mrs. Leith"; Mr. Dickinson gently, but decisively, took the music
+case from Rosamund's hand with an "I'll carry that home for you"; a thin
+man, like an early primrose obliged by some inadvertence of spring to
+work for its living, sidled up and begged for the name of "your most
+beautiful and chaste second encore for our local paper, the 'Welsley
+Whisperer'"; and Mrs. Dickinson in a pearl gray shawl, with an
+artificial pink camellia carelessly entangled in her marvelously smooth
+mouse-colored hair, appeared to tell Mrs. Leith authoritatively that
+"Madame Patey _in her heyday_ never sang 'O Rest in the Lord' as we have
+heard it sung to-night."
+
+Then Rosamund, pleasantly surrounded by dear provincial enthusiasts,
+made her way to the door where Beattie, with more enthusiasts, was
+waiting for her; and they all came out into the narrow High Street,
+and found the September moon riding above their heads to give them a
+greeting nobly serene and beneficent, and they set out _sans facon_,
+many of them bare-headed, to walk home down tiny "Archbishop's Lane" to
+the Precincts.
+
+Rosamund walked with Mr. Dickinson on one side of her and the Dean
+of Welsley and Mrs. Jasper on the other; Canon Wilton, Beattie, the
+Archdeacon of Welsley and the Precentor were just in front; behind
+peacefully streamed minor canons and their wives, young sons and
+daughters of the Precincts, and various privileged persons who, though
+not of the hierarchy, possessed small houses within the sacred pale.
+Only the Bishop and his consort drove majestically home in "Harrington's
+Fly."
+
+What a chatter of voices there was under the projecting eaves of the
+dear old house! What happy laughter was wafted towards the smiling moon!
+Mrs. Dickinson, presently "coming up with" Rosamund's party, became
+absolutely "waggish" (the Dean's expression), and made Rosamund laugh
+with that almost helpless spontaneity which is the greatest compliment
+to a joke. And then the gate in the ancient archway was opened, and they
+all passed into their great pleasaunce, and, with a sensation of joyous
+proprietorship, heard the gate shut and locked behind them, and saw the
+Cathedral lifting its towers to the moon. Laughter was hushed then, and
+some of the voices were silent; feet went more slowly along the edges
+of the velvety lawns; the spell of ancient things which are noble, and
+which tell of the noble ideals of humanity, fell upon them; their hearts
+within them were lifted up.
+
+When the Dean bade good-night to Rosamund he said:
+
+"Your music and you mean a great deal to Welsley."
+
+"Not half as much as Welsley means to me," she replied with earnest
+sincerity.
+
+"We are all looking forward to greeting your gallant, self-sacrificing
+husband presently, very soon I hope. Good-night to you. It has been"--he
+paused, looked at Rosamund and gently pressed her hand,--"a most
+fragrant evening."
+
+A most fragrant evening! When Beattie and Rosamund had eaten their
+sandwiches, and drunk their still lemonade and claret, and when Beattie
+had gone to bed, Rosamund slipped out alone into the dear walled garden,
+and paced up and down in the moonlight.
+
+Yes, there was something fragrant here, something that infected the
+soul, something of old faiths and old holy aspirations, a murmur and a
+perfume of trust and love. There might be gossip, trickling jealousies
+in this little world, mean actions, even, perhaps, ugly desires and ugly
+fulfilments of desire. Rosamund scarcely noticed, or did not notice,
+these things. With her people were at their best. That night, when
+Beattie was going to bed, Rosamund had said to her:
+
+"I can't think why Mrs. Dickinson is called 'the cold douche.' I find
+her so warm-hearted and so amusing!"
+
+And so it was with them all. Rosamund had the magic touch which drew
+the best out of every one in Welsley, because she was happy there, and
+sincerely loved the place.
+
+"How can I leave Welsley?" she thought now, as she walked up and down in
+the garden, and heard presently the chiming of midnight and the voice
+of the watchman beyond the Dark Entry. God seemed very near to her
+in Welsley, God and the happiness of God. In Welsley she felt, or was
+beginning to feel, that she was almost able to combine two lives, the
+life she had grasped and the life she had let go. Here she was a mother
+and at moments she was almost a religious too. She played with her boy,
+she trained him, watched over his small body and his increasing soul;
+and she meditated between the enclosing walls, listening to bells and
+floating praises, to the Dresden Amen, and to the organ with its many
+voices all dedicated to the service of God. Often, when she walked alone
+in the garden, or sat alone in some hidden corner under the mossy walls,
+she felt like a nun who had given up the world forever, and had found
+the true life in God. In imagination, then, she lived the life of which
+she had dreamed as a girl before any man had brought her his love.
+
+She could never, even in imagination, live that life truly, without
+effort, in London. Welsley had made her almost hate London. She did
+not know how she would be able to bear the return to it. Yet, if Canon
+Wilton were right in what he had said to her that afternoon, Dion might
+come back very soon, and therefore very soon she might have to leave
+Welsley.
+
+No. 5 Little Market Street once more; vaporous Westminster leaning to
+the dark river!
+
+Rosamund sighed deeply as she looked up again to the towers, and the
+moon, and turned to go into Little Cloisters. It was difficult to
+shut out such a night; it would be more difficult to give up the long
+meditations, the dreams that came in this sweet retirement sheltered by
+the house of God.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Two days later, at breakfast-time, Rosamund received the following
+letter, written on paper scented with "Wood violet":
+
+
+"HOTEL PALACE-BY-THE-SEA, BOURNEMOUTH, Thursday
+
+"MY DEAR MRS. LEITH,--I have received your two--or is it
+three?--charming letters recently written, suggesting a renewal of the
+lease of Little Cloisters beyond September. At first I hesitated. The
+atmosphere of a Cathedral town naturally attracts me and recalls sweet
+memories of the past. On the other hand the life of a well-managed
+hotel, such as this is not without its _agrements_. Frivolous it may
+be (though not light); comfortable and restful it undoubtedly is. The
+against and the for in a nutshell as it were! Your last letter, in
+which you dwell on the dampness inevitable in old houses, and quote the
+Bishop's opinion, would, I think, have left me undisturbed in mind--I
+have recently taken up the 'new mind' cult, which is, of course, not
+antagonistic to our cherished Anglican beliefs--had it not happened to
+coincide with more than a touch of bronchial asthma. The Bishop (quite
+between you and me!) though a very dear man and a very good Christian,
+is not a person of great intellect. My husband would never enter into
+controversy with him, as he said it was useless to strive in argument
+with a mind not sure of its bearings! An opinion of the Bishop's would
+not, therefore, weigh much with me. But there is an element of truth in
+the contention as to the damp. Old houses _are_ damp at times. Little
+Cloisters, placed as it is in the shadow of the Cathedral, doubtless
+suffers in some degree from this defect. My doctor here,--_such_ a
+clever man!--though very reluctant to prevent me from returning home,
+confessed to-day that he thought my case needed careful watching by some
+one who _knew_. Now (between you and me), nobody _knows_ in Welsley,
+and therefore, after weighing pros and cons, and undergoing an hour of
+mental treatment--merely the silent encouragement and purification of
+the will--by an expert here, I have decided to remain for the winter.
+I am willing, therefore, to extend your lease for another six months
+on the terms as before. Perhaps you will kindly visit my solicitor,
+Mr. Collingwood of Cattle Market Lane,--but you are sure to know his
+address!--who will arrange everything legally with you.--With my
+kindest regards and all good wishes, believe me, dear Mrs. Leith, always
+sincerely yours,
+
+"IMOGENE DUNCAN BROWNING."
+
+
+It was Beattie's last morning at Little Cloisters; she had settled to
+go back to De Lorne Gardens in the afternoon of that day. Rosamund
+read Mrs. Browning's letter sitting opposite to her sister at the
+breakfast-table in the small, paneled dining-room. At the same time
+Beattie was reading a letter from Guy. As she finished it she looked up
+and said:
+
+"Anything interesting?"
+
+"What does Guy say?" replied Rosamund. "Oh, here's a letter from
+godfather! Perhaps he's coming down."
+
+Rather hastily she tore open another envelope.
+
+Later on in the morning, when Beattie was doing mysterious things in the
+garden with Robin, Rosamund slipped out alone and made her way to
+Cattle Market Lane. She came back just before lunch, looking unusually
+preoccupied.
+
+The day after Beattie had returned to London, a note from Rosamund told
+her that the lease of Little Cloisters had been renewed for another six
+months, till the end of March, 1901.
+
+"And if old Dion comes back in the meanwhile, as I fully expect he
+will?" said Guy, when Beattie told him of Rosamund's note.
+
+"I suppose it is possible to sublet a house," said Beattie, looking
+unusually inexpressive, Guy thought.
+
+"They say at the Clubs the C.I.V. will be back before Christmas,
+Beattie," said Guy.
+
+"The Tenbys' lease of Number 5 is up."
+
+"Yes, but do you think Dion can afford to run two houses?"
+
+"Perhaps----" she stopped.
+
+"I don't believe Rosamund will ever be got out of Welsley," said Guy.
+"And I'm pretty sure you agree with me."
+
+"I must go now," said Beattie gently. "I'm going to Queen Anne's
+Mansions to tell the dear mother all about my visit to Welsley."
+
+"When is she going there?"
+
+"I don't know. She's very lazy about moving. She's not been out of
+London since Dion sailed."
+
+"I think she's the most delicate mother-in-law--I don't mean
+physically--who has ever been born in the world."
+
+Beattie looked down, and in a moment went out of the room without saying
+anything more.
+
+"Darling Beattie," murmured Guy, looking after his wife. "How she bears
+her great disappointment."
+
+For Beattie's sake far more than for his own he longed to have a child
+in his home, a child of hers and his. But that would never be. And so
+Beattie gave all the mother-love that was in her to Robin, but much
+of it secretly. Guy knew that, and believed he knew the secret of her
+reticence even with Robin. She loved Robin, as it were, from a distance;
+only his mother must love him cheek to cheek, lips to lips, heart to
+heart, and his father as men love the sons they think of as the bravery
+and strength of the future.
+
+But even Guy did not know how much his wife loved Robin, how many
+buried hopes and dreams stirred in their graves when Robin threw himself
+impulsively into her arms and confidentially hung on her neck and
+informed her of the many important details of his life. No man knows all
+that a certain type of woman is able to feel about a child.
+
+When Rosamund had arranged about the renewal of the lease, she tried to
+feel the joy which was evidently felt by all her Welsley friends--with
+one exception which, however, she either did not notice or did not seem
+to notice. They were frankly delighted and enthusiastic at the prospect
+of keeping her among them. She was very grateful for their affection,
+so eagerly shown, but somehow, although she had signed her name in a
+solicitor's office, and her signature had been witnessed by a neat young
+man with a neat bald head, she did not feel quite at ease. She found
+herself looking at "my Welsley" with the anxiously loving eyes of one
+who gathers in dear details before it is too late for such garnering;
+she sat in the garden and listened to the beloved sounds from the
+Cathedral with strained attention, like one who sets memory at its
+mysterious task.
+
+The Dean's widow had yielded to the suggestion of inevitable dampness in
+old houses, but----!
+
+On September 28, towards evening, when Rosamund was in the garden with
+Robin, Annie, the parlor-maid, came out holding a salver on which lay a
+telegram. Rosamund opened it and read:
+
+
+"Coming home.--DION."
+
+
+"Any answer, ma'am?"
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Is there any answer, ma'am? Shall I tell the boy to wait?"
+
+"What did you say, Annie?"
+
+"Shall I tell the boy to wait, ma'am?"
+
+"No, thank you, Annie. There's no answer."
+
+Annie turned and recrossed the garden, looking careful, as if she were
+thinking of her cap, round which the airs were blowing.
+
+Rosamund sat for a few minutes almost motionless, with the slip of paper
+lying in her lap; then the breeze came lightly, as if curious, and blew
+it away. Robin saw it and ran.
+
+"I'll catch it, mummie. You see! I'll catch it!"
+
+The little brown legs were amazingly swift, but the telegram was elusive
+because the breeze was naughty. When Robin ran up to his mother holding
+it out he was almost breathless.
+
+"Here it is, mummie."
+
+His blue eyes and his voice held triumph.
+
+"I said I would, and I did!"
+
+Rosamund put her arm round him.
+
+"Who do you think sent this?"
+
+"I dunno."
+
+"Daddy sent it."
+
+Robin's eyes became round.
+
+"Daddy! What for?"
+
+"To tell us he's coming home."
+
+A deeply serious expression came to Robin's face.
+
+"Have I growed much?"
+
+"Yes, a great deal."
+
+"Will daddy see it?"
+
+"Yes, I'm sure he will directly he comes."
+
+Robin seemed relieved.
+
+"Is daddy coming here?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Is he goin' to live here with us?"
+
+"We shall see about all that when he comes."
+
+Annie, evidently still thinking about her cap, reappeared on the garden
+path.
+
+"The Dean to see you, ma'am."
+
+Rosamund got up, gave Robin a long kiss on the freckles and said:
+
+"Robin, I believe the Dean has come about Mr. Thrush."
+
+"Does he know Mr. Thrush?"
+
+"Not yet. I'll tell you something presently."
+
+And she went slowly into the house. Was a scheme of hers coming to
+fruition just when----? She tried to close her mind to an approaching
+thought.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+On the 7th of October the C.I.V. sailed from South Africa for England,
+on the 19th of October they made St. Vincent; on the 23rd Dion again
+looked over the sea at the dreaming hills of Madeira. The sight of these
+hills made him realize the change brought about in him by the work he
+had done in South Africa. As he gazed at them he suddenly and sharply
+remembered the man who had gazed at them nine months before, a man
+who was gathering together determination, who was silently making
+preparations for progress, or for what he thought of as progress. Those
+hills then had seemed to be calling to him out of the mists of heat,
+and to himself he had seemed to be defying them, to be thrusting their
+voices from him. For were they not the hills of a land where the lotus
+bloomed, where a weariness bred of stagnant delights wrapped men in a
+garment of Nessus, steeped in a subtle poison which drew from them all
+their energies, which brought them not pain but an inertia more deadly
+to the soul than pain? Now they had no power over him. He did not need
+to defy them, because he had gained in strength. Ere they vanished from
+his eyes over the sea he remembered another Island rising out of waters
+that gleamed with gold. How far off now seemed to him that evening
+when he had looked on it as he traveled to Greece! How much he had left
+behind on the way of his life!
+
+The experience of separation and of war had not aged him, but it had
+made him feel older. Nothing of the boy was left in him. He felt himself
+of manhood all compact. He had seen men die, had seen how they were able
+to die, how they met severe physical suffering; he had silently tried to
+prepare himself for death, keeping a cheerful countenance; he had known,
+like most brave men, the cold companionship of fear, and he had got rid
+of that companionship. Knowing death better, he knew life much better
+than when he had left England.
+
+On the voyage out he had looked at the hills of Madeira with
+Worthington. Now Worthington was not with him; he had died of enteric at
+Pretoria in September. Dion was carrying back to England Worthington's
+last written message to his people. He was carrying also another letter
+written by an English officer, whose body lay in the earth of Africa, to
+a woman at home. On the voyage Dion often thought of that dead man and
+of the living woman to whom he would presently give the letter. He had
+promised to deliver it personally.
+
+At St. Vincent he had received a welcome by cable from Rosamund, and had
+sent a cable to her asking not to be met. He wished to meet her in her
+home at Welsley. She had written to him enthusiastic accounts of its
+peace and beauty. Her pen had been tipped with love of it. Their first
+meeting, their reunion, must take place there in the midst of that
+wonderful peace of green England which she loved so much. After the
+heat and the dust and the pain of South Africa that would surely be very
+good.
+
+Their reunion!
+
+Dion had escaped death. He had been allowed to return to Rosamund in
+splendid health, without a wound, though he had been in battle. He had
+a strong presentiment that he was allowed to return for some definite
+purpose. Could he not now be of far more use to his little son than if
+he had never volunteered for active service? Rosamund and he had looked
+up together at the columns of the Parthenon and had thought of the child
+who might come. Dion felt that he understood the Parthenon better now
+that he had looked death in the face, now that he had been ready to
+give up his life if it had been required of him. He even had a whimsical
+feeling--he smiled at it seriously to himself--that the Parthenon, if he
+again stood before it, would understand him better. He was not proud
+of himself for what he had done. But in the depths of him he often felt
+earnestly glad, almost thankful, that he had been able to do it. The
+doing of it had brought a new zest into life, new meanings, a new
+outlook. He seemed to feel life like something precious in his hand now;
+he had not felt it so before, even when he had won Rosamund and had been
+with her in Greece.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The hills of Madeira faded. Three days later there was a burial at sea
+in the early morning. A private, who had been ill with enteric, had died
+in the night. The body sank into the depths, the ship went on her
+way and ran into a stiff gale. Already England was rousing herself to
+welcome her returning sons, bruskly but lustily, in her way, which was
+not South Africa's way. Dion loved that gale though it kept him awake
+all night.
+
+Next morning they were off the Start, and heard the voices of the sirens
+bidding them good day.
+
+* * * * *
+
+On the last day of October, at about four o'clock in the afternoon,
+Rosamund was waiting for Dion. He was due by the express which, when up
+to time, reached Welsley Station at 3.55. She would naturally have been
+at the station to meet him if she had not received a telegram from him
+begging her to stay at home.
+
+"Would much rather meet you first in Little Cloisters,--Dion," were the
+last words of the telegram.
+
+So Rosamund had stayed at home.
+
+It was a peculiarly still autumn afternoon. A suggestion--it was
+scarcely more than that--of mist made the Precincts look delicately sad,
+but not to the eyes of Rosamund. She delighted in this season of tawny
+colors and of fluttering leaves, of nature's wide-eyed and contemplative
+muteness. The beauty of autumn appealed to her because she possessed a
+happy spirit, and was not too imaginative. She had imagination, but it
+was not of the intensely sensitive and poetic kind which dies with the
+dying leaves, and in the mists loses all the hopes that were born with
+the birth of summer. The strong sanity which marked her, and which had
+always kept her in central paths, far away from the byways in which the
+neurotic, the decadent, the searchers after the so-called "new" things
+loved to tread, led her to welcome each season in is turn, and to
+rejoice in its special characteristics.
+
+So she loved the cloistral feeling autumn brought with it to Welsley.
+Green summer seemed to open the doors, and one rejoiced in a golden
+freedom; tawny autumn seemed softly to close the doors, and one was
+happy in a sensation of being tenderly guarded, of being kept very safe
+in charge for the coming winter with its fires, and its cosy joys of the
+interior.
+
+Another reason which made Rosamund care very much for the autumn was
+this: in the autumn the religious atmosphere which hung about the
+Precincts of Welsley seemed to her to become more definite, more
+touching, the ancient things more living and powerful in their message.
+
+"Welsley always sends out influences," she had once said to Father
+Robertson. "But in certain autumn days it speaks. I hear its voice in
+the autumn."
+
+She heard its voice now as she waited for Dion.
+
+The lattice window which gave on to the garden was partly open;
+there was a fire in the wide, old-fashioned grate; vases holding
+chrysanthemums stood on the high wood mantelpiece and on the
+writing-table; the tea-table had been placed by Annie near the hearth.
+
+Rosamund listened to the cloistral silence, and looked at two deep,
+old-fashioned arm-chairs which were drawn up by the tea-table.
+
+Just how much had she missed Dion?
+
+That question had suddenly sprung up in her mind as she looked at the
+two arm-chairs.
+
+The first time she had been in Little Cloisters she had spoken to Canon
+Wilton of Dion, had wondered if he would come back from South Africa
+altered; and she had said that if she came to live in it Welsley might
+alter her. Canon Wilton had made no comment on her remark. She had
+scarcely noticed that at the time, perhaps had not consciously noticed
+it; but her subconscious mind had recorded the fact, and she recalled it
+now.
+
+Welsley, she thought, had changed her a good deal. She was not a
+self-conscious woman as a rule, but to-day was not like other days, and
+she was not quite like herself on other days. Perhaps, for once, she
+was what women often call "strung up"; certainly she felt peculiarly
+alive--alive specially in the nerves of her body.
+
+Those two arm-chairs were talking to her; they were telling her of
+the imminent renewal of the life closely companioned, watched over,
+protected, beloved. They were telling, and they were asking, too. She
+felt absurdly that it was they who were asking how much she had missed
+Dion.
+
+It would be good to have him back, but she now suddenly realized, in a
+self-conscious way, that she had managed to be very happy without him.
+But then she had always looked forward to his eventual return. Suppose
+he had not come back?
+
+She got up restlessly, went to the window and looked out into the
+garden. Robin was not there, nor was he in the house. Obedient to an
+impulse which she had not understood at the time, Rosamund had arranged
+a small, and rather odd, festivity for him which had taken him away from
+home, and would keep him out till five o'clock: he was having tea in
+a cake-shop near the top of Wesley High Street with his nurse and Mr.
+Thrush, who, not unexpectedly, had arrived in Welsley. The first meeting
+between his father and mother would not be complicated by his eager
+young presence.
+
+So the garden was empty to-day. Not even the big young gardener was to
+be seen; he only came on four days in the week, and this was not one of
+them. As Rosamund looked down into the garden, she loved its loneliness,
+its misty, autumnal aspect. It was surely not her fault if she had
+a natural affection for solitude--not for the hideous solitude of a
+childless mother, but for the frequent privacy of a mother who was
+alone, but who knew that her child was near, playing perhaps, or gone
+for a little jaunt with his faithful nurse, or sleeping upstairs.
+
+As she looked at the garden a faint creeping sense of something almost
+like fear came to her. Since Dion had been away she had surely altered,
+because she had had a new experience; she had, as it were, touched the
+confines of that life which she had deliberately renounced when she had
+married.
+
+It seemed to her, as she stood there and remembered her long meditations
+in that enclosed and ancient garden, that in these months she had drawn
+much nearer to God, and--could it be because of that?--perhaps had
+receded a little from her husband.
+
+The sense of uneasiness--she could not call it fear--deepened in her.
+Was the receding then implicit in the drawing near? She began to feel
+almost confused. She put up a hand to her face; her cheek was hot.
+
+The clock in the room struck four; two minutes later the chimes sounded,
+and then Big John announced the hour.
+
+Dion might arrive at any moment now. She turned away rather quickly from
+the window. She hated the unusual feeling of self-consciousness which
+had come to her.
+
+At ten minutes past four the door bell rang. It must be he. She went to
+the drawing-room door, opened it and listened. She heard a man's voice
+and a bump; then another bump, a creaking, a sort of scraping, and the
+voice once more saying, "I'll manage, miss."
+
+It was Dion's luggage. Harrington's man explained that the gentleman had
+said he would walk to Little Cloisters.
+
+Rosamund went back into the drawing-room and shut the door. Now that
+Dion's luggage was actually in the house everything seemed curiously
+different. A period was definitely over; her loneliness with Robin
+in Little Cloisters was at an end. She sat down in one of the two
+arm-chairs by the tea-table, clasped her hands together and looked at
+the fire.
+
+If she had held to her girlish idea? If she had become a "Sister"?
+But--she shook her head as she sat there alone--Robin! And then she
+sighed; she had not thought, "But--Dion!" She was almost angry with
+herself for being so introspective, so mentally observant of herself.
+All this was surely unnatural in her. Was she going to become
+morbid--she who had such a hatred of morbidity? She tried to force
+herself to feel that she had missed Dion tremendously, that his return
+would make things right in Little Cloisters.
+
+But had they ever been wrong? And, besides, Little Cloisters would
+almost immediately be only a dear memory of the past.
+
+Rosamund began almost to hate herself. Was she capable of any sort of
+treachery? Swiftly she began to dwell upon all the dear goodness of
+Dion, upon his love, his admiration, his perpetual thoughtfulness,
+his unselfishness, his straight purity, his chivalry, his unceasing
+devotion. He was a man to trust implicitly. That was enough. She trusted
+him and loved him. She thanked God that he was back in England. She had
+missed him more, much more than she had realized; she was quite sure of
+that now that she had recalled things. One happiness is apt to oust
+the acute memory of another. That had (quite naturally) happened in her
+case. It would indeed have been strange if, living in such a dear place
+as "My Welsley," with Robin the precious one, she had been a miserable
+woman! And she had always known--as women know things they do not
+know--that Dion would come back after behaving nobly. And that was
+exactly what had happened.
+
+She looked at the arm-chair opposite.
+
+How splendid it would be to see dear, brave, good, faithful Dion
+sitting in it in a moment, safe after all his hardships and dangers,
+comfortable, able to rest at last in his own home.
+
+For Little Cloisters would be his home even if only for a few days. And
+then----What about Mr. Thrush? What about--oh, so many things?
+
+"I'll find the way all right," Dion had said at the station, after he
+had been assured that it was only ten minutes' walk, "or so," to Little
+Cloisters.
+
+The little walk would be a preparation for the very great event. He only
+knew how great it was when he got out at the Welsley Station.
+
+He had never seen Welsley before, though its fame had been familiar to
+him from childhood. Thousands of pilgrims had piously visited it, coming
+from afar; now yet another pilgrim had come from afar, sensitively eager
+to approach a shrine which held something desired by his soul.
+
+That part of the city which immediately surrounded the station was not
+attractive, but very soon Dion came into a narrow street and was aware
+of an ancient flavor, wholly English, and only to be savored thoroughly
+by an English palate. In this street he began to taste England. He
+passed an old curiosity shop, black and white, with a projecting upper
+storey, lattice windows with tiny panes, a door of black oak upon which
+many people had carved their names. By the door stood a spinning-wheel.
+In the window were a tea service of spode and a collection of luster
+ware. There were also some Toby jugs.
+
+Dion went in quickly and bought one for Robin. He carried it unwrapped
+in his hand as he walked on. One could do that here, in this intimate,
+cozy old town of dear England. He enjoyed the light mist, the moisture
+in the air. He had come to hate aridity and the acrid dryness of dust
+blown by hot winds across great spaces. The moisture caressed his skin,
+burnt almost to the color of copper by the African sun.
+
+He came into the High Street. On its farther side, straight in front of
+him, the narrowest street he had ever seen, a rivulet of a street, with
+leaning houses which nearly formed an arcade, stretched to a wonderful
+gray gateway, immensely massive, with towers at its corners, and rows of
+shields above its beetling archway.
+
+This must be the entrance to the Precincts.
+
+In the tiny street he met a verger in mufti, an old bent man, with a
+chin-beard and knotty hands, English in every vein, in every sinew of
+his amazingly respectable and venerable body. This worthy he stopped and
+inquired of him the way to Little Cloisters.
+
+"Where Mrs. Leith and her boy lives, sir?" mouthed the old man, with a
+kindly gaping smile.
+
+"That's it."
+
+"She's a nice lady," said the verger. "We think a lot of her here,
+especially we Cathedral folk."
+
+He went on to explain elaborately where Little Cloisters was, and to
+describe minutely two routes, by either of which it might be come at.
+It was evident that he was one of those who love to listen to themselves
+and who take a pride in words.
+
+Dion decided for the route "round at the back" by Chantrey Lane, through
+the Green Court, leaving the Deanery on the left and the Bishop's Palace
+on the right, and so by way of the Prior's Gate and the ruins of the
+Infirmary through the Dark Entry to Little Cloisters.
+
+"You can't miss it. The name's writ on the door in the wall, and a rare
+old wall it is," said the venerable man.
+
+Dion thanked him warmly and walked on, while the verger looked after
+him.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if that's Mrs. Leith's husband home from the war,"
+he murmured. "Looks as if he'd been fighting, he does, and burnt pretty
+near to a cinder by something, the sun as like as not."
+
+And he walked on down the tiny street towards the muffin which awaited
+him at home, well pleased with his perspicuity, and making mental
+preparations for the astonishing of his wife with a tidbit of news.
+
+Dion came into the Green Court, and immediately felt Welsley, felt it
+in the depths of him, and understood Rosamund's love of it so often
+expressed in her letters. As he looked at the moist green lawn in the
+center, at the gray and brown houses which fronted it, at the Deanery
+garden full of the ruddy flowers of autumn behind the iron railings, at
+the immense Cathedral with its massive and yet almost tenderly graceful
+towers, a history in stone of the faithful work and the progress of men,
+he knew why Rosamund had come to live here. He stood still. In the
+misty air he heard the voices of the rooks. The door of a Canon's house
+opened, and two clergymen, one of them in gaiters and a shovel hat, came
+out, and walked slowly away in earnest conversation. Bells sounded in
+one of the towers.
+
+He understood. Here was a sort of essence of ecclesiasticism. It seemed
+to penetrate the whole atmosphere. Rosamund was at home in it.
+
+He remembered his terrible thought that God had always stood between his
+wife and him, dividing them.
+
+How would it be now?
+
+Again he looked up at the great house of God, and he felt almost afraid.
+But he was not the man he had been when he said good-by to Rosamund; he
+had gained in force of character, and he knew it. Surely out there in
+South Africa, he had done what his mother had wanted him to do, he had
+laid hold of his best possibilities. At any rate, he had sincerely tried
+to do that. Why, then, should he be afraid--and of God?
+
+He walked on quickly, and came to Little Cloisters by way of the Dark
+Entry.
+
+It was very dark that day, for the autumn evening was already making its
+moist presence felt, and there was a breathing of cold from the old gray
+stones which looked like the fangs of Time.
+
+Dion shook his broad shoulders in an irresistible shiver as he came
+out into the passage-way between Rosamund's garden wall and the ruined
+cloisters, immediately beyond which rose the east end of the Cathedral.
+South Africa had evidently made him sensitive to the dampness and cold
+of England.
+
+"Little Cloisters." The white words showed on a tall green door let into
+the wall on his left; and, as the verger had said, it was a rare old
+wall. So here it actually was! He was at home. His heart thumped as he
+pulled at the bell, and unconsciously he gripped the Toby jug hard with
+his other hand.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+"Dion! Is it you at last?"
+
+A warm voice called from above, and the blood rushed to his temples.
+
+"Yes."
+
+It seemed to him that he took the old staircase in his stride, and he
+had a feeling almost such as a man has when he is going into action.
+
+"Rose!"
+
+He held her in his arms and kissed her.
+
+"It's--seemed a long time!"
+
+He felt moisture springing to his eyes. The love he felt for her almost
+overwhelmed his self-control. Till this moment he had never known how
+great it was. All his deprivation was in that embrace.
+
+"Years it's seemed!" he said, letting her go with a little laugh,
+summoned up--he did not know how--to save him from too much emotion.
+
+She gazed at him.
+
+"Oh, Dion, how you have altered!"
+
+"Have I?"
+
+"Tremendously."
+
+How well he knew the kindly glance of her honest brown eyes; a thousand
+times he had called it up before him in South Africa. But this was not
+the glance so characteristic of her. In the firelit room her eyes looked
+puzzled, almost wide, with a sort of startled astonishment.
+
+"You had a lot of the boy in you still when you went away. At least, I
+used to think so."
+
+"Haven't I any left?"
+
+"I can't see any. No, I think you've come back all man. And how
+tremendously burnt you are."
+
+"Almost black, I suppose. But I'm so accustomed to it."
+
+"It's right," she said. "Your face tells the story of what you've done.
+Robin"--she paused, then slowly she said--"Robin's got almost a new
+father."
+
+"Where is he? He's sure to have altered more than I have."
+
+"Oh no. He'll be in about five. I've sent him out to tea with some one
+you know."
+
+"With whom?"
+
+"Mr. Thrush."
+
+"Mr. Thrush at Welsley?"
+
+"Yes. I'll explain all that presently. I thought I'd have you all to
+myself for half an hour, and then Robin should have his turn. Here comes
+Annie."
+
+When the two arm-chairs were occupied, Dion said:
+
+"And you, Rosamund?"
+
+"What about me?"
+
+"Haven't you altered?"
+
+"If I have, probably you would know it and I shouldn't."
+
+"Yes, I dare say that's true. You aren't conscious of it, then?"
+
+But she was giving him his tea, and that took her mind away from his
+question, no doubt. He felt a change in her, but it was not almost
+fiercely marked like the change in him, on whom a Continent had written
+with its sun and its wind, and with its battlefields. The body of a man
+was graven by such a superscription. And no doubt even a child could
+read something of it. But the writing on Rosamund was much fainter, was
+far less easy to decipher; it was perhaps traced on the soul rather than
+on the body. The new legend of Dion was perhaps an assertion. But this
+story of Rosamund, what was it? She saw the man in Dion, lean, burnt,
+strong, ardent, desirous, full of suppressed emotion that was warmly and
+intensely human; he saw in her, as well as the mother, something that
+was perhaps almost pale, almost elusive, like the still figure and
+downbent face of a recluse seen in passing an open window.
+
+She saw in Dion his actions; he saw in her her meditations. Perhaps that
+was it. All this time he had been living incessantly in the midst of
+men, never alone, nearly always busy, often fiercely active, marching,
+eating, sleeping in company. And all the time she had been here, in the
+midst of this cloistral silence, and perhaps often alone.
+
+"You know everybody here, I suppose?" he asked, drinking his tea with
+relish, and eating the toast which seemed to him crisply English, but
+always faintly aware of that still figure and of that downbent face.
+
+"Almost everybody. I've sung a great deal, and got to know them all
+partly through that. And they're dear people most of them. They let one
+alone when they know one wants to be alone."
+
+"And I expect you can enjoy being alone here."
+
+"Yes," she said simply. "At times. It would be difficult to feel lonely,
+in the miserable, dreadful way, I mean, in the Precincts. We are rather
+like a big family here, each one with his, or her, own private room in
+the big family house."
+
+"I know you've always loved a certain amount of solitude, Rose," he said
+tenderly. "D'you remember that day in London when I burst in upon your
+solitude with Dante, and was actually jealous of the 'Paradiso'?"
+
+"Yes," she said, smiling.
+
+"But you forgave me, or I shouldn't be here now."
+
+He gave her his cup for some more tea.
+
+"You can't imagine how absolutely wonderful it is to me to be here after
+what I've been through."
+
+He lay back in his chair, but he still looked tremendously alert, wiry,
+powerful even.
+
+Dion was much more impressive than he had been when he went away.
+Rosamund felt a faint creeping of something that was almost like shyness
+in her as she looked at him.
+
+"After Green Point Camp and Orange River--I shall never forget the
+dust-storm we had there!--and Springfontein and Kaffir River--oh, the
+heat there, Rose!--and Kaalfontein and all the rest of it. It was near
+Kaalfontein that we first came under fire. I shan't forget that."
+
+He was silent for a moment. She looked at him across the tea-table. All
+that he knew and she did not know now made him seem rather strange to
+her. The uniting of two different, utterly different, experiences of
+life, was more tremendous, more full of meaning and of mystery, than the
+uniting of two bodies. This, then, was to be a second wedding-day for
+her and for Dion? All their letters, in which, of course, they had tried
+to tell each other something of their differing experiences, had really
+told very little, almost nothing. Dion's glance told her more than all
+his letters, that and his color, and certain lines in his face, and the
+altered shapes of his hands, and his way of holding himself, and his way
+of speaking. Even his voice was different. He was an unconscious record
+of what he had been through out there; and much of it, she felt sure, he
+would never tell to her except unconsciously by being a different Dion
+from the Dion who had gone away.
+
+"How little one can tell in letters," she said. "Scarcely anything."
+
+"You made me feel Welsley in yours."
+
+"Did I? Why did you walk from the station?"
+
+"I wanted to taste your home, to get into your atmosphere, if I could,
+before seeing you. Rose, love can make a man almost afraid at times."
+
+It seemed to her that his dark eyes burned with fires they had
+captured in South Africa. Sitting in the old room with its homely and
+ecclesiastical look, he had an oddly remote appearance, she thought, as
+if he belonged to a very different milieu. Always dark, he now looked
+almost gipsy-like; yet he had the unmistakable air of a soldier. But if
+there had ever been anything there was now nothing left of the business
+man in Dion.
+
+"Won't you find it very difficult to settle down again to the life in
+Austin Friars, Dion?" she said.
+
+"Perhaps I should, but for one thing."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"You and Robin at home when the drudgery is done."
+
+Rosamund saw Welsley receding from her into darkness, with its familiar
+faces and voices, its gray towers, its cloisters, its bells, the Dresden
+Amen, the secret garden, the dreams she had had in the garden.
+
+"Number 5 is all ready to go into. It was lucky we only let it for six
+months," she said quietly.
+
+"Uncle Biron has given me a fortnight's holiday, or rather gladly agreed
+to my taking it. Of course I'm my own master in a way, being a partner,
+but I want to consider him. He was awfully good about my going away.
+Mother's looking well. She was at our Thanksgiving Service; Beattie and
+Guy too. I've had just a glimpse of godfather."
+
+They talked about family things till Robin came in from his festivity
+with Mr. Thrush, who was staying at Little Cloisters, but only till the
+following day.
+
+That was a great moment, the moment of Robin's arrival. Mr. Thrush did
+not appear with him, but, being a man of delicate perceptions despite
+his unfortunate appearance, retired discreetly to the servants' hall,
+leaving his devoted adherent free for the "family reunion," as he called
+it.
+
+"Go up quietly, dear," said the nurse to Robin, "and tap at the
+drawing-room door."
+
+"Shall I tap?" asked Robin earnestly.
+
+He was looking unusually solemn, his lips were parted, and his eyes
+almost stared.
+
+"Yes, dear. Tap prettily, like a young gentleman as you are, and when
+you hear 'Come in!'----"
+
+"I know then!" interrupted Robin, with an air of decision.
+
+He walked rather slowly upstairs, lifting one brown leg after the other
+thoughtfully from step to step, till he was outside the drawing-room
+door. Inside he heard the noise of a man's voice, which sounded to him
+very tremendous and important, the voice of a brave soldier.
+
+"That's Fa!" he thought, and he listened for a moment as to the voice of
+a god.
+
+Then he doubled his small fist and gave a bang to the door. Some
+instinct told him not to follow nurse's injunction, not to try to be
+pretty in his tapping. The voice of the soldier ceased inside, there was
+a brief sound of a woman's voice, then came a strong "Come in!"
+
+Robin opened the door, went straight up to the very dark and very thin
+man whom he saw sitting by the fire, and, staring at this man with
+intensity, lifted up his face, at the same time saying:
+
+"'Ullo, Fa!"
+
+There was a dropped aitch for which nurse, who was very choice in her
+English, would undoubtedly have rebuked him had she been present. The
+dark man did not rebuke Robin, but caught him up and enfolded him in a
+hug that was powerful but not a bit rough. Robin was quite incapable of
+analyzing a hug, but he loved it as he would not have loved it if it had
+been rough, or if it had been merely gentle. A sense of great happiness
+and of great confidence flooded him. From that moment he adored his
+father as he had never adored him before. The new authority of his
+father's love for him captured him. He knew nothing about it and he
+knew all about it, as is the way with children, those instinctive sparks
+fresh from the great furnace.
+
+Long before dinner time Dion knew that he had won something beside the
+D.C.M. which he had won in South Africa, something that was wonderfully
+precious to him. He gave Robin the Toby jar and another gift.
+
+He cared for his little son that night as he had never cared for him
+before. It was as if the sex in Robin spoke to the sex in him for the
+first time with a clear, unmistakable voice, saying, "We're of the
+comradeship of the male sex, we're of the brotherhood." It was not even
+a child's voice that spoke, though it spoke in a little child. Dion
+blessed South Africa that night, felt as if South Africa had given him
+his son.
+
+That gift would surely be a weapon in his hands by means of which, or
+with the help of which, he would conquer the still unconquered mystery,
+Rosamund's whole heart. South Africa had done much for Dion. Out there
+in that wonderful atmosphere he had seen very clearly, his vision had
+pierced great distances; he saw clearly still, in England. War, it
+seemed, was so terribly truthful that it swept a man clean of lies; Dion
+was swept clean of lies. He did not feel able any longer even to tell
+them occasionally to himself. He knew that Rosamund's greeting to him,
+warm, sweet, sincere though it had been, had lacked something which he
+had found in Robin's. But he felt that now he had got hold of Robin so
+instantly, and so completely, the conquest of the woman he had only won
+must be but a question of time. That was not pride in him but instinct,
+speaking with that voice which seems a stranger to the brain of man, but
+a friend to something else; something universal of which in every man a
+fragment is housed, or by which every man is mysteriously penetrated.
+
+A fortnight's holiday--and then?
+
+On that first evening it had been assumed that as soon as Dion went back
+to business in Austin Friars, No. 5 Little Market Street would receive
+its old tenants again, be scented again with the lavender, made musical
+with Rosamund's voice, made gay with the busy prattle and perpetual
+activities of Robin.
+
+For two days thereafter no reference was made by either Rosamund or
+Dion to the question of moving. Dion gave himself up to Welsley,
+to holiday-making. With a flowing eagerness, not wholly free from
+undercurrents, Rosamund swept him sweetly through Welsley's delights.
+She inoculated him with Welsley, or at any rate did her best to
+inoculate him, secretly praying with all her force that the wonderful
+preparation might "take." Soon she believed that it was "taking." It was
+evident that Dion was delighted with Welsley. On his very first day they
+went together to the afternoon service in the Cathedral, and when the
+anthem was given out it proved to be "The Wilderness." Rosamund's
+quick look at Dion told him that this was her sweet doing, and that she
+remembered their talk on the hill of Drouva. He listened to that anthem
+as he had never listened to an anthem before. After the service Canon
+Wilton, who, though no longer in residence as "three months' Canon," was
+still staying on at his house in the Precincts for a few days, came up
+to welcome him home. Then Mr. Dickinson appeared, full of that modesty
+which is greedy for compliments. Mrs. Dickinson, too, drifted up the
+nave in a casual way which scarcely concealed her curiosity about Mrs.
+Dion's husband; when, later, Rosamund told Dion of her Precincts' name,
+"the cold douche," he could not see its applicability.
+
+"I thought her an observant but quite a warm-hearted woman," he said.
+
+"She is warm-hearted; in fact she's a dear, and I'm very fond of her,"
+said Rosamund.
+
+"Every one here seems very fond of you," he replied.
+
+Indeed, he was struck by Welsley's evident love of Rosamund. It was like
+a warm current flowing about her, and about him now, because he was her
+husband. He was greeted with cordial kindness by every one.
+
+"It is jolly to be received like this," he said to Rosamund. "It does
+a fellow good when he's just come home. It makes him feel that there is
+indeed no place like England. But it's all owing to you."
+
+But she protested.
+
+"They all admire and respect you for what you've done," she said.
+"You've brought the best introductions here, your own deeds. They speak
+for you."
+
+He shook his head, loving her perfectly sincere modesty.
+
+"You may be a thousand things," he told her, "but one thing you'll never
+be--vain or conceited."
+
+The charm of her, which was compounded of beauty and goodness, mixed
+with an extraordinary hold upon, and joy in, the simple and healthy
+things of life, came upon him with a sort of glorious newness after his
+absence in South Africa. He loved other people's love of her and the
+splendid reasons for it so apparent in her. But for Robin he might
+nevertheless have felt baffled and sad even in these moments dedicated
+to the joys of reunion, he might have felt acutely that the completeness
+and perfection of reunion depended upon the exact type of union it
+followed upon. Robin saved him from that. He hoped very much in Robin,
+who had suddenly given him a confidence in himself which he had never
+known till now. This was a glorious possession. It gave him force.
+People in Welsley were decidedly impressed by Mrs. Leith's husband.
+Mrs. Dickinson remarked to her Henry over griddle cakes after the three
+o'clock service:
+
+"I call Mr. Leith a very personable man. Without having Mrs. Leith's
+wonderful charm--what man could have?--he makes a distinct impression.
+He has suppressed force, and that's what women like in a man."
+
+Henry took another griddle cake, and wondered whether he was wise in
+looking so decided. Perhaps he ought to suppress his undoubted force;
+perhaps all his life, without knowing it, he had hovered on the verge of
+the blatant.
+
+Canon Wilton also was struck by the change in Dion, and said something,
+but not just then all, of what he felt.
+
+"You know the phrase, 'I'm my own man again,' Leith, don't you?" he
+said, in his strong bass voice, looking steadily at Dion with his kindly
+stern eyes. (He always suggested to Dion a man who would be very stern
+with himself.)
+
+"Yes," said Dion. "Why?"
+
+"I think South Africa's made you your own man."
+
+Dion looked tremendously, but seriously, pleased.
+
+"Do you? And what about the again?"
+
+"Cut it out. I don't think you'd ever been absolutely your own man
+before you went away."
+
+"I wonder if I am now," Dion said, but without any weakness.
+
+He had been through one war and had come out of it well; now he had come
+home to another. The one campaign had been but a stern preparation for
+the other perhaps. But Rosamund did not know that. Nevertheless, it
+seemed to him that already their relation to each other was slightly
+altered. He felt that she was more sensitive to him than formerly, more
+closely observant of what he was and what he did, more watchful of him
+with Robin, more anxious about his opinion on various matters.
+
+For instance, there was the matter of Mr. Thrush.
+
+Dion had not seen Mr. Thrush on the evening of his first day at Welsley.
+He had been kept so busy by Rosamund, had done and seen so much, that
+he had quite forgotten the ex-chemist. In the evening, however, before
+dinner, he suddenly remembered him.
+
+"What's become of Mr. Thrush?" he asked. "And, by the way, what is he
+doing down here? You never told me, Rose, and even Robin's not said a
+word."
+
+"I asked him not to," said Rosamund, with her half-shrewd, half-soft
+look. "The fact is----" She broke off, then continued, with her
+confidential air, "Dion, when you see Mr. Thrush I want you to tell me
+something truthfully. Will you?"
+
+"I'll try to. What is it?"
+
+"I want you to look at his nose--"
+
+"Rosamund!"
+
+"No, really," she pursued, with great earnestness. "And I want you to
+tell me whether you think, honestly think, it--better."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"It's very important for Mr. Thrush that it should look better. He's
+down here to be seen."
+
+Her voice had become almost mysterious.
+
+"To be seen? By whom? Is he on show in the town?"
+
+"No--don't laugh. It's really important for his future. I must tell you
+something. He's taken the modified pledge."
+
+Her look said, "There! what d'you think of that?"
+
+"Modified!" said Dion, rather doubtfully.
+
+"Never between meals--never."
+
+"At any rate that's a step in the right direction."
+
+"Isn't it? I took it with him."
+
+"The modified pledge?"
+
+"Yes," she said, with great seriousness.
+
+"But you never----! To help him, of course."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And has it made a difference to the nose?"
+
+"I think it's made a considerable difference. But I want your opinion."
+
+"I'll give it you for what it's worth. But who's going to see Mr.
+Thrush?"
+
+"The Dean.
+
+"The Dean! Why on earth?"
+
+"Almost directly there's going to be a vacancy among the vergers, and
+the Dean has promised me faithfully that if Mr. Thrush seems suitable he
+shall have the post."
+
+"Mr. Thrush a verger! Mr. Thrush carry a poker before a bishop!"
+
+"Not a poker, only a white wand. I've been making him practise here in
+the garden, and he does it quite admirably already."
+
+She spoke now with almost defiant emphasis. Dion loved her for the
+defiance and for its deliciously absurd reason.
+
+"The Dean is away, but he's coming back to-morrow, so I begin to feel
+rather anxious. Of course, he'll see at once that Mr. Thrush is an
+educated man. I'm not afraid about that. It's only--well, the little
+failing. It would mean so much for Mr. Thrush to get the post. He'll be
+provided for for life. I've set my heart on it."
+
+Annie came in.
+
+"Oh, Annie, is it Mr. Thrush?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am."
+
+"Please ask him to come in."
+
+With a very casual air, as of one doing a thing for no particular reason
+and almost without thought, she lowered the wick of the lamp which
+illuminated the room.
+
+"We don't want it to flare," she said, as she came away from it. "Oh,
+Mr. Thrush, here's my husband back again!"
+
+With a certain unostentatious dignity Mr. Thrush stepped into the room.
+He was most respectably dressed in a neat black suit, the coat of
+which looked rather like either a frock coat which was in course of
+diminishing gradually into what tailors call "a morning coat," or a
+morning coat which was in course of expanding gently into a frock coat;
+a speckless collar with points appeared above a pair of dark worsted
+gloves, and a hat which resembled a square bowler half-way on the road
+to top hatdom.
+
+Dion felt touched by his appearance and his gait, which seemed to hint
+at those rehearsals in the garden, and especially touched by the fact
+that he had bought a new hat.
+
+"Welcome home, sir!" he said at once to Dion. "I'm sure the country is
+proud of you."
+
+He paid the compliment with so much sincerity that Dion did not feel
+embarrassed by it.
+
+"Do sit down, Mr. Thrush," said Rosamund, after hands had been
+cordially shaken. "No, not there!"--as he was about to sit full in the
+lamplight--"This chair will be more comfortable. Now I'll leave you to
+have a little talk with my husband."
+
+With an inquiring look at Dion she went out of the room.
+
+Before she came back Mr. Thrush had told Dion all his hopes and fears
+with regard to the Dean, and had dwelt on his overwhelming desire to
+become a verger. Quite unself-conscious in his simplicity he rose almost
+to dignity. He frankly confessed his "failing," and alluded to the
+taking of the modified pledge.
+
+"We took it together, sir, your kind lady and I, we both pledged
+ourselves never to touch a drop of liquor between meals whatever the
+occasion."
+
+"Quite right!" said Dion, with firmness, almost with bruskness.
+
+"I'm glad you think so, sir. But a verger can't be too careful. He's
+held up as an example to the whole city by his position, walking so
+often in procession as he does before the eyes of all men. Even a
+chemist scarcely takes so much upon himself. In respect of the body he
+may, I'll allow you,--for no verger has to do with prussic acid, iodine,
+cascara and all such-like,--but in respect of what I might all the
+uplifting of the soul not a doubt of it but that the verger comes far
+before any chemist. It's a solemn thing to think of, and I hope, if so
+be as I'm elected, I shall be worthy of the position. I see Mr. Dean
+to-morrow, sir, at eleven o'clock. I trust I shall make a favorable
+impression. I lived just off Hanover Square for more years than some can
+remember, and that, I hope, with a Very Reverend will tell in my favor.
+None of them vergers here, though I'm sure they're a splendid body of
+men,--any one who has seen them walking before his Lordship, the Bishop,
+the Canons and what not, as I did last Sunday morning, would say the
+same,--but none of the vergers here can say as much. I've made inquiry,
+but of course with all discretion. As to the duties, sir, I think I can
+fulfil them. The carrying of the wand I may say I am almost perfect in
+already. I've been at it in the garden with your kind good lady since I
+came. I found it a bit difficult at first, sir. There's what you might
+call a knack to it, though from the congregation it looks simple enough.
+But there, what does a congregation know of the things a verger has
+to master any more than it does of what is required of a good chemist?
+Often and often when I was just off Hanover Square----"
+
+He was still flowing on with imperturbable volubility when Rosamund came
+back and sent another, more inquiring, glance to Dion.
+
+When Mr. Thrush had retired she at once said anxiously:
+
+"Well?"
+
+"He's a nice old chap."
+
+"Yes, isn't he? But what did you really think?"
+
+"About the nose?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"The lamp was turned rather low, but I really believe the modified
+pledge has--"
+
+"There! What did I say?" she interrupted triumphantly. "I knew you'd
+notice the difference. It's really very much like yours or mine now, and
+I'm sure--"
+
+But here Dion broke in decisively.
+
+"No, Rosamund, I can't let that pass. It's not like yours yet. I say
+nothing about mine. But I honestly think it's modified and I hope the
+Dean will pass it."
+
+"The Dean and I are great cronies!" she murmured doubtfully. "My only
+fear is that after he is a verger Mr. Thrush may--may lapse if I'm
+not----"
+
+She stopped, looking at Dion, and again he thought that she was more
+sensitive to his opinion, to his wishes, than she had formerly been. Her
+slightly changed attitude made Dion gladly aware of change in himself.
+He meant more to Rosamund now than he had meant when he left England.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Three days had slipped by. Dion had been accepted as one of the big
+Welsley family, had been made free of the Precincts. During those three
+days he had forgotten London, business, everything outside of Welsley.
+It had seemed to him that he had the right to forget, and he had
+exercised it. Robin had played a great part in those three days. His new
+adoration of his father was obvious to every one who saw them together.
+The soldier appealed to the little imagination. Robin's ardor was
+concentrated for the moment in his pride of possession. He owned a
+father who--his own nurse had told him so--was not as other fathers, not
+as ordinary fathers such as stumped daily about the narrow streets of
+Welsley, rubicund and, many of them, protuberant in the region of the
+watch-chain. They were all very well; Robin had nothing against them;
+many of them were clergymen and commanded his respect by virtue of
+their office, their gaiters, the rosettes and cords that decorated their
+wide-winged hats. But they were not like "Fa." They had not become lean,
+and muscular, and dark, and quick-limbed, and keen-eyed, and spry, in
+the severe service of their country. They had not--even the Archdeacon,
+Robin's rather special pal, had not--ever killed any wicked men who did
+not like England, or gone into places where wicked men who did not like
+England might have killed them. Some of them did not know much about
+guns, did not seem to take any interest in guns. It was rather pitiable.
+Since his father had come back Robin had had an opportunity of sounding
+the Archdeacon on the subject of an advance in open order. The result
+had not been satisfactory. The Archdeacon, Robin thought, had taken
+the matter with a lightness, almost a levity, which one could not have
+looked for from a man in his position, and when questioned as to his
+methods of taking over had frankly said that he had none.
+
+"I like him," Robin said ruefully. "But he'll never be a good scout,
+will he, Fa?"
+
+To which Dion replied with discretion.
+
+"There are plenty of good scouts, old boy, who would never make good
+archdeacons."
+
+"Is there?" said Robin. "Why not? I know what scouts does, but what does
+archdeacons does?"
+
+And with that he had his father stumped. Dion had not been long enough
+at Welsley to dive into all its mysteries.
+
+On the evening of the third day Dion told Rosamund that he must go to
+London on the following morning.
+
+"I've got something I must do and I want to tell you about it," he said.
+"You remember Mrs. Clarke?"
+
+"Yes," said Rosamund.
+
+"It must be more than two years since I've seen her. She lives a great
+deal in Constantinople, you know. But she sometimes comes to London in
+the winter. It's abominably cold in Constantinople in winter. There are
+perpetual winds from the Black Sea."
+
+"Yes, I know there are. Esme Darlington has told me about them."
+
+"Mrs. Clarke's in London now."
+
+"Did you see her when you passed through?"
+
+"No, but I want to see her to-morrow. Rose, I'm going to tell you
+something which nobody else must know. I was asked to keep it entirely
+to myself, but I refused. I was resolved to tell you, because I don't
+believe in secrets between husband and wife--about their doings, I
+mean." (Just then he had happened to think of Mrs. Clarke's farewell
+telegram to him when he had sailed for South Africa.)
+
+"I know how frank and sincere you always are, Dion," she said gently.
+
+"I try to be. You remember that party at Mrs. Chetwinde's where you
+sang? You met Mrs. Clarke that night."
+
+"Of course I remember. We had quite an interesting talk."
+
+"She's clever. Lord Brayfield was there, too, that night, a fair man.
+
+"I saw him. He wasn't introduced to me."
+
+"Brayfield was shot in the war. Did you know it?"
+
+"No. I thought I had read everything. But I didn't happen to see it."
+
+"And I didn't mention it when I wrote. I thought I'd tell you if I came
+home. Brayfield, poor fellow, didn't die immediately. He suffered
+a great deal, but he was able to write two or three letters--last
+messages--home. One of these messages was written to Mrs. Clarke. He
+gave it to me and made me promise to convey it to her personally, not to
+put it in the post."
+
+"Was Lord Brayfield in the C.I.V.?" asked Rosamund.
+
+"Oh no. He was a captain in the 5th Lancers. We were brigaded with them
+for a bit and under fire at the same time. Brayfield happened to see me.
+He knew I was an acquaintance of Mrs. Clarke's, and when he was shot he
+asked that I should be allowed to come to him. Permission was given. I
+went, and he asked me if I'd give Mrs. Clarke a letter from him when I
+got home. It seems none of his brother officers happened to know her.
+He might have given the letter to one of them. It would have been more
+natural. But"--Dion hesitated--"well, he wanted to say a word or two to
+some one who knew her, I suppose."
+
+Rosamund quite understood there were things Dion did not care to tell
+even to her. She did not want to hear them. She was not at all a curious
+woman.
+
+"I'm glad you are able to take the letter," she said.
+
+And then she began to talk about something else. Mr. Thrush's prospects
+with the Dean, which were even yet not quite decided.
+
+By the quick train at nine o'clock Dion left Welsley next morning; he
+was in London by half-past ten. He had of course written to Mrs. Clarke
+asking if he could see her. She had given him an appointment for
+three o'clock at the flat she had taken for a few months in Park
+Side, Knightsbridge. Dion went first to the City, and after doing some
+business there, and lunching with his uncle at the Cheshire Cheese, got
+into a cab and drove to Knightsbridge.
+
+Mrs. Clarke's flat was on the first floor of a building which faced the
+street on one side and Hyde Park on the other. Dion rang at a large,
+very solid oak door. In two or three minutes the door was opened by an
+elderly maid, with high cheek-bones and long and narrow light gray
+eyes, who said, with a foreign accent, that Mrs. Clarke was at home.
+Afterwards Dion knew that this woman was a Russian and Mrs. Clarke's own
+maid.
+
+She showed Dion into a long curving hall in which a fire was burning.
+Here he left his hat and coat. While he was taking the coat off he
+had time to think, "What an original hall this is!" From it he got an
+impression of warmth and of a pleasant dimness. He had really no time
+to look carefully about, but a quick glance told him that there were
+interesting things in this hall, or at any rate interestingly combined.
+He was conscious of the stamp of originality.
+
+The Russian maid showed him into a drawing-room and went away to tell
+"Madame." She did not go out by the hall, but walked the whole length of
+the long narrow drawing-room, and passed through a small doorway at its
+farther end. Through this doorway there filtered into the drawing-room a
+curious blue light. All the windows of the drawing-room looked into Hyde
+Park, on to the damp grass, the leafless trees, the untenanted spaces of
+autumn.
+
+Dion went to the fireplace, which faced the far doorway. There was not
+a sound in the room; not a sound came to it just then from without. He
+could scarcely believe he was in Knightsbridge. Not even a clock was
+ticking on the mantelpiece above the fire, in which ship logs were
+burning. The flames which came from them were of various shades of blue,
+like magical flames conjured up by a magician. He looked round. He had
+never seen a room like this before. It was a room to live in, to
+hear strange music in; it was not a reception-room. Not crowded with
+furniture it was not at all bare. Its "note" was not austere but quite
+the contrary. It was a room which quietly enticed. Dion was not one of
+those men who know all about women's dresses, and combinations of color,
+and china, and furniture, but he was observant; as a rule he noticed
+what he saw. Fresh from South Africa, from a very hard life out of
+doors, he looked at this room and was almost startled by it. The
+refinement of it was excessive in his eyes and reminded him of something
+overbred, of certain Italian greyhounds, for instance. Strange blues and
+greens were dexterously combined through the room, in the carpet,
+the curtains, the blinds, the stuffs which covered the chairs, sofas,
+divans, cushions--blues and greens innumerable. He had never before seen
+so many differing shades of the two colors; he had not known that so
+many shades existed. In the china these colors were repeated. The door
+by which he had come in was of thick glass in a frame of deep blue wood
+and, by means of a mysterious light in the hall, was made mistily blue.
+All along the windows, lilies were growing, or seemed to be growing,
+in earth closely covered with green moss. There were dwarf trees, like
+minute yew trees, in green and blue china pots.
+
+And always the ship logs in the fire gave out the magical blue flames.
+
+Certainly the general effect of the room was not only luxuriously
+comfortable, but also strangely beautiful, though there was nothing in
+it which a lover of antiques would have given his eyes for. To
+Dion, fresh from South Africa, the room looked too comfortable, too
+ingeniously beautiful. It struck him as ultra modern, ahead of anything
+he had ever yet seen, and almost as evil. But certainly it enticed.
+
+He heard the distant sound of a woman's dress and saw Mrs. Clarke coming
+slowly in from the room beyond (another blue and green room perhaps),
+and he thought of Brayfield dying. He thrust a hand into the
+breast-pocket of his coat and brought out the dead man's letter.
+
+Mrs. Clarke came up to the fire and greeted him. She did not look a
+moment older than when he had seen her last at Claridge's, or indeed
+than when he had first seen her standing under the statue of Echo in
+Mrs. Chetwinde's drawing-room. The same feverish refinement still was
+with her, belonged to her; she looked as before, wasted as if by
+some obscure disease, haunted, almost distressed, and yet absolutely
+self-controlled, mistress of herself and unconscious of critical
+observation. Not even for a moment, seeing her thus again after a long
+interval of time, did Dion hesitate about her beauty. Undoubtedly she
+had beauty. The shape of her head was lovely, and her profile was like a
+delicate vision seen in water. The husky sound of her voice in her first
+words to him took him back to the Divorce Court.
+
+"You haven't changed," she said, staring intently at him in her oddly
+impersonal way, which appraised and yet held something of inwardness.
+
+"But people say I have changed very much."
+
+"People?"
+
+"Well--my people."
+
+"I don't call natural development change. I saw in you very plainly when
+we first met what you are now. You have got there. That's all."
+
+Her lips were very pale. How strangely unshining her hair was.
+
+"Yes, she looked punished!" he thought. "It's that look of punishment
+which sets her quite apart from all other women."
+
+She glanced at the letter he was holding and sat down on a very broad
+green divan. There were many cushions upon it; she did not heap them
+behind her, but sat quite upright. She did not ask him to sit down. He
+would do as he liked. Absurd formalities of any kind did not enter into
+her scheme of life.
+
+"How is Jimmy?" he asked.
+
+"Brilliantly well. He's been at Eton for a long time, doing dreadfully
+at work--he's a born dunce--and splendidly at play. How he would
+appreciate you as you are now!"
+
+She spoke with a gravity that was both careless and intense. He sat down
+near her. In his letter asking to see her he had not told her that
+he had a special object in writing to visit her. By her glance at
+Brayfield's letter he knew that she had gathered it.
+
+They talked of Jimmy for a few minutes; then Dion said:
+
+"My regiment was brigaded with Lord Brayfield's for a time in South
+Africa. I was in the action in which he was shot, poor chap. He saw me
+and remembered that I was a--a friend of yours. When he was dying he
+wanted to see me. I was sent for, and he gave me this letter for you. He
+asked me to give it to you myself if I came back."
+
+He bent down to her with the letter.
+
+"Thank you," she said, and she took it without looking at all surprised,
+and with her habitual composed gravity. "There are Turkish cigarettes in
+that ivory box," she added, looking at a box on a table close by.
+
+"Thank you."
+
+As Dion turned to get a cigarette he heard her tearing Brayfield's
+envelope.
+
+"Will you give me one?" said the husky voice.
+
+Without saying anything he handed to her the box, and held a lighted
+match to her cigarette when it was between the pale lips. She smoked
+gently as she opened and read Brayfield's letter. When she had finished
+it--evidently it was not a long letter--she put it back into the
+envelope, laid it down on the green divan and said:
+
+"What do you think of this room? It was designed and arranged by
+Monsieur de Vaupre, a French friend of mine."
+
+"By a man!" said Dion, irrepressibly.
+
+"Who hasn't been in the South African War. Do you like it?"
+
+"I don't think I do, but I admire it a good deal."
+
+He was looking at the letter lying on the divan, and Brayfield was
+before him, tormented and dying. He had always disliked the look of
+Brayfield, but he had felt almost a sort of affection for him when he
+was dying. Foolishly perhaps, Dion wanted Mrs. Clarke to say something
+kind about Brayfield now.
+
+"If you admire it, why don't you like it?" she asked. "A person--I could
+understand; but a room!"
+
+He looked at her and hesitated to acknowledge a feeling at which he knew
+something in her would smile; then he thought of Rosamund and of Little
+Cloisters and spoke out the truth.
+
+"I think it's an unwholesome-looking room. It looks to me as if it
+had been thought out and arranged by somebody with a beastly, though
+artistic, mind."
+
+"The inner room is worse," she said.
+
+But she did not offer to show it to him, nor did she disagree with his
+view. He even had the feeling that his blunt remark had pleased her.
+
+He asked her about Constantinople. She lived there, she told him, all
+through the spring and autumn, and spent the hottest months on the
+Bosphorus.
+
+"People are getting accustomed to my temerity," she said. "Of course
+Esme Darlington is still in despair, and Lady Ermyntrude goes about
+spreading scandal. But it doesn't seem to do much harm. She hasn't any
+more influence over my husband. He won't hear a word against me. Like a
+good dog, I suppose, he loves the hand which has beaten him."
+
+"You've got a will of iron, I believe," said Dion.
+
+She changed the subject.
+
+"I don't ask you to tell me about South Africa," she said. "Because you
+told me the whole story as soon as I came into the room. But what are
+you going to do now? Settle down in the Church's bosom at Welsley?"
+
+There was no sarcasm in her voice.
+
+"Oh--I'm going back to business in a few days."
+
+"You'll run up and down, I suppose."
+
+"It's too far, an hour and a half each way. I shall have to be in
+London."
+
+He spoke rather indecisively.
+
+"I'm taking a fortnight's holiday, and then we shall settle down."
+
+"I've been in Welsley," said Mrs. Clarke. "It's beautiful but, to me,
+stifling. It has an atmosphere which would soon dry up my mind. All
+the petals would curl up and go brown at the edges. I'm glad you're not
+going to live there. But after South Africa you couldn't."
+
+"I don't know. I find it very attractive," he said, instinctively on the
+defensive because of Rosamund, who had not been attacked. "The coziness
+and the peace of it are very delightful after all the--well, of course,
+it was a pretty stiff life in South Africa."
+
+Again he looked at Brayfield's letter. He wanted to tell Mrs. Clarke
+about Brayfield, but it seemed she had no interest in the dead man.
+While he was thinking this she quietly put out her hand, took the
+letter, got up and dropped it into the fire among the blue flames from
+the ship logs.
+
+"I seldom keep letters," she said, "unless I have to answer them."
+
+She turned round.
+
+"I've kept yours," she said.
+
+"The one I--it was awfully good of you to send me that telegram."
+
+"So Allah had you in His hand."
+
+"I don't know why when so many much better fellows----" He broke off,
+and then he plunged into the matter of Brayfield. He could not go
+without telling her, though hearing, perhaps, would not interest her.
+
+All the time he was speaking she remained standing by the fire, with
+her lovely little head slightly bending forward and her profile turned
+towards him. The emaciation of her figure almost startled him. She wore
+a black dress. It seemed to him a very simple dress. She could have told
+him that such simplicity only comes from a few very good dressmakers,
+and is only fully appreciated by a very few women.
+
+Brayfield, though he was dying, had been very careful in what he had
+said to Dion. In his pain he had shown that he had good blood in him. He
+had not hinted even at any claim on Mrs. Clarke. But he had spoken of a
+friendship which had meant very much to him, and had asked Dion, if he
+ever had the opportunity, to tell Mrs. Clarke that when he was dying she
+was the woman he was thinking about. He had not spoken interestingly;
+he was not an interesting man; but he had spoken with sincerity, with
+genuine feeling.
+
+"She's a woman in a thousand," he had said. "Tell her I thought so till
+the last. Tell her if she had been free I should have begged her to
+marry me."
+
+And he had added, after a pause:
+
+"Not that she'd ever have done it. I'm pretty sure of that."
+
+When Dion had finished, still standing by the fire, Mrs. Clarke said:
+
+"Thank you for remembering it all. It shows your good heart."
+
+"Oh--please!"
+
+Why didn't she think about Brayfield?
+
+She turned round and fixed her distressed eyes on him.
+
+"Which is best, to be charitable or to be truthful?" she said, without
+any vibration of excitement. "_De Mortuis_--it's a kindly saying. A true
+Turk, one of the old Osmanlis, might have said it. If you hadn't brought
+me that letter and the message I should probably never have mentioned
+Brayfield to you again. But as it is I am going to be truthful. I can
+say honestly peace to Brayfield's ashes. His death was worthy. Courage
+he evidently had. But you mustn't think that because he liked me I ever
+liked him. Don't make a mistake. I'm not a nervous suspicious fool of a
+woman anxiously defending, or trying to defend, her honor--not attacked,
+by the way. If Lord Brayfield had ever been anything to me I should
+just be quiet, say nothing. But I didn't like him. If I had liked him I
+shouldn't have burnt his letter. And now"--to Dion's great astonishment
+she made slowly the sign of the Cross--"_requiescat in pace_."
+
+After a long pause she added:
+
+"Now come and see the other room. I'll give you Turkish coffee there."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+It had been understood between Rosamund and Dion that he should spend
+that night in London. He had several things to see to after his long
+absence, had to visit his tailor, the dentist, the bootmaker, to look
+out some things in Little Market Street, to have an interview with
+his banker, et cetera. He would go back to Welsley on the following
+afternoon. In the evening of that day he dined in De Lorne Gardens
+with Beatrice and Guy Daventry and his mother, and again, as in
+Knightsbridge, something was said about the Welsley question. Dion
+gathered that Rosamund's devotion to Welsley was no secret in "the
+family." The speedy return to Little Market Street was assumed;
+nevertheless he was certain that his mother, his sister-in-law, and
+Guy were secretly wondering how Rosamund would be able to endure the
+departure from Welsley. Beatrice had welcomed him back very quietly, but
+he had felt more definitely than ever before the strong sympathy which
+existed between them.
+
+"I quite love Beatrice," he said to his mother in the jobbed brougham
+with the high stepping, but slow moving, horse which conveyed them to
+Queen Anne's Mansions after the dinner.
+
+"She is worth it," said Mrs. Leith. "Beatrice says very little, but she
+means very much."
+
+"Yes. I wonder--I wonder how much of her meaning I thoroughly
+understand, mater."
+
+"Perhaps about five per cent of it, dee-ar," observed Mrs. Leith in her
+sweetest voice.
+
+And then she began to talk about Esme Darlington.
+
+That night Dion stayed at Queen Anne's Mansions, and slept in his old
+room.
+
+In her room his mother lay awake because she wished to lie awake. In
+sleep she would have lost the precious sense of her boy's nearness to
+her. So she counted the hours and she thanked God; and twice in the
+night she slipped out into the hall, with her ample dressing-gown folded
+about her, and she looked at her boy's coat hanging on its hook, and
+she listened just outside his door. Once she felt certain she heard his
+quiet breathing, and then, shutting her eyes, for a moment she was again
+the girl mother with little Dion.
+
+Little, little Dion! The soldier, burnt and hardened and made wholly a
+man by South Africa, was still that to his mother, more than ever that
+since he had been to the war.
+
+That question of Welsley!
+
+Going down in the train next day Dion thought about it a great deal.
+With his return the old longing, almost an old need it was, to give
+Rosamund whatever she wanted, or cared at all for, had come to him
+again. But something fought it, the new longing to dominate and the wish
+to give Rosamund chances. Besides, how could they possibly live on in
+Welsley? He could not spend from three to four hours every day in the
+train. He might get away from London on Fridays and stay at Welsley
+every week till Monday morning, but that would mean living alone in
+Little Market Street for four days in the week. If he seemed willing to
+do that, would Rosamund consent to it?
+
+Another test! He remembered his test before the war.
+
+Mrs. Clarke's allusion to Welsley had left a rather strong impression
+upon him. He did not know whether he had a great respect for her, but
+he knew that he had a great respect for her mind. Like Beattie, but in
+a very different way, she meant a great deal. He no longer doubted that
+she liked him very much, though why he honestly did not know. When with
+her he felt strongly that he was not an interesting man. Dumeny was
+a beast, he felt sure, but he also felt sure that Dumeny was an
+interesting man.
+
+Mrs. Clarke's wild mind attracted something in him. Through her eyes he
+was able to see the tameness of Welsley, a dear tameness, safe, cozy,
+full of a very English charm and touched with ancient beauty, but
+still----! Would the petals of Rosamund ever curl up and go brown at
+the edges from living at Welsley? No, he could not imagine that ever
+happening. A dried-up mind she could never have.
+
+He would not see Welsley through the eyes of Mrs. Clarke.
+
+Nevertheless when he got out of the train at Welsley Station, and saw
+Robin's pal, the Archdeacon, getting out too, and a couple of minor
+canons, who had come up for the evening papers or something, greeting
+him with an ecclesiastical heartiness mingled with just a whiff of
+professional deference, Mrs. Clarke's verdict of "stifling" recurred to
+his mind.
+
+Stamboul and Welsley--Mrs. Clarke and Rosamund!
+
+The dual comparison made him at once see the truth. Stamboul and Welsley
+were beautiful; each possessed an enticing quality; but the one enticed
+by its grandiose mystery, by its sharp contrasts of marble stability
+and matchboard frailty, by its melancholy silences and spaces, by its
+obscure peace and its dangerous passion; the other by its delightful
+simplicity, its noble homeliness, its dignity and charm of an old faith
+and a smiling unworldliness, its harmonies of gray and of green, of
+stone and verdure, its serenity lifted skywards by many bells.
+
+But at the heart of Stamboul the dust lay thick, and there was dew at
+the heart of Welsley.
+
+Perhaps green Elis, with its sheep-bells, the eternal voices of its pine
+trees, the celestial benignity of its Hermes, was more to be desired
+than either Stamboul or Welsley. But for the moment Welsley was very
+desirable.
+
+Dion gave his bag to an "outside porter," and walked to the Precincts
+with the Archdeacon.
+
+He found Rosamund uplifted and triumphant; Mr. Thrush had finally
+captivated the Dean, and had been given the "situation" which Rosamund
+had desired for him. Her joy was almost ebullient. She could talk of
+nothing else. Mr. Thrush was to be installed on the following Sunday.
+
+"Installed?" said Dion. "Is the Archbishop coming down to conduct the
+ceremony?"
+
+"No, no! What I mean is that Mr. Thrush will walk in the procession for
+the first time. Oh, I shall be so nervous! If only he carries the wand
+as I've taught him! I don't know what Mr. Thrush would do without me. He
+seems to depend on me for everything now, poor old gentleman."
+
+"I'm afraid he'll miss you dreadfully," said Dion.
+
+"Miss me? When?"
+
+Before he could answer she said quickly:
+
+"Oh, by the way, Dion, while you've been away I've done something for
+you."
+
+"What is it, Rose?"
+
+She was looking gaily mysterious, and almost cunning, but in a
+delightful way.
+
+"I don't want you to be bored during your holiday."
+
+"Bored! Don't you realize that this is an earthly Paradise for me? You
+and Robin and peace after South Africa."
+
+She looked very shrewd.
+
+"That's all very well, but a man, especially a soldier man, wants
+sport."
+
+She laid a strong and happy emphasis on the last word, and then she
+disclosed the secret. A brother of "the cold douche," a gentleman farmer
+who had land some four miles from Welsley, and who was "a great
+friend" of Rosamund's--she had met him three times at the organist's
+house--hearing of Dion's arrival, had written to say that he had some
+partridges which needed "keeping down." He himself was "laid by" with a
+bad leg, but he would be very glad if Mr. Leith would "take his chance
+among the birds" any day, or days, he liked while at Welsley. The
+gentleman farmer could not offer much, just the ground, most of it
+stubble, and a decent lot of birds.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Dickinson knew through me how fond of shooting you are. We
+owe it all to her," said Rosamund, in conclusion. "I've written to thank
+him, and to say how glad you'll be."
+
+"But you must come too," he said. "You shot in Greece, you must shoot
+again here."
+
+"I don't think I will here," said Rosamund, confidentially and rather
+mysteriously.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Well, I don't think the Dean would approve of it. And he's been so
+bricky about Mr. Thrush that I shouldn't like to hurt him."
+
+"I can't go alone. I shall take Robin then."
+
+He spoke half-laughingly.
+
+"Robin?"
+
+"Yes, why not? I'm sure he'd love to go."
+
+"Of course he would. But how could his little legs walk over stubble?
+He's not four years old yet."
+
+"Robin's got to be Doric. He can't begin too soon."
+
+She smiled, then looked at him seriously.
+
+"Dion, do you know that you've come back much more Doric than you were
+when you went out?"
+
+"Have I, Rose?"
+
+"Much more."
+
+"Do you like me less because of that?"
+
+She blushed faintly.
+
+"No," she said.
+
+That faint blush made Dion's heart bound, he scarcely knew why. But he
+only said soberly:
+
+"I'm glad of that. And now about Robin. You're right. He can't walk over
+stubble with me, but why shouldn't I stick him on a pony?"
+
+"Oh--a pony! How he would love it!"
+
+"Can't I get hold of one?"
+
+"But Job Crickendon's got one!"
+
+"Job Crick-- . . . ?"
+
+"Mrs. Dickinson's brother who's lending you the partridges. Don't say
+another word, Dion. I'll arrange it all. Robin will be in the seventh
+heaven."
+
+"And you must come with us."
+
+Rosamund was about to speak quickly. Dion saw that. Her eyes shone; she
+opened her lips. But something, some sudden thought, stopped her. After
+a minute she said quietly:
+
+"We'll see."
+
+And she gave Dion a curious, tender look which he did not quite
+understand. Surely she was keeping some delicate secret from him, one
+of those dear secrets which perhaps will never be told, but which are
+sometimes happily guessed.
+
+Dion could not help seeing that Rosamund eagerly wanted to attach him to
+Welsley. He felt that she had not honestly and fully faced the prospect
+of returning to live in London. Her plan--he saw it plainly; the
+partridge shooting was part of it--was to make Welsley so delightful to
+him that he would not want to give up the home at Little Cloisters.
+What was to be done? He disliked, he almost hated, the thought that his
+return would necessitate an unpleasant change in Rosamund's life. Yet
+something within him told him that he ought to be firm. He was obliged
+to live in London, and therefore it was only natural and right that
+Rosamund and Robin should live in London too. After this long separation
+he ought not to have to face a semi-bachelor life; three days of the
+week at Little Cloisters and four days alone in Little Market Street. He
+must put Rosamund to the test. That faint blush, which he would not soon
+forget, made him hope that she would come out of the test triumphantly.
+
+If she did, how splendid it would be. His heart yearned at the thought
+of a Rosamund submissive to his wish, unselfish out of the depth
+of--dared he think of it as a new growth of love within her, tending
+towards a great flowering which would bring a glory into two lives? But
+if she yielded at once to his wish, without a word of regret, if she
+took the speedy return to London quite simply as a matter of course, he
+would feel almost irresistibly inclined to take her in his arms and to
+say, "No, you shall stay on at Little Cloisters. We'll manage somehow."
+Perhaps he could stand three hours daily in the train. He could read
+the papers. A man must do that. As well do it in the train as in an
+arm-chair at home.
+
+But at any rate he would put her to the test. On that he was resolved.
+
+At dinner that night Rosamund told him she had already written to "dear,
+kind Job Crickendon" about the pony.
+
+"You might shoot on Monday," she said.
+
+"Right you are. When we hear about the pony we'll tell Robin."
+
+"Yes. Not till it's all delightfully settled. Robin on horseback!"
+
+Her eyes shone.
+
+"I can see him already with a gun in his hand old enough to shoot
+with you," she added. "We must bring him up to be a thorough little
+sportsman; like that Greek boy Dirmikis."
+
+They talked about Robin's future till dinner was over. Dion loved their
+talk, but he could not help seeing that in Rosamund's forecast town life
+held no place at all. In everything, or in almost everything, that
+she said the country held pride of place. There was not one word about
+Jenkins's gymnasium, or the Open Air Club with its swimming facilities,
+or riding in the Park, or fencing at Bernardi's. Rosamund seemed tacitly
+to assume that everything which was Doric was connected with country
+life.
+
+On the following morning she hastened out "to buy riding gaiters for
+Robin." She had his "size" with her.
+
+Not a word had been said about Dion's visit to Mrs. Clarke. Rosamund's
+lack of all curiosity in regard to Mrs. Clarke and himself gave him the
+measure of her faith in him. Few women, he thought, would be able
+to trust a man so completely. And this trust was the more remarkable
+because he felt positive that Rosamund distrusted Mrs. Clarke. She had
+never said so, but he considered that by her conduct she had proved her
+distrust.
+
+It was a great virtue in Rosamund, that power she had to trust where
+trust was deserved.
+
+Dear, kind Job Crickendon wrote that Master Robin could ride his pony,
+Jane, and welcome. The letter arrived on Saturday. Rosamund read it
+aloud to Dion.
+
+"The people about here are the dearest people I've ever come across,"
+she said. "So different from people in London."
+
+"Why, what's the matter with people in London?" asked Dion.
+
+"Oh, I don't know; they're more artificial. They think so much about
+clothes, and hats, and the way their hair's done."
+
+"The men!"
+
+"I was talking of the women."
+
+"But is Job Crickendon a woman?"
+
+"Don't be absurd, Dion. You know what I mean. The country brings out the
+best that is in people."
+
+"That's a bad look out for me, who've lived nearly all my life in
+London."
+
+"You would be yourself anywhere. Now about Robin. I've got the gaiters.
+They're not exactly riding gaiters--they don't make them for such little
+boys--but they'll do beautifully. But I don't want to tell Robin
+till Monday morning. You see he's got a very exciting day before him
+to-morrow, and I think to know about Monday on top of it might be almost
+too much for him."
+
+"But what excitement is there to-morrow?"
+
+She looked at him reproachfully.
+
+"Mr. Thrush!"
+
+"Oh, of course. And is Robin coming to the Cathedral?"
+
+"Yes, for once. It's a terribly long service for a child, but Robin
+would break his heart if he didn't see Mr. Thrush walk in the procession
+for the first time."
+
+"Then we won't tell him till Monday morning. I'll hire a dog-cart and we
+can all drive out together."
+
+Again she gave him the tender look, but she did not then explain what it
+meant.
+
+That evening they dined with Canon Wilton, who had a surprise in store
+for them. Esme Darlington had come down to stay with him over Sunday,
+and to have a glimpse of his dear young friends in Little Cloisters.
+
+The dinner was a delightful one. Mr. Darlington was benignly talkative
+and full of kindly gossip; Canon Wilton almost beamed upon his guests;
+after dinner Rosamund sang song after song while the three men listened
+and looked. She sang her very best for them, and when she was winding
+a lace shawl about her hair preparatory to the little walk home, Canon
+Wilton thanked her in a way that brought the blood to her cheeks.
+
+"You've made me very happy to-night," he said finally. And his strong
+bass voice was softer than usual.
+
+"I'm glad."
+
+"Not only by your singing," he added.
+
+She looked at him inquiringly. His eyes had gone to Dion.
+
+"Not only by that."
+
+And then he spoke almost in a murmur to her.
+
+"He's come back worth it," he said. "Good night. God bless you both."
+
+The following day was made memorable by the "installation" of Mr. Thrush
+as a verger of Welsley Cathedral.
+
+The Cathedral was not specially crowded for the occasion, but there was
+a very fair congregation when Rosamund, Dion and Robin (in a sailor suit
+with wide blue trousers) walked in together through the archway in the
+rood-screen. One of the old established vergers, a lordly person with
+a "presence" and the air of a high dignitary, met them as they stepped
+into the choir, and wanted to put them into stalls; but Rosamund begged
+for seats in a pew just beyond the lectern, facing the doorway by which
+the procession came into the choir.
+
+"Robin would be swallowed up in a stall," she whispered to Dion.
+
+And they both looked down at the little chap tenderly, and met his blue
+eyes turned confidingly, yet almost anxiously too, up to them. He was
+wondering about all this whispering with the verger, and hoping that
+nothing had happened to Mr. Thrush.
+
+They found perfect seats in a pew just beyond the deanery stalls. Far
+up in the distance above them one bell, the five minutes' bell, was
+chiming. Its voice recalled to Rosamund the "ping-ping" of the bell
+of St. Mary's Church which had welcomed her in the fog. How much had
+happened since then! Robin was nestling against her. He sat between her
+and his father, and was holding his father's hand. By dividing Dion from
+her he united her with Dion. She thought of the mystery of the Trinity,
+and then of their mystery, the mystery of father, mother and child.
+To-day she felt very happy, and happy in an unusual way. In her
+happiness she know that, in a sort of under way, she had almost dreaded
+Dion's return. She had been so peacefully content, so truly at rest and
+deeply serene in the life at Welsley with Robin. In her own heart she
+could not deny that she had loved having her Robin all to herself;
+and she had loved, too, the long hours of solitude during which,
+in day-dreams, she had lived the religious life. A great peace had
+enveloped those months at Welsley. In them she had mysteriously grown
+into a closer relation with her little son. She had often felt in those
+months that this mysterious nearness could never have become quite what
+it had become to her unless she had been left alone with Robin. It was
+their solitude which had enabled her to concentrate wholly on Robin, and
+it was surely this exclusive concentration on Robin which had drawn him
+so very close to her. All the springs of his love had flowed towards
+her.
+
+She had been just a wee bit frightened about Dion's return.
+
+And that was why at this moment, when the five minutes' bell was
+ringing, she felt so happy. For Dion's return had not made any
+difference; or, if it had made a difference, she did not actively regret
+it. The child's new adoration of his father had made her care more for
+Dion, and even more for Robin; for she felt that Robin was unconsciously
+loving in his father a strength and a nobility which were new in Dion,
+which had been born far away across the sea. War destroys, and all the
+time war is destroying it is creating. Robin was holding a little bit of
+what the South African War had created as he held his father's hand. For
+are not the profound truths of the soul conveyed through all its temple?
+
+"Happiness is a mystery," thought Rosamund.
+
+And then she silently thanked God that this mystery was within herself,
+and that she felt it in Robin and in Dion.
+
+She looked down at her little son, and as she met his soft and yet
+ardent eyes,--full of innocent anxiety, and almost of awe, about Mr.
+Thrush,--she blessed the day when she had decided to marry Dion, when
+she had renounced certain dreams, when she had taken the advice of the
+man who was now her friend and had resolved to tread that path of life
+in which she could have a companion.
+
+Her companion had given her another companion. In the old gray
+Cathedral, full of the silent voices of men who had prayed and been
+gathered to their rest long since, Rosamund looked down the way of
+happiness, and she could not see its end.
+
+The five minutes' bell stopped and Robin sat up very straight in the
+pew. The Bishop's wife proceeded to her stall with a friend. Robin
+stared reverently, alert for the tribute to Mr. Thrush. Miss Piper
+glided in sideways, holding her head down as if she were searching for
+a dropped pin on the pavement. She, too, was an acquaintance of Robin's,
+and he whispered to his mother:
+
+"Miss Piper's come to see Mr. Thrush."
+
+"Yes, darling."
+
+What a darling he was in his anxiety for his old friend! She looked at
+the freckles on the bridge of his little nose and longed to kiss them.
+This was without doubt the most wonderful day in Robin's life so far.
+She looked ahead and saw how many wonderful days for Robin! And over his
+fair hair she glanced at Dion, and she felt Dion's thought hand in hand
+with hers.
+
+A long sigh came from the organ, and then Mr. Dickinson was at work
+preluding Mr. Thrush. Distant steps sounded on the pavement behind
+the choir screen coming from some hidden place at the east end of the
+Cathedral. The congregation stood up. All this, in Robin's mind, was
+for Mr. Thrush. Still holding his father's hand tightly he joined in the
+congregation's movement. The solemnly pacing steps drew nearer. Robin
+felt very small, and the pew seemed very deep to him now that he was
+standing up. There was a fat red footstool by his left leg. He peeped at
+his father and whispered:
+
+"May I, Fa?"
+
+Dion bent down, took him under the arms and lifted him gently on to the
+footstool just as the vergers appeared with their wands, walking nobly
+at the head of the procession.
+
+At Welsley the ordinary vergers did not march up the choir to the return
+stalls, but divided and formed up in two lines at the entrance, making
+a dignified avenue down which the choristers and the clergy passed with
+calm insouciance into the full view of the waiting congregation. Only
+two picked men, with wands of silver, preceded the dignitaries to their
+massive stalls. Mr. Thrush was--though not in Robin's eyes--an
+ordinary verger. He would not therefore penetrate into the choir. But,
+mercifully, he with one other had been placed in the forefront of the
+procession. He led the way, and Robin and his parents had a full and
+satisfying view of him as the procession curved round and made for the
+screen. In his dark and flowing robe he came on majestical, holding
+his wand quite perfectly, and looking not merely self-possessed but--as
+Rosamund afterwards put it--"almost uplifted."
+
+Robin began to breathe hard as he gazed. From Mr. Thrush's shoulders the
+robe swung with his lordly movements. He reached the entrance. It seemed
+as if nothing could prevent him from floating on, in all the pride and
+dignity of his new office, to the very steps of the Dean's stall. But
+discipline held him. He stood aside; he came to rest with his wand
+before him; he let the procession pass by, and then, almost mystically,
+he evaporated with his brother vergers.
+
+Rosamund sent a quick look to Dion, a look of subdued and yet bright
+triumph. Then she glanced down at Robin. She had been scarcely less
+excited, less strung up, than he. But she had seen the fruit of her
+rehearsals and now she was satisfied. Robin, she saw, was more than
+satisfied. His eyes were round with the glory of it all.
+
+That was the happiest Sunday Dion had ever spent, and it was fated to
+close in a happiness welling up out of the very deeps of the heart.
+
+Canon Wilton and Esme Darlington came in to tea, and Mr. Thrush was
+entertained at a sumptuous repast in the nursery "between the services."
+Robin presided at it with anxious rapture, being now just a little in
+awe of his faithful old friend. His nurse, who approved of Mr. Thrush,
+and was much impressed by the fact that after two interviews with the
+Dean he had been appointed to a post in the Cathedral, sat down to it
+too; and Rosamund and Dion looked in to congratulate Mr. Thrush, and to
+tell him how delighted they were with his bearing in the procession
+and his delicately adroit manipulation of his wand. Mr. Thrush received
+their earnest congratulations with the quiet dignity of one who felt
+that they did not spring from exaggeration of sentiment. Like all great
+artists he knew when he had done well. But when Rosamund and Dion were
+about to retire, and to leave him with Robin and the nurse to the tea
+and well-buttered toast, he suddenly emerged into an emotion which did
+him credit.
+
+"Madame!" He said to Rosamund, in a rather hoarse and tremulous voice.
+
+"Now don't trouble to get up again, dear Mr. Thrush. Yes, what is it?"
+
+Mr. Thrush looked down steadily at the "round" which glistened on his
+plate. Something fell upon it.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Thrush----!" began Robin, and paused in dismay, looking up at
+his mother.
+
+"Madame," said Mr. Thrush again, still looking at the "round," "I
+haven't felt as I do now since I stood behind my counter just off
+Hanover Square, respected. Yes," he said, and his old voice quavered
+upwards, gaining in strength, "respected by all who knew me. _She_
+was with me then, and now she isn't. But I feel--I feel--I'm respected
+again."
+
+Something else fell upon the toast.
+
+"And it's all your doing, madam. I--all I can say is that I--all I can
+say----" His voice failed.
+
+Rosamund put her hand on his shoulder.
+
+"There, Mr. Thrush, there! I know, I know just how it is."
+
+"Madame," said Mr. Thrush, with quavering emphasis, "one can depend upon
+you, a man can depend upon you. What you undertake you carry through,
+even if it's only the putting on his feet of--of--I never thought to be
+a verger, never. I never could have looked up to such a thing but for
+you. But Mr. Dean he said to me, 'Mr. Thrush, when Mrs. Leith speaks up
+for a man, even an archbishop has to listen.'"
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Thrush. Robin, give Mr. Thrush the brown sugar. He
+always likes brown sugar in his tea."
+
+"It's more nourishing, madam," said Mr. Thrush, with a sudden change
+from emotion to quiet self-confidence. "It does more work for the
+stomach. A chemist knows."
+
+"Dear old man!" said Rosamund, when she and Dion were outside in the
+passage. "To say all that before nurse--it was truly generous."
+
+And she frankly wiped her eyes. A moment later she added:
+
+"I pray he doesn't fall back into his little failing!"
+
+She looked at Dion interrogatively. He looked at her, understanding, he
+believed, the inquiry in her eyes. Before he could say anything the kind
+and careful voice of Mr. Darlington was heard below, asking:
+
+"Is Mrs. Dion Leith at home?"
+
+Mr. Darlington was delighted with Little Cloisters. He said it had a
+"flavor which was quite unique," and was so enthusiastic that Rosamund
+became almost excited. Dion saw that she counted Mr. Darlington as an
+ally. When Mr. Darlington's praises sounded she could not refrain from
+glancing at her husband, and when at length their guests got up to
+go "with great reluctance," she begged them to come and dine on the
+following night.
+
+Mr. Darlington raised his ragged eyebrows and looked at Canon Wilton.
+
+"I'm by way of going back to town to-morrow afternoon," he began
+tentatively.
+
+"Stay another night and let us accept," said Canon Wilton heartily.
+
+"But I'm dining with dear Lavinia Berkhamstead, one of my oldest
+friends. It's not a set dinner, but I should hardly like--"
+
+"For once!" pleaded Rosamund.
+
+Mr. Darlington wavered. He looked round the room and then at Rosamund
+and Dion.
+
+"It's most attractive here," he murmured, "and Lady Berkhamstead lives
+in the Cromwell Road, at the far end. I wonder--"
+
+"It's settled!" Rosamund exclaimed. "Dinner at half-past seven. We keep
+early hours here, and Dion goes shooting to-morrow with Robin and may
+get sleepy towards ten o'clock."
+
+After explanations about Robin, Mr. Darlington gracefully yielded. He
+would wire to dear Lavinia Berkhamstead and explain matters.
+
+As he and Canon Wilton walked back to the Canon's house he said;
+
+"What dear people those are!"
+
+"Yes, indeed," said the Canon.
+
+"Happiness has brought out the very best in them both. Leith is a fine
+young fellow, and she, of course, is unique, a piece of radiance, as her
+beautiful mother was. It does one good to see such a happy household."
+
+He gently glowed, and presently added:
+
+"You and I, dear Canon, have missed something."
+
+After a moment the Canon's strong voice came gravely out of the winter
+darkness:
+
+"You think great happiness the noblest education?"
+
+Mr. Darlington began to pull his beard.
+
+"You mean, my dear Wilton----?"
+
+"Do you think the education of happiness is the education most likely to
+bring out the greatest possibilities of the soul?"
+
+This was the sort of very definite question that Mr. Darlington
+preferred to get away from if possible, and he was just preparing to
+"hedge," when, fortunately, they ran into the Dean, and the conversation
+deviated to a discussion concerning the effect the pursuit of scientific
+research was likely to have upon religious belief.
+
+After supper that evening--supper instead of dinner on Sundays was the
+general rule in Welsley--Dion lit his pipe. It had been a very happy
+day. He wished the happiness to last till sleep came to Rosamund and
+to him; nevertheless he was resolved to take a risk, and to take it now
+before they went to bed, while they still had two quiet hours before
+them. He looked at Rosamund and reluctance surged up in him, but he beat
+it back. Something told him that he had been allowed to come back from
+South Africa in order that he might build firm foundations. The perfect
+family life must be set upon rock. He meant to get through to the rock
+if possible. Rosamund and he were beginning again. Now surely was the
+day of salvation if he played the man, the man instead of merely the
+lover.
+
+"This has been one of the happiest days of my life," he said.
+
+He was standing by the fire. Rosamund was sitting on a low chair doing
+some embroidery. Gold thread gleamed against a rough cream-colored
+ground in her capable hands.
+
+"I'm so thankful you like Welsley," she said.
+
+"Won't you hate leaving Welsley?" he asked.
+
+Rosamund went on quietly working for a moment. Perhaps she bent a little
+lower over the embroidery.
+
+"I've made a great many friends here," she said at length, "and----"
+
+She paused.
+
+"Yes--do tell me, Rose."
+
+"There's something here that I care for very much."
+
+"Is it the atmosphere of religion? There's a great deal here that
+suggests the religious life."
+
+"Yes; it's what I care for."
+
+"I was almost afraid of meeting you here when I came back, Rose. I
+remembered what you had once told me, that you had had a great longing
+to enter the religious life. I was half afraid that, living here all
+alone with Robin, you might have become--I don't know exactly how to
+put it--become cloistral. I didn't want to find you a sort of nun when I
+came back."
+
+He spoke with a gentle lightness.
+
+"It might have been so, mightn't it?"
+
+She remembered her dreams in the walled-in garden almost guiltily.
+
+"No," she said steadily--and as she spoke she felt as if she were firmly
+putting those dreams behind her forever. "Motherhood changes a woman
+more than men can ever know."
+
+"I--I know it's all right. Then you won't hate me for taking you both
+back to Little Market Street in a few days?"
+
+He saw the color deepen in her face. For an instant she went on working.
+Then she put the work down, sat back in the low chair, and looked up at
+him.
+
+"No, of course we must go back. And I was very happy in Little Market
+Street."
+
+And then quickly, before he could say anything, she began to recall
+the pleasant details of their life in Westminster, dwelling upon every
+household joy, and everything that though "Londony" had been delightful.
+Having conquered, with an effort which had cost her more than even Dion
+knew, a terrible reluctance she gave herself to her own generous impulse
+with enthusiasm. Rosamund could not do things by halves. She might
+obstinately refrain from treading a path, but if once she had set her
+feet on it she hurried eagerly along it. Something to-night had made her
+decide on treading the path of unselfishness, of generosity. When Dion
+lit his pipe she had not known she was going to tread it. It seemed to
+her almost as if she had found herself upon the path without knowing how
+she had got there. Now without hesitation she went forward.
+
+"It was delightful in Westminster," she concluded, "and it will be
+delightful there again."
+
+"And all your friends here? And Mr. Thrush?"
+
+"I don't know what Mr. Thrush will do," she said, with a change to deep
+gravity.
+
+The two lines showed in her pure forehead.
+
+"I'm so afraid that without me he will fall back. But perhaps I can run
+down now and then just for the day to keep him up to his promise, poor
+dear old man."
+
+"And your friends?"
+
+"Oh, well--of course I shall miss them. But I suppose there is always
+something to miss. There must be a crumpled rose leaf. I am far more
+fortunate than almost any woman I know."
+
+Dion put down his pipe.
+
+"I simply can't do it," he said.
+
+"What?"
+
+"Take you away from here. It seems your right place. You love it; Robin
+loves it. What's to be done? Shall I run up and down?"
+
+"You can't. It's too far."
+
+"I have to read the papers somewhere. Why not in the train?"
+
+"Three hours or more! It's impossible. If only Welsley were nearer
+London! But, then, it wouldn't be Welsley."
+
+"Now I know you'll go I can't take you away."
+
+"Did you--what did you think I should do?"
+
+"How could I tell?"
+
+He sat down and took her hands.
+
+"Rose, you've made this the happiest day of my life."
+
+"Do you mean because----?"
+
+She stopped. Her face became very grave, almost severe. She looked at
+him, but he felt that she was really looking inward upon herself. When
+at last he let go her hands she said:
+
+"Dion, you are very different from what you were when you went to the
+war. If I seem different, too, it's because of that, I think."
+
+"War changes women, perhaps, as well as men," he said tenderly.
+
+They sat by the fire in the quiet old room and talked of the future
+and of all the stages of Robin: as schoolboy, as youth, as budding
+undergraduate, as man.
+
+"Perhaps he'll be a soldier-man as his father has been," said Rosamund.
+
+"Do you wish it?"
+
+She looked at him steadily for a moment. Then she said:
+
+"Yes, if it helps him as I think it has helped you. I expect when men go
+to fight for their country they go, perhaps without knowing it, to fight
+just for themselves."
+
+"I believe everything we do for others, without any thought of
+ourselves, we do for ourselves," he said, very seriously.
+
+"Altruism! But then I ought to live in London for you, and you in
+Welsley for me."
+
+They both laughed. Nothing had been absolutely decided; and yet it
+seemed as if through that laughter a decision had been reached about
+everything really important.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+A dogcart from Harrington's had been ordered to be "round" the next
+day at noon. Dion had decided against a long day's shooting on Robin's
+account. He must not tire the little chap. In truth it would be
+impossible to take the shooting seriously, with Robin there all the
+time, clinging on to Jane and having to be looked after.
+
+"It's going to be Robin's day," Dion said the next morning. "When are
+you going to tell him?"
+
+"Directly after breakfast. By the way, Dion,"--she spoke carelessly, and
+was opening a letter while she spoke,--"I'm not coming."
+
+"Oh, but you must!"
+
+"No; I'll stay quietly here. I have lots of things to do."
+
+"But Robin's first day as a sportsman!"
+
+"He isn't going to shoot," she said with a mother's smile.
+
+"Why won't you come? You've got some very special reason."
+
+"Perhaps I have, but I'm not going to tell it. Women aren't wanted
+everywhere. Sometimes a couple of men like to be alone."
+
+"Robin's a man now?"
+
+"Yes, a little man. I do hope the gaiters will fit him. I haven't dared
+to try them on yet. And I've got him the dearest little whip you ever
+saw."
+
+"Jane will have to look to her paces. I'm sorry you're not coming,
+Rose."
+
+But he did not try to persuade her. He believed that she had a very
+sweet reason behind her abstention. She had had Robin all to herself for
+many months; perhaps she thought the father ought to have his turn now,
+perhaps to-day she was handing over her little son to his father for the
+education which always comes from a man. Her sudden unselfishness--Dion
+believed it was that--touched him to the heart. But it made him long to
+do something, many things, for her.
+
+"I'm determined that you and Welsley shan't part from each other
+forever," he said. "We'll hit on some compromise. This house is on our
+hands, anyhow, till the spring."
+
+"Perhaps we could sublet it," said Rosamund, trying to speak with brisk
+cheerfulness.
+
+"We'll talk it over again to-night."
+
+"And now for Robin's gaiters!"
+
+They fitted perfectly; "miraculously" was Rosamund's word for the way
+they fitted.
+
+"His legs might a-been poured into them almost, a-dear," was nurse's
+admirably descriptive comment on the general effect produced.
+
+Robin looked at his legs with deep solemnity. When the great project
+for this day of days had been broken to him he had fallen upon awe. His
+prattling ardors had subsided, stilled by a greater joy than any that
+had called them forth in his complex past of a child. Now he gazed at
+his legs, which were stretched out at right angles to his body on a
+nursery chair, as if they were not his. Then he looked up at his mother,
+his father, nurse; then once more down at his legs. His eyes were
+inquiring. They seemed to say, "Can it be?"
+
+"Bless him! He can't hardly believe in it!" muttered nurse. "And no
+wonder."
+
+A small sigh came from Robin. To his father and mother it came like the
+whisper of happiness, that good fairy which men cannot quite get rid
+of, try as they may. Two small hands went down to the little gaiters
+and felt them carefully. Then Robin looked up again, this time at his
+father, and smiled. Instinctively he connected his father with these
+wonderful appurtenances, although his mother had bought them and put
+them on him. With that smile he gave the day to his father, and Dion
+took it with just a glance at Rosamund--a glance which deprecated and
+which accepted.
+
+When the dogcart was announced by Annie, with beaming eyes, Dion got
+his gun, Robin received his whip,--a miniature hunting-crop with a horn
+handle,--his cap was pulled down firmly on his head by Rosamund, and
+they set forth to the Green Court. Here they found Harrington's most
+fiery horse harnessed to quite a sporting dogcart and doing his very
+best to champ his bit. From the ground Robin looked up at him with
+solemn eyes. The occasion was almost too great. His father with a gun,
+his own legs in gaiters, the whip which he felt in his hand, the packet
+of sandwiches thrust tenderly by nurse into the pocket of his little
+covert coat, and now this glorious animal and this high and unusual
+carriage gleaming with light-colored wood between its immense wheels!
+There was almost too much of meaning, too much of suggestion in it all.
+No words came to him. He could only feel and gaze.
+
+A stableman with hard lips stood sentinel in front of the fiery horse,
+and put up a red forefinger on the right side of his temple to give them
+greeting.
+
+"I'll get in first," said Dion to Rosamund, "and then you can hand me up
+Robin."
+
+He put in his gun and took the reins, while Robin instinctively extended
+his arms so that his mother could take hold of him under them.
+
+"Up we go!" cried Dion.
+
+And he mounted lightly to the high seat.
+
+"Now, Robin!"
+
+Rosamund took hold of Robin, whose short arms were still solemnly
+outstretched. She was about to lift him into the cart, but, overcome by
+an irresistible impulse, she paused, put one arm under the little legs
+in the gaiters, drew him to her and pressed her lips on the freckled
+bridge of his tiny nose.
+
+"You darling!" she whispered, so that only he could hear. "I love you in
+your gaiters better than I ever loved you before." Then she handed him
+up to his father as if he were a dear little parcel.
+
+"That's it," said Dion. "Put your arm round here, boy. Hold on tight!
+Let him go!"
+
+The hard-lipped man stood to one side and the horse--well, moved. Robin
+gazed down at his mother with the faint hint of an almost shy smile,
+Dion saluted her with his whip, and the glorious day was fairly begun.
+Traveling with a sort of rakish deliberation the dogcart skirted the
+velvet lawn of the Green Court and disappeared from sight beneath the
+ancient archway.
+
+Rosamund sighed as she turned to walk back to Little Cloisters. She
+had made a real sacrifice that day in giving up Robin to his father and
+staying at home. Secretly she had longed to go with her "men-folk" upon
+the great expedition, to be present at Robin's initiation into the Doric
+life. But something very dear in Dion had prompted her to be unselfish.
+Dion was certainly much more impressive to her since his return from
+the war. Even the dear things in him meant more. There seemed to be more
+muscle in them than there had been when he went away.
+
+"Even our virtues can be weak or strong, I suppose," Rosamund thought,
+as she turned into the walled garden which she loved so much, and there
+followed the thought:
+
+"I wonder which mine are."
+
+She meant to spend that day in saying good-by to Welsley. Dion had said
+they would talk things over again that night; probably he would be ready
+to fall in with any desire of hers, but she felt almost sure that she
+would not tell him how much she wished to stay on at Little Cloisters.
+
+An obscure feeling had come to her that perhaps it was not quite safe
+for her to remain any longer here in the arms of the Precincts. Looking
+backward to that which has been deliberately renounced is surely an act
+of weakness.
+
+Even the imaginative effort to live a life that has been put aside is a
+feeble concession to an inclination at least partially morbid. Rosamund
+was in fact a mother, and yet here in Welsley, she had, as it were,
+sometimes played at being one of those "Sisters" who are content to
+be brides of heaven and mothers of the poor. For her own sake it was
+doubtless best to renounce Welsley at once. The new meaning of Dion
+would help her to do that bravely. He had often been unselfish for her;
+she would try to counter his unselfishness with hers.
+
+When she was in the house again she had a colloquy with the cook
+about the dinner for that evening. As Esme Darlington had given up an
+engagement in London to come to Little Cloisters, her dinner must
+be something special. She told the cook so in her cordial, almost
+confidential, way, and they "put their heads together" and devised a
+menu full of attractions. That done she had the day to herself. Dion
+and Robin would come home some time in the afternoon, and they were all
+going to have tea together up in the nursery. It might be at half-past
+four, it might be at half-past five. Till then she was free.
+
+For a moment she thought of going to see some of her friends, of telling
+Mrs. Dickinson and other adherents of hers that her days in Welsley were
+numbered. But a reluctance seized her. She felt a desire to be alone.
+What if instead of saying good-by to Welsley, she said good-by to her
+dreams in Welsley? She summoned Annie and told her not to let any one
+in.
+
+"I'm going to spend a quiet day, Annie," she said.
+
+"Yes, ma'am," said Annie, with an air of intelligent comprehension.
+
+"Though what else any one ever does in old Welsley I'm sure I couldn't
+say," she afterwards remarked to the cook.
+
+"You're a cockney at 'eart, Annie," repeated that functionary. "The
+country says nothing to you. You want the parks, that's what you want."
+
+"Well, I was brought up in 'em, as you may say," said Annie, whose
+father had been a park-keeper, and whose mother and grandmother were
+natives of Westbourne Grove.
+
+By a quiet day Rosamund meant a day lived through in absolute solitude,
+a day of meditation in the cloistered garden. She would not have any
+lunch. Then she would have a better appetite for the nursery tea at
+which Robin would relate to her all the doings of the greatest day of
+his life. Precious, precious Robin!
+
+She went down into the garden.
+
+It was a mistily bright day of November. The sun shone through a
+delicate veil. The air was cold but not sharp. Neither autumn nor winter
+ruled. It seemed like a day which had slipped into an interstice between
+two seasons, a day that was somehow rare and exceptional, holding a
+faint stillness that was strange. There was in it something of the far
+away. If a fairy day can be cold, it was like a fairy day. On such a day
+one treads lightly and softly and at moments feels almost as if out of
+the body.
+
+Lightly and softly Rosamund went to and fro between the high and mossy
+walls of the garden, keeping to the straight paths. When the bells
+chimed in the tower of the Cathedral they sounded much farther away
+than usual; the song of the thrush somewhere in the elder bush near the
+garden door was curiously remote; the caw-caw of the rooks dropped
+down as if from an immeasurable distance. Through the mist the sunshine
+filtered, lightly pale and pure, a sensitive sunshine which would surely
+not stay very long in Rosamund's garden.
+
+A sort of thin stillness had fallen upon the world.
+
+And so another chapter of life was closing, the happy chapter of
+Welsley!
+
+Something of sadness accompanied Rosamund along the straight paths, the
+delicate melancholy which attends the farewells of one who has regret
+but who has hope.
+
+With the new Dion and with the old Robin, the Robin blessedly unchanged,
+she could not be really unhappy. Yet it was sad to give up the dear
+garden and all the dreams which belonged to it. Far down in her--she
+knew it--there was certainly a recluse. She could see the black figure,
+the sheltered face, the eyes looking down, the praying hands. It would
+have been very natural to her long ago to seek God in the way of the
+recluse. But not now!
+
+Hermes and the child came before her. In the stillness of Welsley it was
+as if she heard the green stillness of Elis. She was quite alone in that
+inner room where stood the messenger with the wings on his sandals. Dion
+had stayed outside. He had been unselfish that day as to-day she had
+been unselfish. For she had wanted to go with the little gaiters. She
+could see the smiling look of eternity upon the face of the messenger.
+He had no fear for the child. He had mounted on winged feet to the
+region where no fear is. How his benign and eternal calm had sunk into
+Rosamund's soul that day in Elis. Far off she had seen through the frame
+of the Museum doorway a bit of the valley in which the Hermes had dwelt,
+and stretching across it a branch of wild olive. She had looked at it
+and had thought of the victor's Crown, a crown which had even been won
+by a boy at the games.
+
+Already then a fore-knowledge of Robin had been in her.
+
+She had gazed at the branch and loved it. Certainly she had been
+dreaming, as she had afterwards told Dion, and in her dream had been
+Hermes and the child, and surely another child for whose future the
+messenger would not fear. The branch of wild olive had, perhaps, entered
+into the dream. Into a crown she had wound it to set upon the little
+fair head. And that was why she had suffered, had really suffered, when
+a cruel hand had come into Elis and had torn down the wild olive branch.
+Dion's hand!
+
+That action had been like a murder. She remembered even now her feeling
+of anger and distress. She had been startled. She had been ruthlessly
+torn away from the exquisite calm in which, with the Hermes, she had
+been celestially dreaming. Dion had torn her away, Dion who loved her so
+much.
+
+Why had he done it? Even now she did not know.
+
+He had taken her out of that dream, and now he was going to take her
+away from Welsley.
+
+The misty brightness was already fading from the garden; the song of the
+thrush was no longer audible: he had flown away from the elder bush
+and from Rosamund. The coldness and silence of the day seemed to deepen
+about her. Welsley was fading out of her life. She felt that. She was
+going to begin again. But as she had carried Elis with her when she
+left it, and the dear tombs and temples of Greece, when she had bidden
+good-by to the bare and beautiful land whose winds and whose waters are
+not as the winds and the waters of any other region, so she would carry
+away with her Welsley, this garden with its seclusion, its old religious
+atmosphere, the music of the chimes, even the thrush's song from the
+elder bush. "Farewell!" She must say that. But she had her precious
+possession. Another page of the book of life would be turned. That was
+all.
+
+That was all? She sighed. A painful sense of the impermanence of the
+things of this world came suddenly upon her. Like running water life
+was slipping by; its joys, the shining bubbles poised upon the surface,
+drifted into the distance and--how quickly!--were out of reach.
+
+Perhaps the great attraction, the lure of the religious life, was the
+sense felt by those who led it of having a close grip upon that which
+was permanent. The joys of the world--even the natural, healthy, allowed
+joys--were shut out, but there was the great compensation, companionship
+with that to which no "farewell" would ever have to be said, with that
+to which death only brought the human being nearer.
+
+Rosamund stopped in her walk, and looked up at the great Cathedral which
+towered above the wall of the garden. She had been pacing to and fro
+for a long time. She did not feel tired, but she was beset by an
+unaccustomed sensation of weariness, mental and spiritual rather than
+physical.
+
+After a minute she went into the house, found a rug and a book, came
+back into the garden, and sat down on a bench in a corner hidden from
+observation. This bench was close to the wall which divided the garden
+from the "Dark Entry." It was separated from the lawn and the view of
+the house by a belt of shrubs. Rosamund was fond of this nook and had
+very often sat in it, sometimes alone, sometimes with Robin. She had
+told the maids never to look for her there; if any visitor came and
+she was not seen in that part of the garden which was commanded by the
+windows of the house, they were to conclude that she was "out." Here,
+then, she was quite safe, and could turn the last page of the chapter of
+Welsley in her book of life.
+
+She wrapped herself up in the big and heavy rug. The sun was gone, the
+mist had become slightly more dense, the air was colder.
+
+Presently Dion and Robin would come back; there would be tea in the warm
+old-fashioned nursery, gay talk, the telling of wonderful deeds.
+
+If only Robin did not fall off Jane! But Dion would take care of that.
+Dion certainly loved Robin very much. The bond between father and son
+had evidently been strengthened by the intervention of the war, which
+had broken off their intercourse for a time, and given Robin a father
+changed by contact with hard realities.
+
+For a few minutes in imagination Rosamund followed the two figures over
+the stubble, the thin strong walking figure, and the little darling
+figure on pony back. Would Robin quite forget her in the midst of his
+proud and triumphant joy? She wondered. Even if he did, she would not
+really mind. She wanted him to be very happy indeed without her--just
+for a short time: that he could not be happy without her for long she
+knew very well.
+
+Oddly, her sensation of weariness persisted. She recognized it now
+as wholly unphysical. She was certainly feeling what people call
+"depressed." No doubt this unusual depression--for she had been born
+with a singularly cheerful spirit--was caused by the resolution she had
+taken to give up Welsley. Perhaps Welsley meant more to her even than
+she had supposed. But it was absurd--wasn't it?--to be so dominated by
+places. People, certain people, might mean everything in the life of a
+woman; many women lived, really lived, only in and through their lovers,
+their husbands, their children; but what woman lived in and through the
+life of the place? She had only to compare mentally the loss of Welsley
+with--say--the loss of Dion, the new Dion, to realize how little Welsley
+really meant to her. Certainly she loved it as a place, but probably a
+woman can only love a place with a bit of her.
+
+And yet to-day, she certainly felt depressed. Even the thought of the
+nursery tea did not drive the depression from her.
+
+She opened the book she had brought from the house. It was a volume
+of Browning's poems. She had opened it at hap-hazard, and now her eyes
+rested on these words, words loved almost above all others by one of the
+greatest souls that ever spent itself for England:
+
+     "I go to prove my soul!
+     I see my way as birds their trackless way
+     I shall arrive! What time, what circuit first
+     I ask not; but unless God send His Hail
+     Or blinding fire-balls, sleet, or stifling snow,
+     In some time, His good time!--I shall arrive:
+     He guides me and the bird. In His good time!"
+
+She read the lines three--four times. Then she laid the book down on her
+knees and sat very still. Consciously she tried to withdraw herself, to
+pass into meditation carrying the poem with her.
+
+     "I see my way as birds their trackless way--I shall arrive!"
+
+Rosmund was gazing downward at a coping of worn brick on which she
+had set her feet, but she did not see it now. She saw migratory birds
+traveling steadily through a vast expanse of gray sky; birds that were
+going, at the appointed time, to some far-distant place, in search of
+a golden climate, in search of the sun. Inevitably they would come
+into the golden climate, inevitably they would find the sun which they
+needed. Like them she was traveling through a vast gray expanse, the
+life of the world. Robin and Dion were with her. They were seeking the
+sun which they needed. Surely, like the birds, they would find the sun
+at last. She had thought to seek her way deliberately. When she was
+quite a girl it had seemed to her that the human being had the power,
+and was therefore almost under the obligation, to find the way to God
+for herself. When she had contemplated entering the religious life the
+thought at the back of her mind had perhaps been something like this:
+"I'll conquer the love and the mercy of God by my own exertions; I'll
+find the way to God by my own ingenuity and determination in searching
+it out." Possibly she had never quite simply and humbly said in her
+soul, with Newman, "Be Thou my Guide." Now, as she sat in the garden,
+with the image of the migratory birds in her mind, she thought, "The
+birds do that. They give themselves to the sky, and God does the rest.
+He knows the way by which each human soul can best go back to that from
+which once it issued forth." Perhaps as a Sister, leading the hidden
+secluded life, she could not have found the way; perhaps she had to
+find it in the world, through Dion with whom she had united herself, or
+through Robin to whom she had given birth.
+
+Through Robin! Yes, surely that was her way to God. "A little child
+shall lead them." The words started up in her mind without their
+context, and she realized that, though people believe it is the mother
+who teaches the child, nevertheless the mother learns the greatest
+truths from the child. Who living on the earth could keep her from sin
+as surely as her Robin? How could she be evil when Robin looked to her
+as the embodiment of goodness. What would she not do, what would she not
+give up, to increase Robin's love for her, to give him more reason for
+regarding her with innocent confidence and simple reverence?
+
+Yes, Robin was surely her way to God.
+
+And now, withdrawn into the very depths of meditation, and hearing
+no longer the distant voices of the rooks as they wheeled about the
+elm-tops near Canon Wilton's house, she went onwards down the way chosen
+for her by God, the "Robin-way."
+
+Now Robin was a young child, and naturally looked up to her as a kind of
+Providence. Presently he would be a lad; inevitably he would reach the
+age when the growing mind becomes critical. Young animals gnaw hard
+things to test the strength of their teeth; so do young growing minds
+gnaw the bones that come in their way. Even the mother comes in for much
+secret criticism from the son who loves her. Rosamund's time for being
+criticized by Robin would come in the course of the years. She must try
+to get ready against that time; she must try to be worthy of Robin's
+love when he was able to be critical. And so onwards down the way across
+the gray expanse, guided, like the birds!
+
+Rosamund saw herself now as the mother of a tall son, hardened a
+little by public-school life, a cricketer, a rower, a swimmer; perhaps
+intellectual too, the winner of a scholarship. There were so many hearts
+and minds that the mother of a son must learn to keep, to companion, to
+influence, to go forward with: the heart and the mind of the child, the
+schoolboy, the undergraduate, the young man out in the world taking up
+his life-task--a soldier perhaps, or a man of learning, a pioneer, a
+carver of new ways for the crowd following behind.
+
+It was a tremendous thing to be a mother; it was a difficult way to God.
+But it was the most beautiful way of all the ways, and Rosamund was
+very thankful that she had been guided to take it. Robin, she knew, had
+taught her already very much, but how little compared with all that he
+was destined to teach her in the future! Even when her hair was white
+no doubt she would still be learning from him, would still be trying to
+lift herself a little higher lest he should ever have to look downward
+to see her.
+
+For a long time she meditated on these things, for a very long while.
+The sun never came back to the garden as she dreamed of the sun which
+the birds were seeking, of the sun which she and Dion and Robin were
+seeking; the afternoon hours passed on in a gray procession; the chimes
+sounded many times, but she did not hear them. She had forgotten Welsley
+in remembering how small a part Welsley must play in her mother-life, in
+remembering how very small were the birds in the immense expanse of the
+sky.
+
+In Meditation she had entered into Vastness.
+
+The sound of the organ in the Cathedral recalled her. It was four
+o'clock. The afternoon service was just beginning. She sat still and
+listened. It was growing dark now, but she had no wish to move. Probably
+in half an hour Robin and Dion would come back from the shooting. From
+to-day she would think of Robin in a different way. He would be even
+dearer to her, even more sacred, her little teacher. What did it matter
+where she lived if her little teacher was with her. The sting had
+gone out of her unselfishness; she was glad she had been able to be
+unselfish, to put Dion before herself.
+
+The organ ceased. They were praying now in the Cathedral. Presently she
+heard them singing the psalms faintly. The voices of the boys came to
+her with a sort of vague sweetness through the gathering darkness and
+the mist. They died away; the Magnificat followed, then silence, then
+the Nunc Dimittis, then another silence, presently the anthem. Finally
+she heard the organ alone in a Fugue of Bach.
+
+The quarter to five chimed in the tower. Dion and Robin were a little
+late.
+
+She got up, and carried the rug into the house.
+
+"Annie!" she called.
+
+Annie came.
+
+"When Mr. Leith and Robin come back,--they'll be here directly,--will
+you ask them to give me a call? I shall be in the garden."
+
+"Very well, ma'am."
+
+Again Rosamund paced up and down the paths. Now she was very conscious
+of herself and of her surroundings. The long night of early winter was
+falling upon Welsley. Five o'clock struck, a quarter-past five, then the
+half-hour. She stood still on the path, beginning to wonder. How late
+they were! Robin would surely be very tired. It would be too much for
+him. Directly he had had his tea he must be put to bed. Or perhaps it
+would be best to put him to bed at once. He would be disappointed, but
+they could easily have tea in the night nursery. She smiled, conjuring
+up a picture of Robin under the bedclothes being fed pieces of cake. He
+would enjoy that. And she would hold his cup for him while he drank, so
+that the bed might be safe. Meals in bed are often dangerous to the bed.
+How delightful were all the little absurd things she did for Robin!
+
+When the chimes told her that it was a quarter to six she began to feel
+puzzled, and just the least little bit anxious. It had been quite dark
+for a little while now. Job Crickendon's farm was only about four
+miles from Welsley. Harrington's horse might not be an exceptionally
+fast-goer, but surely he could cover six miles in an hour. Dion and
+Robin could get back in forty minutes at the most. They must have stayed
+on at Job Crickendon's till past five o'clock. Could they have had tea
+there? No, she was sure they would not have done that, when they knew
+she was waiting for them, was looking forward eagerly to tea in the
+nursery.
+
+When six o'clock struck and they had not returned she felt really
+uneasy, although she was not at all a nervous mother, and seldom, or
+never, worried about her little son. She could not doubt any longer that
+something unexpected had occurred. They were dining at half-past seven
+that night. In an hour's time at the latest she and Dion would have to
+dress. The hopes she had set on the family tea were vanishing. In her
+uneasiness she began to feel almost absurdly disappointed about the tea.
+She was hungry, too; she had had no lunch just because of the tea. It
+was to be a sort of family revel, and she had wished to enjoy it in
+every way, to make of it a real meal. Her abstention from lunch now
+seemed to her almost pitiful. Disappointment became acute in her. Yet
+even now her uneasiness, though definite, was not strong. If it had been
+she would not have been able to feel so disappointed, even so sorry for
+herself. She had given up the day to Dion. The nursery tea was to have
+been her little reward. Now she would be deprived of it. For a moment
+she felt hurt, almost the least bit angry.
+
+As the words formed themselves in her mind she heard the quarter-past
+six chime out in the tower. She stood still on the path. What had
+happened? Perhaps Robin had fallen off Jane and hurt himself, or perhaps
+there had been an accident when they were driving home. Harrington's
+horse was probably a crock. He might have fallen down. The dogcart was a
+high one----
+
+She pulled herself up. She had always secretly rather despised the
+typical "anxious mother," had always thought that the love which shows
+itself in perpetual fear was a silly, poor sort of affection. Even when
+Robin, as a baby, had once been seriously ill, at the time of the Clarke
+divorce case, she had been calm, had shown complete self-control. She
+had even surprised people by her fearlessness and quiet determination.
+
+They did not know how she had prayed, and almost agonized in secret. She
+had drawn the calm at which they had wondered from prayer. She had asked
+God to let Robin get well, and she had felt that her prayer had been
+heard, and that God would grant her the life of her child.
+
+Perhaps she had exaggerated to herself the danger he was in. But he was
+ill--for a short time he was very ill, and a baby's hold on life is but
+frail.
+
+Now she remembered her self-control during Robin's illness, and
+resolutely she banished her anxiety. There was no doubt some perfectly
+simple explanation which presently would account to her for their not
+coming at the tea hour.
+
+"Ma'am!" cried a respectable voice. "Ma-a-am!"
+
+"What is it, Nurse. They haven't come back?"
+
+Nurse was coming down the path gingerly, with a shawl over her cap.
+
+"No, ma'am. Whatever can have happened? _Something's_ a-happened, that's
+certain."
+
+"Nonsense, Nurse!"
+
+"But whatever should keep them out till late into the night, ma'am?"
+
+"It's only a little after six. It isn't night at all."
+
+"But the tea, ma'am! And Master Robin's so regular in his habits. He'll
+be fair famished, ma'am, that he will. I----Well, ma'am, if I may say
+it, I really don't hold with all this shooting, and sport, and what not
+for such young children."
+
+"It's only just for once, Nurse. Go in now. You'll catch cold."
+
+"But yourself, ma'am?"
+
+"I'm quite warm. I'd rather stay out."
+
+Nurse stared anxiously for a moment, then turned away and went gingerly
+back to the house. Her white shawl faded against the background of
+darkness. With its fading Rosamund entered into--not exactly darkness,
+but into deep shadows. She supposed that nurse's fear had communicated
+itself to her; she had caught the infection of fear from nurse. But when
+was nurse not afraid? She was an excellent woman and absolutely devoted
+to Robin, but she was not a Spartan. She leaped at sight of a mouse, and
+imagined diseases to be for ever floating Robinwards on all the breezes.
+Rosamund had strictly forbidden her ever to talk nonsense about illness
+to Robin, and she had obeyed. But that was her one fault; she had a
+timorous nature.
+
+Rosamund wished nurse had not come out into the garden to infect her
+with foolish fear.
+
+Nurse's invitation to her to come into the house had made her suddenly
+know that to be shut in would be intolerable to her. Why was that? She
+now knew that lately, while she had been walking in the garden, she had
+been straining her ears to hear the sound of wheels in the Green Court.
+She knew she would be able to hear them in the garden. In the house
+that would be impossible. Therefore she could not go into the house till
+Robin came back.
+
+All her fear was for Robin. He was so young, so tiny. Perhaps she ought
+not to have allowed him to go. Perhaps nurse was right, and such an
+expedition ought to have been ruled out as soon as it was suggested.
+Perhaps Dion and she had been altogether too Doric. She began to think
+so. But then she thought: "Robin's with his father. What harm could come
+to him with his father, and such a competent father too?" That thought
+of Dion's strength, coolness, competency reassured her; she dwelt on it.
+Of course with Dion Robin must be all right.
+
+Presently, leaving the path in front of the house, she went again to the
+seat hidden away behind the shrubs against the wall which separated the
+garden from the Dark Entry. This dark entry was an arched corridor of
+stone which led directly from the Green Court to the passage-way on
+which the main door of the garden opened. It was paved with worn slabs
+of stone upon which the feet of any one passing rang with a mournful and
+hollow sound. A tiny path skirted the garden wall, running between the
+hidden seat and the small belt of shrubs which shut out a view of the
+house. Just before she turned into this path Rosamund looked back at the
+old house, and saw a lamp gleaming in the lattice window of the nursery.
+She did not sit down on the seat. She had thought to do that and to
+listen. But the mist had made the wood very wet, and she had left the
+rug in the house. If she walked softly up and down the little path she
+would be sure to hear the hoofs of Harrington's horse, the wheels of the
+dogcart directly the wanderers drove into the Green Court. There they
+would get down, and would walk home through the Dark Entry. She intended
+to call out to them when she heard their footsteps ringing on the old
+stones. That would surprise them. She tried to enjoy the thought of
+their surprise when they heard her voice coming out of the darkness. How
+Robin would jump at the sound of mummy!
+
+She stood just in front of the seat for two or three minutes, listening
+intently in the misty darkness. She heard nothing except for a moment a
+rustling which sounded like a bird moving in ivy. Then she began to walk
+softly up and down passing and repassing the seat. When she came up to
+the seat for the fourth time in her walk, an ugly memory--she knew not
+why--rose in her mind like a weed in a pool; it was the memory of a
+story which she had long ago read and disliked. She had read it, she
+remembered, in a railway train on a long journey. She had had a book,
+something interesting and beautiful, with her, but she had finished
+it. A passenger, who had got out of the carriage, had left behind him a
+paper-covered volume of short stories. She had taken it up and had read
+the first story, which now, after an interval of years, recurred to her
+mind.
+
+There was in the story a very commonplace business man, middle-aged,
+quite unromantic and heavy, the sort of man who does not know what
+"nerves" means, who thinks suggestion "damned nonsense," and psychical
+research, occultism, and so forth, absurdities fit only to take up the
+time of "a pack of silly women." This worthy person lived in the suburbs
+of London in a semi-detached villa with a long piece of garden at the
+back. On the other side of the fairly high garden wall was the garden of
+his next-door neighbor, another business man of the usual suburban
+type. Both men were busy gardeners in their spare time. Number one had
+conceived the happy idea of putting up a tea-house in the angle of
+the wall at the bottom of his lawn. Number two, having heard of this
+achievement, and not wishing to be outdone, put up a very similar
+tea-house in the corresponding angle on his side of the wall. The
+two tea-houses stood therefore back to back with nothing but the wall
+between them. Now, one warm summer evening Mr. Jenkins-Smith--Rosamund
+could remember his name, though she had not thought of him for
+years--had been busy watering his flowers and mowing his lawn. He had
+worked really hard, and when the evening began to close in he thought
+he would go into the tea-house and have a rest. On each side of the
+curly-legged tea-table of unpolished wood stood a wicker arm-chair. Into
+one of these chairs Mr. Jenkins-Smith sank with a sigh of content. Then
+he lighted his pipe, stretched out his short legs, and, gazing at
+his beautifully trimmed garden, prepared to enjoy a delicious hour of
+well-earned repose. Things were going well with him; money was easy; his
+health was good; when he sat down in the wicker chair and put his pipe
+into his mouth he was, perhaps, as happy a man as you could find in all
+Surbiton.
+
+But presently, in fact very soon, he became conscious of a disagreeable
+feeling. A curious depression began to come upon him. He smoked
+steadily, he gazed out at his garden green with turf and gay with
+flowers, but his interest and pleasure in it were gone from him. He
+wondered why. Presently he turned his head and looked over his shoulder.
+What he was looking for he did not know; simply he felt obliged to do
+what he did. He saw, of course, nothing but the curved wooden back of
+the tea-house. He listened, he strained his ears, but he heard nothing
+except the faint "ting-ting" of a tram-bell, and voices of some children
+playing in a distant garden. His pipe had gone out. As he lit a match
+and held it to his pipe bowl he saw that his hand was shaking. Whatever
+had come to him? He was no drinker; he had always been a temperate man,
+proud of his clear eyes and steady limbs, yet now he was shaking like a
+drunkard. Perspiration burst out upon his forehead. He was seized by an
+intense desire to get away from the tea-house, to get out into the open,
+and he half rose from his chair, holding on to the arms and dropping
+his pipe on the wooden floor. The tiny noise it made set his nerves in
+a turmoil. He was afraid. But of what? He took his hands from the chair
+and sat back, angry with himself, almost ashamed. That he should feel
+afraid, here in his own garden, in his own cozy tea-house! It was
+absurd, monstrous; it was like a sort of madness come upon him. But he
+was determined not to give way to such nonsense. Just because he was
+longing to go out of the tea-house he would remain in it. Let the
+darkness come; he did not mind it; he was going to smoke his pipe.
+
+Again he stared over his shoulder, and the sweat ran down his face. Had
+not he heard something in the tea-house of his neighbor on the other
+side of the wall? It seemed to him that he had rather felt a sound than
+actually heard it. Nausea came upon him. He got up trembling. But still
+he was ashamed of himself, and he would not go out of the tea-house.
+Instead he went behind the table, stood close to the wooden wall, put
+his ear to it and listened intently. He heard nothing; but when he was
+standing against the wall his horror and fear increased until he could
+no longer combat them. He turned sharply, knocked over a chair, and
+hurried out into the garden. There for a moment he stood still. Under
+the sky he felt better, but not himself; he did not feel himself at
+all. After a pause for consideration he put on his jacket,--he had been
+gardening in his shirt-sleeves,--went into his house, out into the road,
+and then up to the door of his neighbor. There he rang the bell and
+knocked. A maid came. "Is your master in?" he asked. "Yes, sir, he's
+sitting in the summer-house at the end of the garden." "How long's he
+been there?" "About half an hour, sir, as near as I can reckon." "Could
+I see him?" "Certainly, sir." "Perhaps you'd--perhaps you'd show me to
+the summer-house." "Yes, sir."
+
+Mr. Jenkins-Smith and the maid went to the end of the garden, and there,
+in the summer-house, they found the corpse of a suicide hanging from a
+beam in the roof.
+
+This was the ugly story which had come into Rosamund's mind as she
+stood by the seat close to the garden wall. On the other side of Mr.
+Jenkins-Smith's wall had been the summer-house of his neighbor; on the
+other side of her wall there was the Dark Entry. She stood considering
+this fact and thinking of the man's terror in his garden. He had been
+subject surely to an emanation. A mysterious message had been sent to
+him by the corpse which dangled from the beam on the other side of the
+wall.
+
+She went nearer to the wall of the garden and listened attentively. Had
+she not heard a sound in the Dark Entry? It seemed to her that some one
+had come into the stone corridor while she had been walking up and
+down on the path, and was now standing there motionless. But how very
+unlikely it was that any one would do such a thing! It must be quite
+black there now, and very cold on the stone pavement, between the stone
+walls, under the roof of stone. Of course no one was there.
+
+Nevertheless she went on listening with a sort of painful attention. And
+distress came upon her. It began in a sort of physical malaise out of
+which a mental dread, such as she had never yet experienced, was born.
+She felt now quite certain that some one was standing still in the Dark
+Entry, very close to her, but separated from her by two walls of brick
+and stone; and something of this unseen person, of his attention, or
+his anger, or his terror, or his criminal intent, in any case something
+tremendously powerful, pierced the walls and came upon her and enveloped
+her. She opened her lips, not knowing what she was going to say, and
+from them came the cry:
+
+"Dion!"
+
+Silence followed her cry.
+
+"Dion! Dion!" she called again.
+
+Immediately after the third cry she heard a slow step on the stones
+of the Dark Entry, passing close to her but muffled by the intervening
+walls. It went on very slowly indeed; it was a dragging footfall; the
+sound of it presently died away.
+
+Then she sat down on the bench close to the wall. She still felt
+distressed, even afraid. Whoever it was--that loiterer in the Dark
+Entry--he had left the corridor by the archway near Little Cloisters; he
+had not gone into the Green Court.
+
+She sat waiting in the darkness.
+
+* * * * *
+
+That afternoon, while Rosamund was in the garden, Mr. Esme Darlington
+was paying a little visit to his old friend and crony, the Dean of
+Welsley. He had known the Dean--well, almost ever since he could
+remember, and the Dean's wife ever since she had married the Dean. His
+delay in returning to town, caused by Rosamund's attractive invitation,
+enabled him to spend an hour at the Deanery, where he had tea in the
+great drawing-room on the first floor, which looked out on the Green
+Court. So pleasant were the Dean and his wife, so serenely flowed the
+conversation, that the hour lengthened out into two hours, and the
+Cathedral chimes announced that it was a quarter to seven before Mr.
+Darlington uncrumpled his length to go. Even then Mrs. Dean begged him
+to stay on a little longer.
+
+"It's such a treat to hear all the interesting gossip of London," she
+said, almost wistfully. "When Dickie"--Dickie was the Dean,--"when
+Dickie was at St. Peter's, Eaton Square, we knew everything that was
+going on, but here in Welsley--well, I often feel rather rusty."
+
+Mr. Darlington paid the appropriate compliment, not in a banal way,
+and then mentioned that at half-past seven he was dining in Little
+Cloisters.
+
+"That delightful creature Mrs. Dion Leith!" exclaimed Mrs. Dean.
+"Dickie's hopelessly in her toils."
+
+"My dear!" began the Dean, in pleased protestation.
+
+But she interrupted him.
+
+"I assure you," she went on to Mr. Darlington, "he is always making
+excuses to see her. She has even influenced him to appoint a new verger,
+a most extraordinary old person, called Thrush, with a nose!"
+
+Mr. Darlington cocked an interrogative eyebrow.
+
+"My darling!" said the Dean. "He's a good old man, very deserving, and
+has recently taken the pledge."
+
+"He's a modified teetotaler!" said his wife to Mr. Darlington, patting
+her husband's arm. "You see what Dickie's coming to. If it goes on he
+will soon be a modified Dean."
+
+It was past seven when they finished talking about Rosamund and Dion,
+when Mr. Darlington at length tore himself delicately away from their
+delightful company, and, warmly wrapped in an overcoat lined with
+unostentatious sable, set out on the short walk to Canon Wilton's house.
+To reach the Canon's house he had to pass through the Dark Entry and
+skirt the garden wall of Little Cloisters.
+
+Now, as he came out of the Dark Entry and stepped into the passage-way,
+which led by the wall and the old house into the great open space of
+green lawns and elm trees round which the dwellings of the canons showed
+their lighted windows to the darkness of the November evening, he was
+stopped by a terrible sound. It came to him from the garden of Little
+Cloisters. It was short, sharp and piercing, so piercing that for an
+instant he felt as if literally it had torn the flesh of his body. He
+had never before heard any sound at all like it; but, when he was able
+to think, he thought, he felt almost certain, that it had come from
+an animal. He shuddered. Always temperamentally averse from any fierce
+demonstrations of feeling, always instinctively restrained, careful and
+intelligently conventional, he was painfully startled and moved by this
+terrible outcry which could only have been caused by intense agony. As
+he believed that the cry had come from an animal, he naturally supposed
+that the agony which had caused it was physical. He was a very humane
+man, and as soon as he had mastered the feeling of cold horror which
+had for a moment held him rigid, he hastened on to the door of Little
+Cloisters and pulled the bell. After a pause which seemed to him long
+the door was opened by Annie, Rosamund's parlor-maid. She presented to
+Mr. Darlington's peering gaze a face full of ignorance and fear.
+
+"What is the matter?" he asked, in a hesitating voice.
+
+"Sir?" said Annie.
+
+"What has happened in the garden?"
+
+"Nothing, sir, that I know of. I have been in the house." She paused,
+then added, with a sort of timorous defiance: "I'm not one as would
+listen, sir."
+
+"Then you didn't hear it?"
+
+"Hear what, sir?"
+
+Her question struck upon Mr. Darlington's native conventionality, and
+made him conscious of the fact that, perhaps almost indiscreetly, he
+was bandying words with a maid-servant. He put up one hand to his beard,
+pulled at it, and then said, almost in his usual voice:
+
+"Is Mrs. Leith in?"
+
+"She's in the garden, sir."
+
+"In the garden?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Is--is Mr. Leith at home?"
+
+"He's just come home, sir, and gone to Mrs. Leith in the garden."
+
+Mr. Darlington stood for a moment pulling his beard and raising and
+lowering his eyebrows. Then he said doubtfully:
+
+"Thank you. I won't disturb them now. I shall be here with Canon Wilton
+at half-past seven."
+
+Annie stood staring at him in silence.
+
+"They--Mr. and Mrs. Leith expect us, I believe?" added Mr. Darlington.
+
+"They haven't said anything to the contrary, sir."
+
+"No?"
+
+Slowly Mr. Darlington turned away, slowly he disappeared into the
+darkness; his head was bent, and he looked older than usual. Annie gazed
+after him. Once she opened her lips as if she were going to call him
+back, but no sound came from them.
+
+"Annie! Annie!" cried a voice in the house behind her.
+
+She turned sharply and confronted Robin's nurse.
+
+"Where's Master Robin?" said the nurse, almost fiercely.
+
+"I don't know. He hasn't come back with master."
+
+"I'm going into the garden," said the nurse.
+
+"For God's sake, don't!" said Annie.
+
+"Why not?" asked the nurse.
+
+Suddenly Annie began to cry. The nurse pulled her in and shut the door
+of the house.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+Rosamund did not know how long she sat in the garden after she had heard
+the footfall in the Dark Entry. Perhaps five minutes, perhaps many more
+had slipped by before she was aware of feeling cold. A chill had gone
+through her mind when she heard the footfall; now her body was chilled.
+She shivered and got up. She must go into the house.
+
+It was now very dark. The path was a pale grayish blur at her feet. On
+her left the shrubs which concealed the house from her showed as a heavy
+morose blackness against the softer and more mysterious blackness of
+the night. The dampness which rose in the garden was like the dreary
+whispering of sad earth voices.
+
+She shivered again.
+
+Then she heard a faltering step on the path beyond the shrubs. It was
+certainly Dion's step. At last they had come back!
+
+With a movement of her shoulders she tried to throw off her depression,
+as if it were something heavy resting upon her, something which a
+physical effort could get rid of. Then she called out in a brisk and
+cheerful voice:
+
+"Dion, I'm here. How late you are! What have you shot?"
+
+It was too late now for the nursery tea, but they had come back and all
+was well.
+
+"Dion!"
+
+The step had stopped on the path and no voice answered her. Nevertheless
+she was certain that it was Dion who had come into the garden. Perhaps
+Robin was with him, perhaps they were going to give her a surprise.
+She waited for an instant. Something within her was hesitating. She
+conquered it, not without an effort, and went round the angle of the
+path. Beyond the shrubs, but not far from them, a man was standing. It
+was Dion. He was alone. It was so dark that Rosamund could not see him
+clearly, but she noticed at once that the outline of his figure looked
+strange. His body seemed to be all awry as if he were standing in an
+unnatural position. She stopped and stared at this body.
+
+"Is anything wrong, Dion?" she asked. "What's the matter? Why do you
+stand like that?"
+
+After her last quick question she heard a long-drawn quivering breath.
+
+"Where's Robin?" she said sharply.
+
+He did not answer. She meant to go up to him; but she did not move.
+
+"Why are you so late? Where's Robin?" he repeated.
+
+"Rosamund--"
+
+"Don't move! Stand there, and tell me what it is."
+
+"Haven't I--always tried to make you happy?"
+
+The words came from the body before her, but she did not know the voice.
+It was Dion's voice, of course. It must be that. But she had never heard
+it before.
+
+"Don't come nearer to me. What have you done?"
+
+"Robin--I have--I have--Robin--my gun----"
+
+The voice failed in the darkness. Rosamund shut her eyes. She had seen
+an angry hand tear down a branch of wild olive. Suddenly she knew. It
+seemed to her that ever since that day long ago in Elis some part of her
+had always prophetically known that Dion was fated to bring terror and
+ruin into her life. This was not true, but now she felt it to be true.
+
+"You've killed Robin," she said, quietly and coldly.
+
+Her brain and heart seemed to stand still, like things staring into an
+immense voice. They had come to the end of their road.
+
+"You've killed Robin," she said again.
+
+"Rosamund----"
+
+The body in front of her moved to come towards her. Then she uttered the
+fearful cry which was heard by Mr. Darlington on his way home from the
+Deanery, and she fled from the body which had slain Robin.
+
+That purely instinctive action was the beginning of Dion's punishment.
+A cry, the movement of a body, and everything which meant life to him,
+everything for which he had lived, was gone. But he followed Rosamund
+with a sort of blind obstinacy, driven as she was by instinct. Dimly he
+knew that he was a man who only merited compassion, all the compassion
+of the world. He had no horror of himself, but only a horror of that
+Fate to which mortals have to submit and which had overtaken him in a
+shining moment of happiness. The gun accident of which his little son
+had been the victim presented itself to his erring mind as a terrific
+stroke from above, or from beyond, falling equally upon father and
+child. He was not responsible for it. The start of a frightened pony,
+its sudden attempt to bolt, the pulling of a rein which had brought the
+animal against him just as he was lifting his gun to fire at a rising
+bird--what were those things? Only the clumsy machinery used by
+implacable Fate to bring about that which had been willed somewhere, far
+off in the dark and the distance.
+
+He must tell Rosamund, he must tell Rosamund.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Annie and the nurse came out to the edge of the broad path which ran
+along the front of the house and peered into the darkness. Annie was
+crying and holding on to the nurse, whose almost fierce determination
+faded as she confronted the mystery of the night which hid her master
+and mistress.
+
+"H'sh, Annie," she whispered. "Where can they be? Listen, I tell you!"
+
+Annie strove to choke down her sobs.
+
+"I can hear--some one," whispered the nurse, after a moment. "Don't you.
+Listen, I tell you! Right over by the wall near the Bishop's!"
+
+The sound of steps indeed came to them through the darkness. Annie broke
+away from the nurse.
+
+"I'm frightened! I'm frightened! I don't know what's come to them," she
+whispered through her teeth, resisting the impulse to cry out. "Come in,
+Nurse, for God's sake!"
+
+She shrank into the house. The nurse stood where she was for a moment,
+but when she heard the steps a little nearer to her she, too, was
+overcome by fear and followed Annie trembling, shutting the door behind
+her.
+
+Exactly at half-past seven Mr. Darlington and Canon Wilton were outside
+the door of Little Cloisters and Mr. Darlington pulled the bell. Always
+the most discreet of men, he had not mentioned to his host the terrible
+cry he had heard in the Leiths' garden, or his short colloquy with
+Annie. He was seriously disturbed in mind, but, being a trained man of
+the world and one who prided himself upon his powers of self-control, he
+had concealed this unpleasant fact from the Canon, and had talked quite
+agreeably during their little walk between the two houses. The sound of
+that dreadful cry still seemed to shudder through his flesh, but it was
+not for him to pry into the private lives of others, even of those whom
+he knew intimately, and had a great regard for. He hoped all was
+well with his dear young friends, There might be some quite simple
+explanation of that cry. He fervently hoped there was. In any case it
+was not for him to ask questions, or to--
+
+"They're a long while answering the bell," said Canon Wilton, in
+his strong, earnest voice. "Hadn't you better give it another tug,
+Darlington?"
+
+Mr. Darlington started.
+
+"H'm--ha!"
+
+He raised his hand and pulled the bell a second time.
+
+"That's better," said the Canon, as he heard inside the house a long
+tinkle. "Annie's bound to come now. As a rule she's very quick in
+answering the door. Among her many virtues, Mrs. Leith counts that of
+being a first-rate housewife. She trains her maids well."
+
+"Does she?" murmured Mr. Darlington abstractedly, bending forward till
+he seemed almost to be listening at the door. "Does she? I hear some one
+coming. H'm!"
+
+He straightened himself. The door opened and Annie appeared. When she
+saw the two men she drew back quickly to let them pass in. Canon Wilton
+said kindly: "Good evening, Annie."
+
+"Oh, sir," said Annie, and began to cry audibly.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked the Canon, surprised.
+
+They were now in the little oak paneled hall, and by the light of the
+lamp they could see the tears running down the flushed face of the maid.
+"Is anything wrong?" said the Canon.
+
+"Oh, sir, I'm so glad you've come! Oh, we don't know what it is!"
+
+At this moment Robin's nurse showed herself on the staircase.
+
+"For God's sake, sir," she said, with trembling lips, "do go into the
+garden!"
+
+"Why?" said Canon Wilton, in a loud, firm voice.
+
+"Mr. and Mrs. Leith are both there, sir. They've been there this long
+time. Mr. Leith he's come back from the shooting without Master Robin.
+Oh, there's something wrong, sir, there's something wrong!"
+
+"Stay here for a moment, Darlington," said the Canon, with a sudden,
+almost fiery, decision. "I'll go at once and see what's the matter."
+
+But Mr. Darlington laid a bony hand on his friend's arm.
+
+"I'll come with you, Wilton. I'm--I'm afraid it's something very bad."
+
+He lowered his voice almost to a whisper in saying the last words.
+
+The Canon formed "Why?" with his lips.
+
+"Just now, as I was passing the garden here coming back from the
+Deanery, I heard a most dreadful cry. I thought at the time that it came
+from an animal, but--now----"
+
+The Canon stared at him almost sternly.
+
+"We'd better not waste time," he said. "I wish you'd gone in then."
+
+And he turned bruskly. He had opened the door, and was about to step on
+to the broad path which divided the front of the house from the lawn,
+when he heard steps approaching swiftly on the gravel.
+
+"Some one coming!" he said. "Stop where you are, Darlington. I believe
+its . . ."
+
+Before he could finish his sentence Rosamund came upon him out of
+the darkness. Her face was distorted, so distorted that he scarcely
+recognized it. It seemed to have shrunk and sharpened, and it had the
+look of fierceness which is characteristic of the faces of starving
+people. She put out both her hands as she came up to him, pushed him
+with violence into the house, and followed him.
+
+"Lock the door!" she whispered. "Lock it! Lock it!"
+
+"But----"
+
+Her voice rose. She seemed savage with fear.
+
+"Lock it, I tell you!"
+
+A long arm shot out and a bony hand turned the key in the door.
+
+"It's the only thing to be done for the moment," said Mr. Darlington to
+the Canon. "She's mad with fear."
+
+Both the maids had disappeared, terrified by the face of their mistress.
+Rosamund caught hold of the stair-rail and began to hurry upstairs, but
+Mr. Darlington followed her and seized her by the arm.
+
+"Rosamund! Rosamund! What is it?"
+
+She turned.
+
+"I'm going to find Robin. That man's killed Robin! Keep him out! Keep
+him away from me!"
+
+A dreadful surreptitious expression made her face hideous. She leaned
+forward, nodding her head, and whispered in Mr. Darlington's ear:
+
+"_You_ keep him away from me while I find Robin. He's killed Robin!"
+
+Her whole body began to shake. Mr. Darlington put one arm round her.
+
+"But, Rosamund----"
+
+Below, the handle of the door leading to the garden was turned, the door
+was shaken, and there came a knocking on the wood.
+
+Then Mr. Darlington heard again the cry which had come to him that
+evening as he passed the garden of Little Cloisters. His arm dropped.
+
+Rosamund went frantically up the stairs and disappeared on the dark
+landing above.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV -- THE UNKNOWN GOD
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+In June of the following year two young Englishmen, who were making a
+swift tour of the near East, were sitting one evening in a public garden
+at Pera. The west wind, which had been blowing all day, had gone down
+with the coming of night. The air was deliciously warm, but not sultry.
+The travelers had dined well, but not too well, and were ready to
+be happy, and to see in others the reflection of their own contented
+holiday mood. It was delightful to be "on the loose," without
+responsibilities, and with a visit to Brusa to look forward to in
+the immediate future. They sat under the stars, sipped their coffee,
+listened to the absurd music played by a fifth-rate band in a
+garishly-lighted kiosk, and watched with interest the coming and going
+of the crowd of Turks and Perotes, with whom mingled from time to time
+foreign sailors from ships lying off the entrance to the Golden Horn
+and a few tourists from the hotels of Pera. Just behind them sat their
+guide, a thin and eager Levantine, half-Greek and half-Armenian, who,
+for some inscrutable reason, declared that his name was John.
+
+There was little romance in this garden set in the midst of the noisy
+European quarter of Constantinople. The music was vulgar; Greek waiters
+with dissipated faces ran to and fro carrying syrups and liqueurs;
+corpulent Turks sat heavily over glasses of lager beer; overdressed
+young men of enigmatic appearance, with oily thick hair, shifty eyes,
+and hands covered with cheap rings, swaggered about smoking cigarettes
+and talking in loud, ostentatious voices. Some women were there, fat and
+garish for the most part, liberally powdered and painted, and crowned
+with hats at which Paris would have stared almost in fear. There were
+also children, dark, even swarthy, with bold eyes, shrill voices,
+immodest bearing, who looked as if they had long since received the ugly
+freedom of the streets, and learned lessons no children ought to know.
+
+Presently the band stopped playing and there was a general movement of
+the crowd. People got up from the little tables and began to disperse.
+"John" leaned forward to his employers, and in a quick and rattling
+voice informed them that a "fust-rate" variety entertainment was about
+to take place in another part of the garden. Would they come to see
+it? There would be beautiful women, very fine girls such as can only be
+gazed on in Constantinople, taking part in the "show."
+
+The young men agreed to "have a look at it," and followed John to
+a place where many round tables and chairs were set out before a
+ramshackle wooden barrack of a theatre, under the shade of some
+pepper trees, through whose tresses the stars peeped at a throng and a
+performance which must surely have surprised them.
+
+The band, or a portion of it, was again at work, playing an inane
+melody, and upon the small stage two remarkably well-developed and
+aquiline-featured women of mature age, dressed as very young children
+in white socks, short skirts which displayed frilled drawers, and muslin
+bonnets adorned with floating blue and pink ribbons, swayed to and fro
+and joined their cracked voices in a duet, the French words of which
+seemed to exhale a sort of _fade_ obscenity. While they swayed and
+jigged heavily, showing their muscular legs to the staring audience,
+they gazed eagerly about, seeking an admiration from which they might
+draw profit when their infantile task was over. Presently they retired,
+running skittishly, taking small leaps into the air, and aimlessly
+blowing kisses to the night.
+
+"Very fine girls!" murmured John to his young patrons. "They make much
+money in Pera."
+
+One of the young men shrugged his shoulders with a smile.
+
+"Get us two Turkish coffees, John!" he said. Then he turned to his
+companion. "I say, Ellis, have you noticed an English feller--at least
+I take him to be English--who's sitting over there close to the stage,
+sideways to us?"
+
+"No; where is he?" asked his companion.
+
+"You see that old Turk with the double chin?"
+
+"Rather."
+
+"Just beyond him, sitting with a guide who's evidently Greek."
+
+"I've got him."
+
+"Watch him. I never saw such a face."
+
+A blowzy young woman, in orange color and green, with short
+tinsel-covered skirts, bounded wearily on to the stage, smiling, and
+began to sing:
+
+     "Je suis une boite de surprises!
+         O la la! O la la!
+     Je suis une boite de surprises."
+
+Ellis looked across at the man to whom his attention had been drawn.
+This man was seated by a little table on which were a siphon, a bottle
+of iced water, and a tall tumbler nearly half-full of a yellow liquid.
+He was smoking a large dark-colored cigar which he now and then took
+from his mouth with a hand that was very thin and very brown. His face
+was dark and browned by the sun, but looked startlingly haggard, as if
+it were pale or even yellowish under the sunburn. About the eyes
+there were large wrinkles, spraying downwards over the cheek bones and
+invading the cheeks. He wore a mustache, and was well-dressed in a tweed
+suit. But his low collar was not very fresh, and his tie was arranged in
+a slovenly fashion and let his collar stud be seen. He sat with his
+legs crossed, staring at the grimacing woman on the stage with a sort of
+horribly icy intentness. The expression about his lips and eyes was more
+than bitter; it showed a frozen fierceness.
+
+On the other side of the table was seated a lean, meager guide,
+obviously one of those Greeks who haunt the quays of Constantinople
+on the look out for arriving travelers. Now and then this Greek leaned
+forward and, with a sort of servile and anxious intelligence, spoke to
+his companion. He received no reply. The other man went on smoking and
+staring at the _boite de surprises_ as if he were alone. And somehow he
+seemed actually to be alone, encompassed by a frightful solitude.
+
+"A tragic face, isn't it?" said the man who had first spoken.
+
+"By Jove it is!" returned the officer. "I wonder that woman can go on
+singing so close to it."
+
+"Probably she hasn't seen him. How many years do you give him?"
+
+"Thirty-eight or forty."
+
+"He isn't out for pleasure, that's certain."
+
+"Pleasure! One would suppose he'd been keeping house with Medusa
+and--the deuce, she's seen him!"
+
+At this moment the singer looked towards the stranger, quavered,
+faltered, nearly broke down, then, as if with an effort, raised her
+voice more shrilly and defiantly, exaggerated her meaningless gestures
+and looked away. A moment later she finished her song and turned to
+strut off the stage. As she did so she shot a sort of fascinated glance
+at the dark man. He took his cigar from his mouth and puffed the smoke
+towards her, probably without knowing that he did so. With a startled
+jerk she bounded into the wings.
+
+At this moment John returned with two cups of coffee.
+
+"You know everything, John. Tell us who that man over there is," said
+Ellis, indicating the stranger.
+
+John sent a devouring glance past the old Turk's double chin, a glance
+which, as it were, swallowed at one gulp the dark man, his guide, the
+siphon, the water-bottle and the glass partially full of the yellow
+liquid.
+
+"I dunno him. He is noo."
+
+"Is he English?"
+
+"Sure!" returned John, almost with a sound of contempt.
+
+He never made a mistake about any man's nationality, could even tell
+a Spanish Jew from a Portuguese Jew on a dark night at ten yards'
+distance.
+
+"I tell you who he is later. I know the guide, a damned fool and a rogue
+of a Greek that has been in prison. He robs all his people what take
+him."
+
+"You needn't bother," said Ellis curtly.
+
+"Of course not. Shut up, John, and don't run down your brothers in
+crime."
+
+"That man my brother!"
+
+John upraised two filthy ringed hands.
+
+"That dirty skunk my brother! That son of--"
+
+"That'll do, John! Be quiet."
+
+"To-morrow I till you all about the gentleman. Here is another fine
+girl! I know her very well."
+
+A languid lady, with a face painted as white as a wall, large scarlet
+lips, eyes ringed with bluish black, and a gleaming and trailing black
+gown which clung closely to her long and snake-like body, writhed on to
+the stage, looking carefully sinister.
+
+The dark man swallowed his drink, got up and made his way to the exit
+from the garden. He passed close to the two young men, followed by
+his Greek, at whom John cast a glance of scowling contempt, mingled,
+however, with very definite inquiry.
+
+"By Jove! He's almost spoilt my evening," said Ellis. "But we made a
+mistake, Vernon. He isn't anything like forty."
+
+"No; more like thirty under a cloud."
+
+"By the look of things I should guess there are plenty of people under
+a cloud in Pera. But that English feller stands out even here. This girl
+is certainly a first-class wriggler, if she's nothing else."
+
+They did not mention the stranger again that night. But John had not
+forgotten him, and when he arrived at their hotel next day he at once
+opened his capacious mouth and let out the following information:
+
+"The gentleman's name is Denton, his other name is Mervyn, he is three
+days in Constantinople, he lives in Hughes's Hotel in Pera, a very poor
+house where chic people they never goes, he is out all day and always
+walkin', he will not take a carriage, and he is never tired, Nicholas
+Gounaris--the Greek guide--he is droppin' but the gentleman he does not
+mind, he only sayin' if you cannot walk find me another guide what can,
+every night he is out, too, and he is goin' to Stamboul when it is dark,
+he is afraid of nothin' and goin' where travelers they never go, one
+night Gounaris he had to show the traveler--"
+
+But at this point Ellis shut John up.
+
+"That'll do," he observed. "You're a diligent rascal, John. One must
+say that. But we aren't a couple of spies, and we don't want to hear any
+more about that feller."
+
+And John, without bearing any malice, went off to complete his
+arrangements for the journey to Brusa.
+
+Two days later, Mrs. Clarke, who was at Buyukderer in a villa she had
+taken for the summer months, but who had come into Constantinople to do
+some shopping, saw "Mervyn Denton" in a side street close to the British
+Embassy. Those distressed eyes of hers were very observant. There were
+many people in the street, and "Denton," who was alone, was several
+yards away from her, and was walking with his back towards her; but she
+immediately recognized him, quickened her steps till she was close to
+him, and then said:
+
+"Dion Leith!"
+
+Dion heard the husky voice and turned round. He did not say anything,
+but he took off the soft hat he was wearing. Mrs. Clarke stared at him
+with the unself-conscious directness which was characteristic of her.
+She saw Dion for the first time since the tragedy which had changed his
+life, but she had written to him more than once. Her last letter had
+come from Buyukderer. He had answered it, but he had not told her where
+he was, had not even hinted to her that he might come to Constantinople.
+Nevertheless, she did not now show any surprise. She just looked at him
+steadily, absorbed all the change in him swiftly, and addressed herself
+to the new man who stood there before her.
+
+"Come with me to the Hotel de Paris. I'm spending the night there, and
+go back to-morrow to Buyukderer. I had something to do in town."
+
+She had not given him her hand, and he did not attempt to take it. He
+put on his hat, turned and walked at her side. Neither of them spoke
+a word until they had come into the uproar of the Grande Rue, which
+surrounded them with a hideous privacy. Then Mrs. Clarke said;
+
+"Where are you staying?"
+
+"At Hughes's Hotel."
+
+"I never heard of it."
+
+"It's in Brusa Street. It's cheap."
+
+"And horrible," she thought.
+
+But she did not say so.
+
+"I have only been here three days," Dion added.
+
+"Do you remember that I once said to you I knew you would come back to
+Constantinople?"
+
+For a moment his face was distorted. When she saw that she looked away
+gravely, at the glittering shops and at the Perotes who were passing
+by with the slow and lounging walk which they affect in the Grande Rue.
+Presently she heard him say:
+
+"You were right. It was all arranged. It was all planned out. Even then
+I believe I knew it would be so, that I should come back here."
+
+"Why have you come?"
+
+"I don't know," he answered, and his voice, which had been hard and
+fierce, became suddenly dull.
+
+"He really believes that," she thought.
+
+"Here is the hotel," she said. "I'm all alone. Jimmy has been out, but
+has had to go back to Eton. I wish you had seen him."
+
+"Oh no!" said Dion, almost passionately.
+
+They went up in a lift, worked by a Montenegrin boy with a big round
+forehead, to her sitting-room on the second floor. It was large, bare
+and clean, with white walls and awnings at the windows. She rang the
+bell. A Corsican waiter came and she ordered tea. The roar of the street
+noises penetrated into the shadowy room through the open windows,
+and came to Dion like heat. He remembered the silence of Claridge's.
+Suddenly his head began to swim. It seemed to him that his life, all of
+it that he had lived till that moment, was spinning round him, and that,
+as it spun, it gave out a deafening noise and glittered. He sat down on
+a chair which was close to a small table, laid his arms on the table,
+and hid his face against them. Still the deafening noise continued. The
+sum of it was surely made up of the uproar of the Grand Rue with the
+uproar of his spinning life added to it. He saw yellow balls ringed with
+pale blue rapidly receding from his shut eyes.
+
+Mrs. Clarke looked at him for a moment; then she went into the adjoining
+bedroom and shut the door behind her. She did not come back till the
+waiter knocked and told her that tea was ready. Then she opened the
+door. She had taken off her hat and gloves, and looked very white and
+cool, and very composed.
+
+Dion was standing near the windows. The waiter, who had enormously thick
+mustaches, and who evidently shaved in the evening instead of in the
+morning, was going out at the farther door. He shut it rather loudly.
+
+"Every one makes a noise in Pera. It's _de rigueur_," said Mrs. Clarke,
+coming to the tea-table.
+
+"Do you know," said Dion, "I used to think _you_ looked punished?"
+
+"Punished--I!"
+
+There was a sudden defiance in her voice which he had never heard in it
+before. He came up to the table.
+
+"Yes. In London I used to think you had a punished look and even a
+haunted look. Wasn't that ridiculous? I didn't know then what it meant
+to be punished, or to be haunted. I hadn't enough imagination to know,
+not nearly enough. But some one or something's seen to it that I shall
+know all about punishment and haunting. So I shall never be absurd about
+you again."
+
+After a pause she said:
+
+"I wonder why you thought that about me?"
+
+"I don't know. It just came into my head."
+
+"Well, sit down and let us have our tea."
+
+Dion sat down mechanically, and Mrs. Clarke poured out the tea.
+
+"I wish it was Buyukderer," she said.
+
+"Oh, I like the uproar."
+
+"No, you don't--you don't. Pera is spurious, and all its voices are
+spurious voices. To-morrow morning, before I go back, you and I will go
+to Eyub."
+
+"To the dust and the silence and the cypresses--O God!" said Dion.
+
+He got up from his chair. He was beginning to tremble. Was it coming
+upon him at last then, the utter breakdown which through all these
+months he had--somehow--kept at a distance? Determined not to shake,
+he exerted his will violently, till he felt as if he were with dreadful
+difficulty holding, keeping together, a multitude of living, struggling
+things, which were trying to get away out of his grasp. And these living
+things were the multitudinous parts of the whole which was himself.
+
+All that now was had been foreshadowed. There had been writing on the
+wall.
+
+"I am grateful to you for several things. I'm not going to give you the
+list now. Some day, perhaps, I shall tell you what they are . . . among
+the cypresses of Eyub."
+
+She had said that to him in London, and her voice had been fatalistic as
+she spoke; and in the street that same day, on his way home, the voice
+of the boy crying the last horror had sounded to him like a voice from
+the sea, a strange and sad cry lifted up between Europe and Asia. And
+now----
+
+"How did you know?" he said. "How did you know that we should be here
+together some day?"
+
+"Sit down. You must sit down."
+
+She put her languid and imperative hand on his wrist, and he sat down.
+He took her hand and put it against his forehead for a moment. But that
+was no use. For her hand seemed to add fever to his fever.
+
+"I have seen you standing amongst graves in the shadow of cypress
+trees," he said. "In England I saw you like that. But--how did you
+know?"
+
+"Drink your tea. Don't hurry. We've got such a long time."
+
+"I have. I have all the days and nights--every hour of them--at my own
+disposal. I'm the freest man on earth, I suppose. No work, no ties."
+
+"You've given up everything?"
+
+"Oh, of course. That is, the things that were still left to me to give
+up. They didn't mean much."
+
+"Eat something," she said, in a casual voice, pushing a plate of
+delicious little cakes towards him.
+
+"Thank you."
+
+He took one and ate. He regained self-control, but he knew that at any
+moment, if anything unusual happened, or if he dared to think, or to
+talk, seriously about the horror of his life, he would probably go down
+with a crash into an abyss in which all of his manhood, every scrap of
+his personal dignity, would be utterly lost. And still almost blindly
+he held on to certain things in the blackness which encompassed him.
+He still wished to play the man, and though in bitterness he had tried
+sometimes to sink down in degradation, his body--or so it had seemed to
+him--had resisted the will of the injured soul, which had said to it,
+"Go down into the dirt; seek satisfaction there. Your sanity and your
+purity of life have availed you nothing. From them you have had no
+reward. Then seek the rewards of the other life. Thousands of men enjoy
+them. Join that crowd, and put all the anemic absurdities of so-called
+goodness behind you."
+
+He had almost come to hate the state he conceived of as goodness; yet
+the other thing, its opposite, evil, he instinctively rebelled against
+and even almost feared. The habit of a life-time was not to be broken in
+a day, or even in many days. Often he had thought of himself as walking
+in nothingness, because he rejected evil.
+
+Goodness had ruthlessly cast him out; and so far he had made no other
+friend, had taken no other comrade to his bruised and bleeding heart.
+
+Mrs. Clarke began to talk to him quietly. She talked abut herself, and
+he knew that she did this not because of egoism, but because delicately
+she wished to give him a full opportunity for recovery. She had seen
+just where he was, and she had understood his recoil from the abyss. Now
+she wished, perhaps, to help him to draw back farther from it, to draw
+back so far that he would no longer see it or be aware of it.
+
+So she talked of herself, of her life at Buyukderer in the summer, and
+in Pera in the autumn and spring.
+
+"I don't go out to Buyukderer till the middle of May," she said, "and I
+come back into town at the end of September."
+
+"You manage to stand Pera for some months every year?" said Dion,
+listening at first with difficulty, and because he was making a
+determined effort.
+
+"Yes. An Englishwoman--even a woman like me--can't live in Stamboul.
+And Pera, odious as it is, is in Constantinople, in the city which has a
+spell, though you mayn't feel it yet."
+
+She was silent for a moment, and they heard the roar from the Grande
+Rue, that street which is surely the noisiest in all Europe. Hearing
+it, Dion thought of the silence of the Precincts at Welsley. That sweet
+silence had cast him out. Hell must be full of roaring noises and
+of intense activities. Then Mrs. Clarke went on talking. There was
+something very feminine and gently enticing in her voice, which
+resembled no other voice ever heard by Dion. He felt kindness at the
+back of her talk, the wish to alleviate his misery if only for a
+moment, to do what she could for him. She could do nothing, of course.
+Nevertheless he began to feel grateful to her. She was surely unlike
+other women, incapable of bearing a grudge. For he had not been very
+"nice" to her in the days when he was happy and she was in difficulties.
+At this moment he vaguely exaggerated his lack of "niceness," and
+perhaps also her pardoning temperament. In truth, he was desperately
+in need of a touch from the magic wand of sympathy. Believing, or even
+perhaps knowing, that to the incurably wounded man palliatives are of no
+lasting avail, he had deliberately fled from them, and gone among those
+who had no reason to bother about him. But now he was grateful.
+
+"Go on talking," he said once, when she stopped speaking. And she
+continued talking about her life. She said nothing more about Jimmy.
+
+The Corsican waiter came and took away the tea things noisily. Her spell
+was broken. For a moment Dion felt dazed.
+
+He got up.
+
+"I ought to go," he said.
+
+"Must you?"
+
+"Must!--Oh no! My time is my own, and always will be, I suppose."
+
+"You have thrown up everything?"
+
+"What else could I do? The man who killed his own son! How could I stay
+in London, go among business men who knew me, talk about investments to
+clients? Suppose you had killed Jimmy!"
+
+There was a long silence. Then he said:
+
+"I've given up my name. I call myself Mervyn Denton. I saw the name in a
+novel I opened on a railway bookstall."
+
+She got up and came near to him quietly.
+
+"This is all wrong," she said.
+
+"What is?"
+
+"All you are doing, the way you are taking it all."
+
+"What other way is there of taking such a thing?"
+
+"Will you come with me to Eyub to-morrow?"
+
+"It was written long ago that I am to go there with you. I'm quite sure
+of that."
+
+"I'll tell you what I mean there to-morrow."
+
+She looked towards the window.
+
+"It's like the roar of hell," he said.
+
+And he went away.
+
+That night Mrs. Clarke dined alone downstairs in the restaurant. The
+cooking at the Hotel de Paris was famous, and attracted many men from
+the Embassies. Presently Cyril Vane, one of the secretaries at the
+British Embassy, came in to dine. He had with him a young Turkish
+gentleman, who was called away by an agent from the Palace in the middle
+of dinner. Vane, thus left alone, presently got up and came to Mrs.
+Clarke's table.
+
+"May I sit down and talk to you for a little?" he said, with a manner
+that testified to their intimacy. "My guest has deserted me."
+
+"Yes, do. Tell the waiter to bring the rest of your dinner here."
+
+"But I have finished."
+
+"Light your cigar then."
+
+"If you don't mind."
+
+They talked for a few minutes about the things of every day and the
+little world they both lived in on the Bosporus; then Mrs. Clarke said:
+
+"I met a friend from England unexpectedly to-day."
+
+"Did you?"
+
+"A man called Dion Leith."
+
+"Dion Leith?" repeated Vane.
+
+He looked at her earnestly.
+
+"Now wait a moment!"
+
+His large, cool blue eyes became meditative.
+
+"It's on the edge of my mind who that is, and yet I can't remember. I
+don't know him, but I'm sure I know of him."
+
+"He fought in the South African War."
+
+Suddenly Vane leaned forward. He was frowning.
+
+"I've got it! He fought, came back with the D.C.M., and only a few days
+afterwards killed his only child, a son, out shooting. I remember the
+whole thing now, the inquest at which he was entirely exonerated and the
+rumors about his wife. She's a beautiful woman, they say."
+
+"Very beautiful."
+
+"She took it very badly, didn't she?"
+
+"What do you mean by very badly?"
+
+"Didn't she bear very hard on him?"
+
+"She couldn't endure to see him, or to have him near her. Is that very
+wonderful?"
+
+"You stand up for her then?"
+
+"She was first and foremost a mother."
+
+"Do you know," Vane said rather dryly, "you are the only woman I
+never hear speak against other women. But when the whole thing was an
+accident?"
+
+"We can't always be quite fair, or quite reasonable, when a terrible
+shock comes to us."
+
+"It's a problem, a terrible problem of the affections," Vane said. "Had
+she loved her husband? Do you know?"
+
+"I know that he loved her very much," said Mrs. Clarke. "He is here
+under an assumed name."
+
+Vane looked openly surprised and even, for a moment, rather disdainful.
+
+"But then----" He paused.
+
+"Why did I give him away?"
+
+"Well--yes."
+
+"Because I wish to force him to face things fully and squarely. It's his
+only chance."
+
+"Won't he be angry?"
+
+"But I don't mind that."
+
+"You've had a reason in telling me," said Vane quietly. "What is it?"
+
+"Come up to my sitting-room. We'll have coffee there."
+
+"Willingly. I feel your spell even when you're weaving it for another
+man's sake."
+
+Mrs. Clarke did not reject the compliment. She only looked at Vane, and
+said:
+
+"Come."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+In the morning Mrs. Clarke sent a messenger to Hughes's Hotel asking
+Dion to meet her at the landing-place on the right of the Galata Bridge
+at a quarter to eleven.
+
+"We will go to Eyub by caique," she wrote, "and lunch at a Turkish cafe
+I know close to the mosque."
+
+She drove to the bridge. When she came in sight of it she saw Dion
+standing on it alone, looking down on the crowded water-way. He was
+leaning on the railing, and his right cheek rested on the palm of his
+brown hand. Mrs. Clarke smiled faintly as she realized that this man who
+was waiting for her had evidently forgotten all about her.
+
+She dismissed the carriage, paid the toll and walked on to the bridge.
+As usual there was a crowd of pedestrians passing to and fro from Galata
+to Stamboul and from Stamboul to Galata. She mingled with it, went up to
+Dion and stood near him without uttering a word. For perhaps two minutes
+she stood thus before he noticed her. Then he turned and sent her a
+hard, almost defiant glance before he recognized who his companion was.
+
+"Oh, I didn't know it was----Why didn't you speak? Is it time to go? I
+meant to be at the landing."
+
+He spoke like a man who had been a long way off, and who returned weary
+and almost dazed from that distance. He looked at his watch.
+
+"Please forgive me for putting you to the trouble of coming to find me."
+
+"You needn't ever ask me to forgive you for anything. Don't let us
+bother each other with all the silly little things that worry the fools.
+We've got beyond all that long ago. There's my caique."
+
+She made a signal with her hand. Two Albanians below saluted her.
+
+"Shall we go at once? Or would you rather stay here a little longer?"
+
+"Let us go. I was only looking at the water."
+
+He turned and sent a long glance to Stamboul.
+
+"Your city!" he said.
+
+"I shall take you."
+
+For the first time that day he looked at her intimately, and his look
+said:
+
+"Why do you trouble about me?"
+
+They went down, got into the caique, and were taken by the turmoil of
+the Golden Horn. Among the innumerable caiques, the steamboats, the
+craft of all kinds, they went out into the strong sunshine, guarded
+on the one hand by the crowding, discolored houses of Galata rising to
+Pera, on the other hand by the wooden dwellings and the enormous mosques
+of Stamboul. The voices of life pursued them over the water and they sat
+in silence side by side. Dion made no social attempt to entertain his
+companion. Had she not just said to him that long ago they had gone
+beyond all the silly little things that worry the fools? In the midst
+of the fierce activity and the riot of noise which marks out the
+Golden Horn from all other water-ways, they traveled towards emptiness,
+silence, the desolation on the hill near the sacred place of the Turks,
+where each new Sultan is girded with the sword of Osman, and where the
+standard-bearer of the Prophet sleeps in the tomb that was seen in a
+vision.
+
+In the strong heat of noon they left the caique and walked slowly
+towards the hill which rises to the north-east, where the dark towers of
+the cypresses watch over the innumerable graves. Mrs. Clarke had put up
+a sun umbrella. Her face was protected by a thin white veil. She wore a
+linen dress, pale gray in color, with white lines on it, and long
+loose gloves of suede. She looked extraordinarily thin. Her unshining,
+curiously colorless hair was partly covered by a small hat of burnt
+straw, turned sharply and decisively up on the left side and trimmed
+with a broad riband of old gold. Dion remembered that he had thought of
+her once as a vision seen in water. Now he was with her in the staring
+definite clearness of a land dried by the heats of summer and giving to
+them its dust. And she was at home in this aridity. In the dust he was
+aware of the definiteness of her. Since the blackness had overtaken him
+people had meant to him less than shadows gliding on a wall mean to a
+joyous man. Often he had observed them, even sharply and with a sort of
+obstinate persistence; he had been trying to force them to become real
+to him. Invariably he had failed in his effort. Mrs. Clarke was real to
+him as she walked in silence beside him, between the handsome railed-in
+mausoleums which line the empty roads from the water's edge almost to
+the mosque of the Conqueror. A banal phrase came to his lips, "You are
+in your element here." But he held it back, remembering that they walked
+in the midst of dust.
+
+Leaving the mosque they ascended the hill and passed the Tekkeh of the
+dancing dervishes. All around them were the Turkish graves with their
+leaning headstones, or their headstones fallen and lying prone in the
+light flaky earth above the smoldering corpses of the dead. Here and
+there tight bunches of flowers were placed upon the graves. Gaunt
+shadows from old cypresses fell over some of them, defining the
+sunlight. Below was the narrowing sea, the shallow north-west arm of the
+Golden Horn, which stretches to Kiathareh, where are the sweet waters of
+Europe, and to Kiahat Haneh.
+
+"We'll sit here," said Mrs. Clarke presently.
+
+And she sat down, with the folding ease almost of an Oriental, on the
+warm earth, and leaned against the fissured trunk of a cypress.
+
+Casually she had seemed to choose the resting-place, but she had chosen
+it well. More times than she could count she had come to that exact
+place, had leaned against that cypress and looked down the Golden
+Horn to the divided city, one-half of which she loved as she loved few
+things, one-half of which she endured for the sake of the other.
+
+"From here," she said to Dion, "I can feel Stamboul."
+
+He had lain down near to her sideways and rested his cheek on his hand.
+The lower half of his body was in sunshine, but the cypress threw its
+shadow over his head and shoulders. As Mrs. Clarke spoke he looked
+down the Golden Horn to the Turkish city, and his eyes were held by
+the minarets of its mosques. Seldom had he looked at a minaret without
+thinking of prayer. He thought of prayer now, and then of his dead
+child, of the woman he had called wife, and of the end of his happiness.
+The thought came to him:
+
+"I was kept safe in the midst of the dangers of war for a reason; and
+that reason was that I might go back to England and kill my son."
+
+And yet every day men went up into these minarets and called upon other
+men to bow themselves and pray.
+
+God is great. . . .
+
+In the sunlit silence of the vast cemetery the wheels of Dion's life
+seemed for a moment to cease from revolving.
+
+God is great--great in His power to inflict misery upon men. And so pray
+to Him! Mount upon the minarets, go up high, till you are taken by the
+blue, till, at evening, you are nearer to the stars than other men,
+and pray to Him and proclaim His glory. For He is the repository of the
+power to cover you with misery as with a garment, and to lay you even
+with the dust. Pray then--pray! Unless the garment is upon you, unless
+the dust is already about you!
+
+Dion lay on the warm earth and looked at the distant minarets, and
+smiled at the self-seeking slave-instinct in men, which men sought to
+glorify, to elevate into a virtue.
+
+"Why are you smiling?" said a husky voice above.
+
+He did not look up, but he answered:
+
+"Because I was looking at those towers of prayer."
+
+"The minarets."
+
+She was silent for a few minutes; after a while she said:
+
+"You remember the first time you met me?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"I was in difficulties then. They culminated in the scandal of my
+divorce case. Tell me, how did you think I faced all that trouble?"
+
+"With marvelous courage."
+
+"In what other way can thoroughbred people face an enemy? Suppose I had
+lost instead of won, suppose Jimmy had been taken from me, do you think
+it would have broken me?"
+
+"I can't imagine anything breaking you," said Dion. "But I don't believe
+you ever pray."
+
+"What has that to do with it?"
+
+"I believe the people who pray are the potential cowards."
+
+"Do you pray?"
+
+"Not now. That's why I was smiling when I looked at the minarets. But I
+don't make a virtue of it. I have nothing to pray for."
+
+"Well then, if you have put away prayer, that means you are going to
+rely on yourself."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"For all the sustaining you will need in the future. The people commonly
+called good think of God as something outside themselves to which they
+can apply in moments of fear, necessity and sorrow. If you have really
+got beyond that conception you must rely on yourself, find in yourself
+all you need."
+
+"But I need nothing--you don't understand."
+
+"You nearly told me yesterday."
+
+"Perhaps if you hadn't gone out of the room I should have been obliged
+to tell you, but not because I wished to."
+
+"I understood that. That is why I went out of the room and left you
+alone."
+
+For the first time Dion looked up at her. She had lifted her veil, and
+her haggard, refined face was turned towards him.
+
+"Thank you," he said.
+
+At that moment he liked her as he had never liked her in the past.
+
+"Can you tell me now because you wish to?"
+
+"Here among the graves?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Again he looked at the distant minarets lifted towards the blue near the
+way of the sea. But he said nothing. She shut her sun umbrella, laid it
+on the ground beside her, pulled off her gloves and spread them out on
+her knees slowly. She seemed to be hesitating; for she looked down and
+for a moment she knitted her brows. Then she said;
+
+"Tell me why you came to Constantinople."
+
+"I couldn't."
+
+"If I hadn't met you in the street by chance, would you have come to see
+me?"
+
+"I don't think I should."
+
+"And yet it was I who willed you to come here."
+
+Dion did not seem surprised. There was something remote in him which
+perhaps could not draw near to such a simple commonplace feeling in that
+moment. He had gone out a long way, a very long way, from the simple
+ordinary emotions which come upon, or beset, normal men living normal
+lives.
+
+"Did you?" he asked. "Why?"
+
+"I thought I could do something for you. I began last night."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Doing something for you. I told an acquaintance of mine called Vane,
+who is attached to the British Embassy, that you were here."
+
+A fierce flush came into Dion's face.
+
+"I said you would probably come out to Buyukderer," she continued, "and
+that I wanted to bring you to the summer Embassy and to introduce you to
+the Ambassador and Lady Ingleton."
+
+Dion sat up and pressed his hands palm downwards on the ground.
+
+"I shall not go. How could you say that I was here? You know I had
+dropped my own name."
+
+"I gave it back to you deliberately."
+
+"I think that was very brutal of you," he said, in a low voice, tense
+with anger.
+
+"You wanted to be very kind to me when I was in great difficulties.
+Circumstances got rather in the way. That doesn't matter. The intention
+was there, though you were too chivalrous to go very far in action."
+
+"Chivalrous to whom?"
+
+"To her."
+
+His face went pale under its sunburn.
+
+"What are you doing?" he said, in a low voice that was almost terrible.
+"Where are you taking me?"
+
+"Into the way you must walk in. Dion--"--even in calling him by
+his Christian name for the first time her voice sounded quite
+impersonal--"you've done nothing wrong. You have nothing, absolutely
+nothing, to be ashamed of. Kismet! We have to yield to fate. If you
+slink through the rest of your years on earth, if you get rid of your
+name and hide yourself away, you will be just a coward. But you aren't
+a coward, and you are not going to act like one. You must accept your
+fate. You must take it right into your heart bravely and proudly, or, if
+you can't do that, stoically. I should."
+
+"If you had killed Jimmy?"
+
+She was silent.
+
+"If you had killed Jimmy?" he repeated, in a hard voice.
+
+"I should never hide myself. I should always face things."
+
+"You haven't had the blow I have had. I know I am not in fault. I know I
+have nothing to blame myself for. I wasn't even careless with my gun. If
+I had been I could never have forgiven myself. But I wasn't."
+
+"It was the pony. I know. I read the account of the inquest. You were
+absolutely exonerated."
+
+"Yes. The coroner and the jury expressed their deep sympathy with me,"
+he said, with intense bitterness. "They realized how--how I loved my
+little boy. But the woman I loved more even than my boy, whom I had
+loved for ever since I first saw her--well, she didn't feel at all as
+the coroner and the jury did."
+
+"Where is she? I hear now and then from Beatrice Daventry, but she never
+mentions her sister."
+
+"She is in Liverpool doing religious work, I believe. She has given
+herself to religion."
+
+"What does that mean exactly?"
+
+"People give themselves to God, don't they, sometimes?"
+
+"Do they?" said Mrs. Clarke, with her curious grave directness, which
+seemed untouched by irony.
+
+"It seems a way out of--things. But she always had a tendency that way."
+
+"Towards the religious life?"
+
+"Yes. She always cared for God a great deal more than she cared for me.
+She cared for God and for Robin, and she seemed to be just beginning to
+care for me when I deprived her of Robin. Since then she has hated me."
+
+He spoke quietly, sternly. All the emotion of which she had been
+conscious on the previous afternoon had left him.
+
+"I didn't succeed in making her love me!" he continued. "I thought I
+had gained a good deal in South Africa. When I came back I felt I was
+starting again, and that I should carry things through. Robin felt the
+difference in me directly. He would have got to care for me very much,
+and I could have done a great deal for him when he had got older. But
+God didn't see things that way. He had planned it all out differently.
+When I was with her in Greece, one day I tore down a branch of wild
+olive and stripped the leaves from it. She saw me do it, and it
+distressed her very much. She had been dreaming over a child, and my
+action shattered her dream, I suppose. Women have dreams men can't quite
+understand--about children. She forgave me for that almost directly.
+She knew I would never have done anything to make her unhappy even for
+a moment, if I had thought. Now I have broken her life to pieces, and
+there's no question of forgiveness. If there were, I should not speak of
+her to you. We are absolutely parted forever. She would take the hand of
+the most dreadful criminal rather than my hand. She has a horror of me.
+I'm the thing that's killed her child."
+
+He looked down at the dilapidated graves, and then at the lonely water
+which seemed trying to hide itself away in the recesses of the bare
+land.
+
+"That's how it is. Robin forgave me. He was alive for a moment--after,
+and I saw by his eyes he understood. Yes, he understood--he understood!"
+
+Suddenly his body began to shake and his arms jerked convulsively.
+Instinctively, but quite quietly, Mrs. Clarke put out her hand as if she
+were going to lay hold of his right arm.
+
+"No--don't!" he said. "Yesterday your hand made me worse."
+
+She withdrew her hand. Her face did not change. She seemed wholly
+unconscious of any rudeness on his part.
+
+"Let's move--let's walk!" he said.
+
+He sprang up. When he was on his feet he regained control of his body.
+
+"I don't know what's the matter with me," he said. "I'm not ill."
+
+"My friend, it will have to come," she said, getting up too.
+
+"What?"
+
+But she did not reply.
+
+"I've never been like this till now," he added vaguely.
+
+She knew why, but she did not tell him. She was a woman who knew how to
+wait.
+
+They wandered away through that cemetery above the Golden Horn, among
+the cypresses and the leaning and fallen tombstones. Now and then they
+saw veiled women pausing beside the graves with flowers in their hands,
+or fading among the cypress trunks into sunlit spaces beyond. Now and
+then they saw a man praying. Once they came to a tomb where children
+were sitting in a circle chanting the Koran with a sound like the sound
+of bees.
+
+Before they went down to the Turkish cafe, which is close to the holy
+mosque, they stood for a long while together on the hillside, looking
+at distant Stamboul. The cupolas of the many mosques and the tall and
+speary minarets gave their Eastern message--that message which, even to
+Protestant men from the lands of the West, is as the thrilling sound of
+a still, small voice. And the voice will not be gainsaid; it whispers,
+"In the East thou shalt find me if thou hast not found me in the West."
+
+"Why do you care for Stamboul so much?" Dion asked his companion. "I
+think you are utterly without religion. I may be wrong, but I think you
+are. And Stamboul is full of calls to prayer and of places for men to
+worship in."
+
+"Oh, there is something," she answered. "There is the Unknown God."
+
+"The Unknown God?" he repeated, with a sort of still bitterness.
+
+"And His city is Stamboul--for me. When the _muezzin_ calls I bow myself
+in ignorance. What _He_ is, I don't know. All I know is that men cannot
+explain Him to me, or teach me anything about Him. But Stamboul has
+lures for me. It is not only the city of many prayers, it is also the
+city of many forgetfulnesses. The old sages said, 'Eat not thy heart
+nor mourn the buried Past.' Stay here for a time, and learn to obey that
+command. Perhaps, eventually, Stamboul will help you."
+
+"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.
+
+"Let the spirit die," he thought, "that the body may live!"
+
+He put one arm round his companion.
+
+"If you want me----" he whispered, on a deep breath.
+
+His voice died away in the darkness between the giant cypresses, those
+trees which watch over the dead in the land of the Turk.
+
+_She_ had said once that the human being can hurt God.
+
+Obscurely he wished to do that.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Mrs. Clarke looked up from a letter written in a large boyish hand which
+had just been brought out on the terrace of the fountain by the butler.
+
+"Jimmy will be here on Thursday--that is, in Constantinople. The train
+ought to be in early in the morning."
+
+Her eyes rested on Dion for a moment; then she looked down again at the
+letter from Eton.
+
+"He's in a high state of spirits at the prospect of the journey. But
+perhaps I oughtn't to have had him out; perhaps I ought to have gone to
+England for his holidays."
+
+"Do you mean because of me?" said Dion.
+
+"I was thinking of cricket," she replied impassively.
+
+He was silent. After a moment she continued:
+
+"There are no suitable companions for him out here. I wish the Ingletons
+had a son. Of course there is riding, swimming, boating, and we can make
+excursions. You'll be good to him, won't you?"
+
+She folded the letter up and put it into the envelope.
+
+"I always keep all Jimmy's letters," she said.
+
+"Look here!" Dion said in a hard voice. "I think I'd better go."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You know why."
+
+"Have I asked you to go?"
+
+"No, but I think I shall clear out. I don't feel like acting a part to a
+boy. I've never done such a thing, and it isn't at all the sort of thing
+I could do well."
+
+"There will be no need to act a part. Be with Jimmy as you were in
+London."
+
+"Look at me!" he exclaimed with intense bitterness. "Am I the man I was
+in London?"
+
+"If you are careful and reasonable, Jimmy won't notice any difference.
+Hero worship doesn't look at things through a microscope. Jimmy's got
+his idea of you. It will be your fault if he changes it."
+
+"Did you tell him I should be here during the holidays?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I can't help that," he said, almost brutally.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean that you answered for me before you knew where I should be."
+
+He got up from the straw chair on which he was sitting, almost as if he
+meant to go away from her and from Buyukderer at once.
+
+"Dion, you mustn't go," she said inflexibly. "I can't let you. For if
+you go, you will never come back."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"I do know it."
+
+They looked at each other across the fountain; his eyes fell at last
+almost guiltily before her steady glance.
+
+"And you know it too," she said.
+
+"I may go, nevertheless. Who is to prevent me?"
+
+She got up, went to the other side of the fountain, and put her hand
+behind his arm, after a quick glance round to make sure that no eyes
+were watching her. She pushed her hand down gently and held his wrist.
+
+"Do you realize how badly you sometimes treat me?" she said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+She pulled his soft cuff with her little fingers.
+
+"I do realize it, but I can't help it. I have to do it."
+
+"If I didn't know that I should mind it much more," she said.
+
+"I never thought I had it in me to treat a woman as I sometimes treat
+you. I used--to be so different."
+
+"You were too much the other way. But yours is a nature of extremes.
+That's partly why I----"
+
+She did not finish the sentence.
+
+"Then you don't resent my beastliness to you?" he asked.
+
+"Not permanently. Sometimes you are nice to me. But if you were ever
+to treat me badly when Jimmy was with me, I don't think I could ever
+forgive you."
+
+"I dread his coming," said Dion. "I had much better go. If you don't let
+me go, you may regret it."
+
+In saying that he acknowledged the power she had already obtained over
+him, a power from which he did not feel sure that he could break away,
+although he was acutely aware of it and sometimes almost bitterly
+resented it. Mrs. Clarke knew very well that most men can only be held
+when they do not know that they are held, but Dion, in his present
+condition, was not like any other man she had known. More than once in
+the earliest stages of their intimacy she had had really to fight to
+keep him near her, and so he knew how arbitrary she could be when her
+nature was roused.
+
+Sometimes he hated her with intensity, for she had set herself to
+destroy the fabric of his spirit, which not even Rosamund had been able
+entirely to destroy by her desertion of him. Sometimes he felt a sort of
+ugly love of her, because she was the agent through whom he was learning
+to get rid of all that Rosamund had most prized in him. It was as if he
+called out to her, "Help me to pull down, to tear down, all that I built
+up in the long years till not one stone is left upon another. What I
+built up was despised and rejected. I won't look upon it any more. I'll
+raze it to the ground. But I can't do that alone. Come, you, and help
+me." And she came and she helped in the work of destruction, and in an
+ugly, horrible way he loved her for it sometimes, as a criminal might
+love an assistant in his crime.
+
+But from such a type of love there are terrible reactions. During these
+reactions Dion had treated Cynthia Clarke abominably sometimes, showing
+the hatred which alternated with his ugly love, if love it could
+properly be called. He hated her in such moments for the fierce lure she
+had for the senses, a lure which he felt more and more strongly as
+he left farther behind him the old life of sane enjoyments and of the
+wisdom which walks with restraint; he hated her for the perversity which
+he was increasingly conscious of as he came to know her more intimately;
+he hated her because he had so much loved the woman who would not make
+a friend of her; he hated her because he knew that she was drawing him
+into a path which led into the center of a maze, the maze of hypocrisy.
+
+Hitherto Dion had been essentially honest and truthful, what men call
+"open and above-board." He had walked clear-eyed in the light; he had
+had nothing dirty to hide; what his relations with others had seemed
+to be that they had actually been. But since that first night in the
+pavilion Cynthia Clarke had taught him very thoroughly the hypocrisy a
+man owes to the woman with whom he has a secret liaison.
+
+He still believed that till that night she had been what the world calls
+"a straight woman." She did not ape a rigid morality for once betrayed
+by passion, or pretend to any religious scruples, or show any fears of
+an eventual punishment held in reserve for all sinners by an implacable
+Power; she did not, when Dion was brutal to her, ever reproach him with
+having made of her a wicked or even a light woman. But she made him feel
+by innumerable hints and subtleties that for him she had exchanged a
+safe life for a life that was beset with danger, the smiled-on life of
+a not too conventional virtue for something very different. She seemed
+sometimes uneasy in her love, as if such a love were an error new to her
+experience.
+
+Jimmy was her chief weapon against Dion's natural sincerity. Dion
+realized that she was passionately attached to her boy, and that
+she would make almost any sacrifice rather than lose his respect and
+affection. Nevertheless, she was ready to take great risks. The risks
+she was not prepared to take were the smaller risks. And in connexion
+with them her call for hypocrisy was incessant. If Dion ever tried to
+resist her demands for small lies and petty deceptions, she would look
+at him, and say huskily:
+
+"I have to do these things now because of Jimmy. No one must ever have
+the least suspicion of what we are to each other, or some day Jimmy
+might get to know of it. It isn't my husband I'm afraid of, it's Jimmy."
+
+If Dion had been by nature a suspicious man, or if he had had a wider
+experience with women, Mrs. Clarke's remarkable ingenuity in hypocrisy
+would almost certainly have suggested to him that she was no novice in
+the life of deception. Her appearance of frankness, even of bluntness,
+was admirable. To every one she presented herself as a woman of strong
+will and unconventional temperament who took her own way openly, having
+nothing to conceal, and therefore nothing to fear. She made a feature
+of her friendship with the tragic Englishman; she even dwelt upon it
+and paraded it for the pretense of blunt and Platonic friendship was the
+cloud with which she concealed the fire of their illicit relation. The
+trip on the "Leyla" to Brusa had tortured Dion. Since the episode in
+the pavilion a more refined torment had been his. Mrs. Clarke had not
+allowed him to escape from the social ties which were so hateful to him.
+She had made him understand that he must go among her acquaintances
+now and then, that he must take a certain part in the summer life
+of Therapia and Buyukderer, that the trip to Brusa had been only a
+beginning. More than once he had tried to break away, but he had not
+succeeded in his effort. Her will had been too strong for his, not
+merely because she did not fear at moments to be fierce and determined,
+but because behind her fierceness and determination was an unuttered
+plea which his not dead chivalry heard; "For you I have become what I
+was falsely accused of being in London." He remembered the wonderful
+fight she had made then; often her look and manner, when they were alone
+together, implied, "I couldn't make such a fight now." She never said
+that, but she made him float in an atmosphere of that suggestion.
+
+He believed that she loved him. Sometimes he compared her love with the
+affection which Rosamund had given him, and then it seemed to his not
+very experienced heart that perhaps intense love can only show itself
+by something akin to degradation, by enticements which a genuinely
+pure nature could never descend to, by perversities which the grand
+simplicity and wholesomeness of goodness would certainly abhor. Then a
+distortion of love presented itself to his tragic investigation as
+the only love that was real, and good and evil lost for him their true
+significance. He had said to himself, "Let the spirit die that the body
+may live." He had wished, he still wished, to pull down. He had a sort
+of demented desire for ruins and dust. But he longed for action, on
+the grand scale. Small secrecies, trickeries, tiptoeing through the
+maze--all these things revolted that part of his nature which was,
+perhaps, unchangeable. They seemed to him unmanly. In his present
+condition he could quite easily have lain down in the sink of Pera's
+iniquity, careless whether any one knew; but it was horribly difficult
+to him to dine with the Ingletons and Vane at the Villa Hafiz, to say
+"Good night" to Mrs. Clarke before them, to go away, leaving them in
+the villa, and then, very late, to sneak back, with a key, to the garden
+gate, when all the servants were in bed, and to creep up, like a thief,
+to the pavilion. Some men would have enjoyed all the small deceptions,
+would have thought them good fun, would have found that they added a
+sharp zest to the pursuit of a woman. Dion loathed them.
+
+And now he was confronted with something he was going to loathe far
+more, something which would call for more sustained and elaborate
+deception than any he had practised yet. He feared the eyes of an
+English boy more than he feared the eyes of the diplomats and the
+cosmopolitans of varying types who were gathered on the Bosporus during
+the months of heat. He detested the idea of playing a part to a boy. How
+could a mother lay plots to deceive her son? And yet Mrs. Clarke adored
+Jimmy.
+
+Rosamund and Robin started up in his mind. He saw them before him as he
+had seen them one night in Westminster when Rosamund had been singing
+to Robin. Ah, she had been a cruel, a terribly cruel, wife, but she had
+been an ideal mother! He saw her head bent over her child, the curve of
+her arm round his little body. A sensation of sickness came upon him, of
+soul-nausea; and again he thought, "I must get away."
+
+The night before the day on which Jimmy was due to arrive, Mrs. Clarke
+was in Constantinople. She had gone there to meet Jimmy, and had started
+early in the morning, leaving Dion at Buyukderer. When she was gone he
+took the Albanian's boat and went out on the Bosporus for a row. The man
+and he were both at the oars, and pulled out from the bay. When they had
+gone some distance--they had been rowing for perhaps ten minutes--the
+man asked:
+
+"Ou allons-nous, Signore?"
+
+"Vers Constantinople," replied Dion.
+
+"Bene!" replied the man.
+
+That night Mrs. Clarke had just finished dinner when a waiter tapped at
+her sitting-room door.
+
+"What is it?" she asked.
+
+"A gentleman asks if he can see you, Madame."
+
+"A gentleman? Have you got his card?"
+
+"No, Madame; he gave no card."
+
+"What is he like?"
+
+"He is English, I think, very thin and very brown. He looks very
+strong."
+
+The waiter paused, then added:
+
+"He has a hungry look."
+
+Mrs. Clarke stared at the man with her very wide-open eyes.
+
+"Go down and ask him to wait."
+
+"Yes, Madame."
+
+The man went out. When he had shut the door Mrs. Clarke called:
+
+"Sonia!"
+
+Her raised voice was rather harsh.
+
+The bedroom door was opened, and the Russian maid looked into the
+sitting-room.
+
+"Sonia," said Mrs. Clarke rapidly in French, "some one--a man--has
+called and asked for me. He's waiting in the hall. Go down and see who
+it is. If it's Mr. Leith you can bring him up."
+
+"And if it is not Monsieur Leith?"
+
+"Come back and tell me who it is."
+
+The maid came out of the bedroom, shut the door, crossed the
+sitting-room rather heavily on flat feet, and went out on to the
+landing.
+
+"Shut the door!" Mrs. Clarke called after her.
+
+When the sitting-room door was shut she sat waiting with her forehead
+drawn to a frown. She did not move till the sitting-room door was opened
+by the maid and a man walked in.
+
+"Monsieur Leith," said the maid.
+
+And she disappeared.
+
+"Come and sit down," said Mrs. Clarke. "Why have you come to Pera?"
+
+"I wanted to speak to you."
+
+"How tired you look! Have you had dinner?"
+
+"No, I don't want it."
+
+"Did you come by steamer?"
+
+"No, I rowed down."
+
+"All the way?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Where are you staying?"
+
+"I haven't decided yet where I shall stay. Not here, of course."
+
+"Of course not. Dion, sit down."
+
+He sat down heavily.
+
+"If you haven't decided about an hotel, where is your luggage?"
+
+"I haven't brought any."
+
+She said nothing, but her distressed eyes questioned him.
+
+"I started out for a row. The current set towards Constantinople, so I
+came here."
+
+"I'm glad," she said.
+
+But she did not look glad.
+
+"We can spend a quiet evening together," she added nonchalantly.
+
+"I didn't come for that," he said.
+
+He began to get up, but she put one hand on him.
+
+"Do sit still. What is it, then? Whatever it is, tell me quietly."
+
+He yielded to her soft but very imperative touch, and sat back in his
+chair.
+
+"Now, what is it?"
+
+"I'm sure you know. It's Jimmy."
+
+She lowered her eyelids, and her pale forehead puckered.
+
+"Jimmy! What about Jimmy?"
+
+"I don't want to be at Buyukderer while he's with you."
+
+"And you have rowed all the way from Buyukderer to Constantinople,
+without even a brush and comb, to tell me that!"
+
+"I told you at Buyukderer."
+
+"And we decided that it would be much jollier for Jimmy to have you
+there for his holidays. I depend upon you to make things tolerable
+for Jimmy. You know how few people there are near us who would trouble
+themselves about a boy. You will be my stand-by with Jimmy all through
+his holidays."
+
+She spoke serenely, even cheerfully, but there was a decisive sound in
+her voice, and the eyes fixed upon him were full of determination.
+
+"I can't understand how you can be willing to act a lie to your own boy,
+especially when you care for him so much," said Dion, almost violently.
+
+"I shall not act a lie."
+
+"But you will."
+
+"Sometimes you are horribly morbid," she said coldly.
+
+"Morbid! Because I want to keep a young schoolboy out of--"
+
+"Take care, Dion!" she interrupted hastily.
+
+"If you--you don't really love Jimmy," he said.
+
+"I forbid you to say that."
+
+"I will say it. It's true."
+
+And he repeated with a cruelly deliberate emphasis:
+
+"You don't really love Jimmy."
+
+Her white face was suddenly flooded with red, which even covered her
+forehead to the roots of her hair. She put up one hand with violence and
+tried to strike Dion on the mouth. He caught her wrist.
+
+"Be quiet!" he said roughly.
+
+Gripping her wrist with his hard, muscular brown fingers he repeated:
+
+"You don't love Jimmy."
+
+"Do you wish me to hate you?"
+
+"I don't care. I don't care what happens to me."
+
+She sat looking down. The red began to fade out of her face. Presently
+she curled her fingers inwards against his palm and smiled faintly.
+
+"I am not going to quarrel with you," she said quietly.
+
+He loosened his grip on her; but now she caught and held his hand.
+
+"I do love Jimmy, and you know it when you aren't mad. But I care for
+you, too, and I am not going to lose you. If you went away while Jimmy
+was out here I should never see you again. You would disappear. Perhaps
+you would cross over to Asia."
+
+Her great eyes were fixed steadily upon him.
+
+"Ah, you have thought of that!" she said, almost in a whisper.
+
+He was silent.
+
+"Women would get hold of you. You would sink; you would be ruined,
+destroyed. I know!"
+
+"If I were it wouldn't matter."
+
+"To me it would. I can't risk it. I am not going to risk it."
+
+Dion leaned forward. His brown face was twitching.
+
+"Suppose you had to choose between Jimmy and me!"
+
+He was thinking of Robin and Rosamund. A child had conquered him once.
+Now once again a child--for Jimmy was no more than a child as yet,
+although he thought himself important and almost a young man--intruded
+into his life with a woman.
+
+"I shall not have to choose. But I have told you that a child is not
+enough for the happiness of a woman like me. You know what I am, and you
+must know I am speaking the truth."
+
+"Did you love your husband?" he asked, staring into her eyes.
+
+"Yes," she replied, without even a second of hesitation. "I did till he
+suspected me."
+
+"And then----"
+
+"Not after that," she said grimly.
+
+"I wonder he let you do all you did."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+She let his hand go.
+
+"I would never have let you go about with other men, however innocently.
+I thought about that at your trial."
+
+"I should never let any one interfere with my freedom of action. If a
+man loves me I expect him to trust me."
+
+"You don't trust me."
+
+"Sometimes you almost hate me. I know that."
+
+"Sometimes I hate everybody, myself most of all. But I should miss you.
+You are the only woman in all the world who wants me now."
+
+Suddenly a thought of his mother intruded into his mind, and he added:
+
+"Wants me as a lover."
+
+She got up quickly, almost impulsively, and went close to him.
+
+"Yes, I want you, I want you as a lover, and I can't let you go. That is
+why I ask you, I beg you, to stay with me while Jimmy's here."
+
+She leaned against him, and put her small hands on his shoulders.
+
+"How can a child understand the needs of a woman like me and of a man
+like you? How can he look into our hearts or read the secrets of our
+natures--secrets which we can't help having? You hate what you call
+deceiving him. But he will never think about it. A boy of Jimmy's age
+never thinks about his mother in that way."
+
+"I know. That's just it!"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+But he did not explain. Perhaps instinctively he felt that her natural
+subtlety could not be in accord with his natural sincerity, felt that in
+discussing certain subjects they talked in different languages. She put
+her arms round his neck.
+
+"I need the two lives," she said, in a very low voice. "I need Jimmy and
+I need you. Is it so very wonderful? Often when a woman who isn't old
+loses her husband and is left with her child people say, 'It's all
+right for her. She has got her child.' And so she's dismissed to her
+motherhood, as if that must be quite enough for her. Dion, Dion, the
+world doesn't know, or doesn't care, how women suffer. Women don't speak
+about such things. But I am telling you because I don't want to have
+secrets from you. I have suffered. Perhaps I have some pride in me.
+Anyhow, I don't care to go about complaining. You know that. You must
+have found that out in London. I keep my secrets, but not from you."
+
+She put her white cheek against his brown one.
+
+"It's only the two lives joined together that make life complete for
+a woman who is complete, who isn't lopsided, lacking in something
+essential, something that nature intends. I am a complete woman, and I'm
+not ashamed of it. Do you think I ought to be?"
+
+She sighed against his cheek.
+
+"You are a courageous woman," he said; "I do know that."
+
+"Don't _you_ test my courage. Perhaps I'm getting tired of being
+courageous."
+
+She put her thin lips against his.
+
+"It's acting--deception I hate," he murmured. "With a boy especially I
+like always to be quite open."
+
+Again he thought of Robin and of his old ideal of a father's relation
+to his son; he thought of his preparation to be worthy of fatherhood,
+worthy to guide a boy's steps in the path towards a noble manhood. And a
+terrible sense of the irony of life almost overcame him. For a moment
+he seemed to catch a glimpse of the Creator laughing in darkness at the
+aspiration of men; for a moment he was beset by the awful conviction
+that the world is ruled by a malign Deity.
+
+"All the time Jimmy is at Buyukderer we'll just be friends," said the
+husky voice against his cheek.
+
+The sophistry of her remark struck home to him, but he made no comment
+upon it.
+
+"There are white deceptions," she continued, "and black deceptions, as
+there are white and black lies. Whom are we hurting, you and I?"
+
+"Whom are we hurting?" he said, releasing himself from her.
+
+And he thought of God in a different way--in Rosamund's way.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+He looked at her as if he were going to speak, but he said nothing. He
+felt that if he answered she would not understand, and her face made him
+doubtful. Which view of life was the right one, Rosamund's or Cynthia
+Clarke's? Rosamund had been pitiless to him and Cynthia Clarke was
+merciful. She put her arms round his neck when he was in misery, she
+wanted him despite the tragedy that was his perpetual companion. Perhaps
+her view of life was right. It was a good working view, anyhow, and was
+no doubt held by many people.
+
+"We can base our lives on truth," she continued, as he said nothing. "On
+being true to ourselves. That is the great truth. But we can't always
+tell it to all the casual people about us, or even to those who are
+closely in our lives, as for instance Jimmy is in mine. They wouldn't
+understand. But some day Jimmy will be able to understand."
+
+"Do you mean----"
+
+"I mean just this: if Jimmy were twenty-one I would tell him
+everything."
+
+He looked down into her eyes, which never fell before the eyes of
+another.
+
+"I believe you would," he said.
+
+She continued looking at him, as if tranquilly waiting for something.
+
+"I'll--I'll go back to Buyukderer," he said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+In his contrition for the attack which he had made upon the honor of his
+wife at his mother's instigation, Beadon Clarke had given up all
+claims on his boy's time. Actually, though not legally, Mrs. Clarke had
+complete control over Jimmy. He spent all his holidays with her, and
+seldom saw his father, who was still attached to the British Embassy in
+Madrid. He had never been allowed to read any reports of the famous case
+which had been fought out between his parents, and was understood to
+think that his father and mother had, for some mysterious reason, found
+it impossible to "hit it off together," and had therefore decided
+to live apart. He was now rather vaguely fond of his father, whom he
+considered to be "quite a good sort," but he was devoted to his mother.
+Mrs. Clarke's peculiar self-possession and remarkably strong will made a
+great impression on Jimmy. "It's jolly difficult to score my mater off,
+I can tell you," he occasionally remarked to his more intimate chums at
+school. He admired her appearance, her elegance, and the charm of her
+way of living, which he called "doing herself jolly well"; even her
+unsmiling face and characteristic lack of what is generally called
+vivacity won his approval. "My mater's above all that silly gushing and
+giggling so many women go in for, don't you know," was his verdict on
+Mrs. Clarke's usually serious demeanor. Into her gravity boyishly he
+read dignity of character, and in his estimation of her he set her very
+high. Although something of a pickle, and by nature rather reckless
+and inclined to be wild, he was swiftly obedient to his mother, partly
+perhaps because, understanding young males as well as she understood
+male beings of all ages, she very seldom drew the reins tight. He knew
+very well that she loved him.
+
+On the evening of his arrival at Buyukderer for the summer holidays
+Jimmy had a confidential talk with his mother about "Mr. Leith," whom
+he had not yet seen, but about whom he had been making many anxious
+inquiries.
+
+"I'll tell you to-night," his mother had replied. And after dinner she
+fulfilled her promise.
+
+"You'll see Mr. Leith to-morrow," she said.
+
+"Well, I should rather think so!" returned Jimmy, in an injured voice.
+"Where is he?"
+
+"He's living in rooms in the house of a Greek not far from here."
+
+"I thought he was in the hotel. I say, mater, can't I have a cigarette
+just for once?"
+
+"Yes, you may, just for once."
+
+Jimmy approached the cigarette box with the air of a nonchalant
+conqueror. As he opened it with an apparently practised forefinger he
+remarked:
+
+"Well, mater?"
+
+"He's left the hotel. You know, Jimmy, Mr. Leith has had great
+misfortunes."
+
+Jimmy had heard of the gun accident and its terrible result, and he now
+looked very grave.
+
+"I know--poor chap!" he observed. "But it wasn't his fault. It was the
+little brute of a pony. Every one knows that. It was rotten bad luck,
+but who would be down on a fellow for bad luck?"
+
+"Exactly. But it's changed Mr. Leith's life. His wife has left him. He's
+given up his business, and is, consequently, less well off than he was.
+But this isn't all."
+
+Jimmy tenderly struck a match, lighted a cigarette, and, with
+half-closed eyes, blew forth in a professional manner a delicate cloud
+of smoke. He was feeling good all over.
+
+"First-rate cigarettes!" he remarked. "The very best! Yes, mater?"
+
+"He's rather badly broken up."
+
+"No wonder!" said Jimmy, with discrimination.
+
+"You'll find him a good deal changed. Sometimes he's moody and even
+bad-tempered, poor fellow, and he's fearfully sensitive. I'm trying my
+best to buck him up."
+
+"Good for you, mater! He's our friend. We're bound to stand by him."
+
+"And that's exactly what I'm trying to do. When he's a little difficult,
+doesn't take things quite as one means them--you know?"
+
+"Rather! Do I?"
+
+"I put it down to all the trouble he's been through. I never resent it.
+Now I ought really to have got out a holiday tutor for you."
+
+"Oh, I say, after I've swotted my head off all these months! A chap
+needs some rest if he's to do himself justice, hang it, mater, now!"
+
+"I know all about that!"
+
+She looked at him shrewdly, and he smiled on one side of his mouth.
+
+"Go on, mater!"
+
+"But having Mr. Leith here I thought I wouldn't do that. Mr. Leith's
+awfully fond of boys, and it seemed to me you might do him more good
+than any one else could."
+
+"Well, I'm blowed! D'you really think so?"
+
+Jimmy came over and sat on the arm of her chair, blowing rings of smoke
+cleverly over her lovely little head.
+
+"Put me up to it, mater, there's a good girl. I'm awfully keen on Mr.
+Leith, as you know. He's got the biggest biceps I ever saw, and I'm
+jolly sorry for him. What can I do? Put me up to it."
+
+And Mrs. Clarke proceeded to put Jimmy up to it. She had told Dion that
+Jimmy wouldn't see the difference in him. Now she carefully prepared
+Jimmy to face that difference, and gave him his cue for the part she
+wished him to play. Jimmy felt very important as he listened to her
+explanations, trifling seriously with his cigarette, and looking very
+worldly-wise.
+
+"I twig!" he interrupted occasionally, nodding his round young head,
+which was covered with densely thick, rather coarse hair. "I've got it."
+
+And he went off to bed very seriously, resolved to take Mr. Leith in
+hand and to do his level best for him.
+
+So it was that when Dion and he met next day he was not surprised at
+the change in Dion's appearance and manner. Nor were his young eyes
+merciless in their scrutiny. Just at first, perhaps, they stared with
+the unthinking observation of boyhood, but almost immediately Jimmy had
+taken the cue his mother had given him, and had entered into his part of
+a driver-away of trouble.
+
+He played it well, with a tact that was almost remarkable in so young
+a boy; and Dion, ignorant of what Mrs. Clarke had done on the night of
+Jimmy's arrival, was at first surprised at the ease with which they
+got on together. He had dreaded Jimmy's coming, partly because of the
+secrets he must keep from the boy, but partly also because of Robin.
+A boy's hands would surely tear at the wound which was always open.
+Sometimes Dion felt horribly sad when he was in contact with Jimmy's
+light-hearted and careless gaiety; sometimes he felt the gnawing
+discomfort of one not by nature a hypocrite forced into a passive
+hypocrisy; nevertheless there were moments when the burden of his life
+was made a little lighter on his shoulders by the confidence his young
+companion had in him, by the admiration for him showed plainly by Jimmy,
+by the leaping spirits which ardently summoned a reply in kind.
+
+The subtlety of Mrs. Clarke, too, helped Dion at first.
+
+Since her son's arrival, without ostentation she had lived for him. She
+entered into all Jimmy's plans, was ready to share his excitements and
+to taste, with him, those pleasures which were possible to a woman as
+well as to a boy. But she was quick to efface herself where she saw
+that she was not needed or might even be in the way. As a mother she was
+devoid of jealousy, was unselfish without seeming to be so. She did
+not parade her virtue. Her reticence was that of a perfectly finished
+artist. When she was wanted she was on the spot; when she was not
+wanted she disappeared. She sped Dion and Jimmy on their way to boating,
+shooting, swimming expeditions, with the happiest grace, and never
+assumed the look and manner of the patient woman "left behind."
+
+Not once, since Jimmy's arrival, had she shown to Dion even a trace of
+the passionate and perverse woman he now knew her to be under her pale
+mask of self-controlled and very mental composure. At the hotel in
+Constantinople she had said to Dion, "All the time Jimmy's at Buyukderer
+we'll just be friends." Now she seemed utterly to have forgotten that
+they had ever been what the world calls lovers, that they had been
+involved in scenes of passion, and brutality, and exhaustion, that they
+had torn aside the veil of reticence behind which women and men hide
+from each other normally the naked truth of what they can be. She
+treated Dion casually, though very kindly, as a friend, and never, even
+by the swift glance or a lingering touch of her fingers, reminded him of
+the fires that burned within her. Even when she was alone with him, when
+Jimmy ran off, perhaps, unexpectedly in the wake of a passing caprice,
+she never departed from her role of the friend who was before all things
+a mother.
+
+So perfect was her hypocrisy, so absolutely natural in its
+manifestation, that sometimes, looking at her, Dion could scarcely
+forbear from thinking that she had forgotten all about their illicit
+connexion; that she had put it behind her forever; that she was one
+of those happy people who possess the power of slaying the past and
+blotting the murder out of their memories.
+
+That scene between them in Constantinople on the eve of Jimmy's
+arrival--had it ever taken place? Had she really ever tried to strike
+him on the mouth? Had he caught her wrist in a grip of iron? It seemed
+incredible.
+
+And if he was involved in a great hypocrisy since the boy's arrival he
+was released from innumerable lesser hypocrisies. His life at present
+was what it seemed to be to the little world on the Bosporus.
+
+Just at first he did not realize that though Mrs. Clarke genuinely loved
+her son she was not too scrupulous to press his unconscious services in
+aid of her hypocrisy.
+
+The holiday tutor whom she ought to have got out from England to improve
+the shining hour on Jimmy's behalf was replaced by Dion in the eyes of
+Mrs. Clarke's world.
+
+One day she said to Dion:
+
+"Will you do me a good turn?"
+
+"Yes, if I can."
+
+"It may bore you."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Read a little bit with Jimmy sometimes, will you? He's abominably
+ignorant, and will never be a scholar, but I should like him just to
+keep up his end at school."
+
+"But I haven't got any school-books."
+
+"I have. He's specially behindhand with his Greek. His report tells me
+that. If you'll do a little Greek grammar and construing with him in the
+mornings now and them, I shall be tremendously grateful. You see,
+owing to my miserable domestic circumstances, Jimmy is practically
+fatherless."
+
+"And you ask me to take his father's place!" was in Dion's mind.
+
+But she met his eyes so earnestly and with such sincerity that he only
+said:
+
+"Of course I'll read with him in the mornings."
+
+Despite the ardent protests to Jimmy Dion kept his promise. Soon Mrs.
+Clarke's numerous acquaintances knew of the morning hours of study. She
+had happened to tell Sir Carey Ingleton about Jimmy's backwardness in
+book-learning and Mr. Leith's kind efforts to "get him on during the
+holidays." Sir Carey had spoken of it to Cyril Vane. The thing "got
+about." The name of Dion Leith began to be connected rather with Jimmy
+Clarke than with Mrs. Clarke. Continually Dion and Jimmy were seen about
+together. Mrs. Clarke, meanwhile, often went among her friends alone,
+and when they asked about Jimmy she would say:
+
+"Oh, he's gone off somewhere with Mr. Leith. I don't know where. Mr.
+Leith's a regular boy's man and was a great chum of Jimmy's in London;
+used to show him how to box and that sort of thing. It's partly for
+Jimmy that he came to Buyukderer. They read together in the mornings.
+Mr. Leith's getting Jimmy on in Greek."
+
+Sometimes she would add:
+
+"Mr. Leith loves boys, and since his own child died so sadly I think
+he's taken to Jimmy more than ever."
+
+Soon people began to talk of Dion Leith as "Jimmy Clarke's holiday
+tutor." Once, when this was said in Lady Ingleton's drawing-room at
+Therapia, she murmured:
+
+"I don't think it quite amounts to that. Mr. Leith has never been a
+schoolmaster."
+
+And there she left it, with a faint smile in which there was just the
+hint of an almost cynical sadness.
+
+Since the trip to Brusa on the "Leyla" she had thought a great deal
+about Dion Leith, and she was very sorry for him in a rather unusual
+way. Out of her happiness with her husband she seemed to draw an
+instinctive knowledge of what such a nature as Dion Leith's wanted and
+of the extent of his loss. Once she said to Sir Carey, with a sort of
+intensity such as she seldom showed:
+
+"Good women do terrible things sometimes."
+
+"Such as----?" said Sir Carey, looking at her almost with surprise in
+his eyes.
+
+"I think Mrs. Leith has done a terrible thing to her husband."
+
+"Perhaps she loved the child too much."
+
+"Even love can be almost abominable," said Lady Ingleton. "If we had a
+child, and you had done what poor Dion Leith has done, do you think I
+should have cast you out of my life?"
+
+"But--are you a good woman?" he asked her, smiling.
+
+"No, or you should never have bothered about me."
+
+He touched her hand.
+
+"When you do that," Lady Ingleton said, "I could almost cry over poor
+Dion Leith."
+
+Sir Carey bent down and kissed her with a very tender gallantry.
+
+"You and I are secretly sentimentalists, Delia," he said. "That is why
+we are so happy together."
+
+"Why doesn't Dion Leith go to England?" she exclaimed, almost angrily.
+
+"Perhaps England seems full of his misery. Besides, his wife is there."
+
+"He ought to go to her. He ought to force her to see the evil she is
+doing."
+
+"Leith will never do that, I feel sure," said Sir Carey gravely. "And in
+his place I don't know that I could."
+
+Lady Ingleton looked at him with an almost sharp impatience such as she
+seldom showed him.
+
+"When a man has right on his side he ought to browbeat a woman!" she
+exclaimed. "And even if he is in the wrong it's the best way to make
+a woman see things through his eyes. Dion Leith is too delicate with
+women."
+
+After a moment she added:
+
+"At any rate with some women, the first of whom is his own wife. A man
+should always put up a big fight for a really big thing, and Dion Leith
+hasn't done that!"
+
+"He fought in South Africa for England."
+
+"Ah," she said, lifting her chin, "that sort of thing is so different."
+
+"Tell him what you think," said the Ambassador.
+
+"I know him so little. But perhaps--who knows--some day I shall."
+
+She said no more on that subject.
+
+Meanwhile Dion was teaching Jimmy, who was really full of the happiest
+ignorance. Jimmy's knowledge of Greek was a minus quantity, and he said
+frankly that he considered all that kind of thing "more or less rot."
+Nevertheless, Dion persevered. One morning when they were going to get
+to work as usual in the pavilion,--chose by Mrs. Clarke as the suitable
+place for his studies,--taking up the Greek Grammar Dion opened it
+by chance. He stood by the table from which he had picked the book up
+staring down at the page. By one of those terrible rushes of which the
+mind is capable he was swept back to the famous mound which fronts the
+plain of Marathon; he saw the curving line of hills, the sea intensely
+blue and sparkling, empty of ships, the river's course through the
+tawny land marked by the tall reeds and the sedges; he heard the distant
+lowing of cattle coming from that old battlefield, celebrated by poets
+and historians. And then he heard, as if just above him, the dry crackle
+of brushwood--Rosamund moving in the habitation of Arcady. And he
+remembered the cry, the intense human cry which had echoed in the
+recesses of his soul on that day long--how long--ago in Greece,
+"Whither? Whither am I and my great love going? To what end are we
+journeying?"
+
+He heard again that cry of his soul in the pavilion at Buyukderer, and
+beneath the sunburn his lean cheeks went lividly pale.
+
+Reluctantly Jimmy was getting an exercise book and a pen and ink out of
+the drawer of a table, which Mrs. Clarke had had specially made for the
+lessons by a little Greek carpenter who sometimes did odd jobs for her.
+He found the ink bottle almost empty.
+
+"I say," he began.
+
+He looked up.
+
+"I say, Mr. Leith----"
+
+His voice died away and he stared.
+
+"What's wrong?" he managed to bring out at last.
+
+He thrust out a hand and laid hold of the grammar. Dion let it go.
+
+His eyes searched the page.
+
+"What's up, Mr. Leith?"
+
+He looked frankly puzzled and almost afraid. He had never seen any one
+look just like that before.
+
+There was a moment of silence. Then, with a sudden change of manner,
+Dion exclaimed:
+
+"Come on, Jimmy! I don't feel like doing lessons this morning. I vote
+we go out. I'm going to ask your mother if we can ride to the Belgrad
+forest. Perhaps she'll come with us."
+
+He was suddenly afraid to remain alone with the boy, and he felt that
+he could not stay in that pavilion full of the atmosphere of feverish
+passion, of secrecy, of betrayal. Yes, of betrayal! For there he had
+betrayed the obstinate love, which he had felt at Marathon as a sort of
+ecstasy, and still felt, but now like a wound, within him in spite of
+Rosamund's rejection of him. Not yet had the current taken him and swept
+him away from all the old landmarks. Perhaps it never would. And yet he
+had given himself to it, he had not tried to resist.
+
+Jimmy jumped up with alacrity, though he still looked rather grave and
+astonished. They went down the terraced garden to the villa.
+
+"Run up and ask your mother," said Dion. "Probably she's in her
+sitting-room. I'll wait here to know what she says."
+
+"Right you are!"
+
+He went off, looking rather relieved.
+
+Robin at fifteen! Dion shut his eyes.
+
+Jimmy was away for more than ten minutes. Then he came back to say that
+his mother would come with them to the forest and would be ready in an
+hour's time.
+
+"I'll go back to my rooms, change my breeches, and order the horses,"
+said Dion.
+
+He was longing to get away from the scrutiny which at this moment Jimmy
+could not forego. He knew that Jimmy had been talking about him to Mrs.
+Clarke, had probably been saying how "jolly odd" he had been in
+the pavilion. For once the boy's tact had failed him, and Dion's
+sensitiveness tingled.
+
+An hour later they were on horseback and rode into the midst of the
+forest. At the village of Belgrad they dismounted, left the horses in
+the care of a Turkish stableman, and went for a walk among the trees.
+It was very hot and still, and presently Mrs. Clarke said she would sit
+down and rest.
+
+"You and Jimmy go on if you want to," she said.
+
+But Jimmy threw himself down on the ground.
+
+"I'm tired. It's so infernally hot."
+
+"Take a nap," said his mother.
+
+The boy laid his head on his curved arms sideways. Mrs. Clarke leaned
+down and put his panama hat over his left cheek and eye.
+
+"Thank you, mater," he murmured.
+
+He lay still.
+
+Dion had stood by with an air of hesitation during this little talk
+between mother and son. Now he looked away to the forest.
+
+"You go," Mrs. Clarke said to him. "You'll find us here when you come
+back. The Armenians call the forest _Defetgamm_. Perhaps you will come
+under its influence."
+
+"_Defetgamm_! What does that mean?"
+
+"Dispeller of care."
+
+He stood looking at her for a moment; then, without another word, he
+turned quickly away and disappeared among the trees.
+
+Jimmy slept with his face hidden, and Mrs. Clarke, with wide-open eyes,
+sat motionless staring into the forest.
+
+When they reached the Villa Hafiz late in the afternoon Dion helped
+Mrs. Clarke to dismount. As she slid down lightly from the saddle she
+whispered, scarcely moving her lips:
+
+"The pavilion to-night eleven. You've got the key."
+
+She patted Selim's glossy black neck.
+
+"Come, Jimmy!" she said. "Say good night to Mr. Leith. I'm sure he's
+tired and has had more than enough of us for to-day. We'll give him a
+rest from us till to-morrow."
+
+And Jimmy bade Dion good-by without any protest.
+
+As Dion rode off Mrs. Clarke did not turn to look after him. She had
+not troubled even to question him with her eyes. She had assumed that he
+would do what she wanted. Would he do that?
+
+At first he believed that he would not go. He had been away in the
+forest with his misery for nearly two hours, struggling among the
+shadows of the trees. Jimmy had seen in the pavilion that morning that
+his "holiday tutor" was strangely ill at ease, and had discussed the
+matter with his mater, and asked her why on earth the sight of a page
+of Greek grammar should make a fellow stand staring as if he were
+confronted by a ghost. But Jimmy had no conception of what Dion had
+been through in the forest, where happy Greeks and Armenians were lazily
+enjoying the empty hours of summer, forgetting yesterday, and serenely
+careless of to-morrow.
+
+In the forest Dion had fought with an old love of which he began to be
+angrily ashamed, with a love which was now his greatest enemy, a thing
+contemptible, inexplicable. In the pavilion that morning it had suddenly
+risen up before him strong, intense, passionate. It seemed irresistible.
+But he was almost furiously resolved not merely to resist it, but to
+crush it down, to break it in pieces, or to drive it finally out of his
+life.
+
+And he had fought with it alone in the forest which the Armenians call
+_Defetgamm_. And in the forest something--some adherent, it seemed--had
+whispered to him, "To kill your enemy you must fill your armory with
+weapons. The woman who came to you when you were neither in one world
+nor in the other is a weapon. Why have you ceased to use her?"
+
+And now, as if she had heard the voice of that adherent, and had known
+of the struggle in the forest, the woman herself had suddenly broken
+through the reserve she had imposed upon them both since the coming of
+her son.
+
+In a hideous way Dion wanted to see her, and yet he shrank from going
+back to her secretly. The coming of Jimmy, his relations with the boy,
+the boy's hearty affection for him and admiration for him, had roused
+into intense activity that part of his nature which had always loved,
+which he supposed always must love, the straight life; the life with
+morning face and clear, unfaltering eyes; the life which the Hermes
+suggested, immune from the fret and fever of secret vices and passions,
+lifted by winged sandals into a region where soul and body were in
+perfect accord, and where, because of that, there was peace; not a peace
+of stagnation, but a peace living and intense. But that part of his
+nature had led him even now instinctively back to the feet of Rosamund.
+And he revolted against such a pilgrimage.
+
+"The pavilion to-night eleven; you've got the key."
+
+Her face had not changed as she whispered the words, and immediately
+afterwards she had told a lie to her boy, or had implied a lie. She had
+made Jimmy believe the thing that was not. Loving Jimmy, she did not
+scruple to play a part to him.
+
+Dion ate no dinner that night. After returning to his rooms and getting
+out of his riding things into a loose serge suit he went out again and
+walked along the quay by the water. He paced up and down, ignoring the
+many passers-by, the boatmen and watermen who now knew him so well.
+
+He was considering whether he should go to the pavilion at the appointed
+hour or whether he should leave Buyukderer altogether and not return to
+it. This evening he was in the mood to be drastic. He might go down to
+Constantinople and finally cast his burden away there, never to take it
+up again--the burden of an old love whose chains still hung about him;
+he might plunge into the lowest depths, into depths where perhaps the
+remembrance of Rosamund and the early morning would fade away from him,
+where even Mrs. Clarke would not care to seek for him, although her will
+was persistent.
+
+He fully realized now her extraordinary persistence, the fierce firmness
+of character that was concealed by her quiet and generally impersonal
+manner. Certainly she had the temperament of a ruler. He remembered--it
+seemed to him with a bizarre abruptness--the smile on Dumeny's lips in
+the Divorce Court when the great case had ended in Mrs. Clarke's favor.
+
+Did he really know Cynthia Clarke even now?
+
+He walked faster. Now he saw Hadi Bey before him, self-possessed, firm,
+with that curiously vivid look which had attracted the many women in
+Court.
+
+And Jimmy believed in his mother. Perhaps, until Dion's arrival in
+Buyukderer, the boy had had reason in his belief--perhaps not. Dion was
+very uncertain to-night.
+
+A sort of cold curiosity was born in him. Until now he had accepted Mrs.
+Clarke's presentment of herself to the world, which included himself,
+as a genuine portrait; now he began to recall the long speech of Beadon
+Clarke's counsel. But the man had only been speaking according to his
+brief, had been only putting forth all the ingenuity and talent which
+enabled him to command immense fees for his services. And Mrs. Clarke
+had beaten him. The jury had said that she was not what he had asserted
+her to be.
+
+Suppose they had made a mistake, had given the wrong verdict, why
+should that make any difference to Dion? He had definitely done with the
+goodness of good women. Why should he fear the evil of a woman who was
+bad? Perhaps in the women who were called evil by the respectable, or by
+those who were temperamentally inclined to purity, there was more warm
+humanity than the women possessed who never made a slip, or stepped
+out of the beaten path of virtue. Perhaps those to whom much must be
+forgiven were those who knew how to forgive.
+
+If Mrs. Clarke really were what Beadon Clarke's counsel had suggested
+that she was, how would it affect him? Dion pondered that question on
+the quay. Mrs. Clarke's pale and very efficient hypocrisy, which he had
+been able to observe at close quarters since he had been at Buyukderer,
+might well have been brought into play against himself, as it had been
+brought into play against the little world on the Bosporus and against
+Jimmy.
+
+Dion made up his mind that he would go to the pavilion that night. The
+cold curiosity which had floated up to the surface of his mind enticed
+him. He wanted to know whether he was among the victims, if they could
+reasonably be called so, of Mrs. Clarke's delicate hypocrisy. He was
+still thinking of Mrs. Clarke as a weapon; he was also thinking that
+perhaps he did not yet know exactly what type of weapon she was. He must
+find that out to-night. Not even the thought of Jimmy should deter him.
+
+At a few minutes before eleven he went back to his rooms, unlocked his
+despatch box, and drew out the key of the gate of Mrs. Clarke's garden.
+He thrust it into his pocket and set out on the short walk to the Villa
+Hafiz. The night was dark and cloudy and very still. Dion walked quickly
+and surreptitiously, not looking at any of the people who went by him
+in the darkness. All the windows of the villa which faced the sea were
+shuttered and showed no lights. He turned to the right, stood before the
+garden gate and listened. He heard no sound except a distant singing on
+the oily waters of the Bay. Softly he put his key into the gate, gently
+unlocked it, stepped into the garden. A few minutes later he was on the
+highest terrace and approached the pavilion. As he did so Mrs. Clarke
+came out of the drawing-room of the villa, passed by the fountain, and
+began to ascend the garden.
+
+She was dressed in black and in a material that did not rustle. Her thin
+figure did not show up against the night, and her light slow footfall
+was scarcely audible on the paths and steps as she went upward. Jimmy
+had gone to bed long ago, tired out with the long ride in the heat.
+She had just been into his bedroom, without a light, and had heard his
+regular breathing. He was fast asleep, and once he was asleep he never
+woke till the light of day shone in at the window. It was a comfort that
+one could thoroughly rely on the sleeping powers of a healthy boy of
+fifteen.
+
+She sighed as she thought of Jimmy. The boy was going to complicate
+her life. She was by nature an unusually fearless woman, but she was
+beginning to realize that there might come a time when she would know
+fear--unless she could begin to live differently as Jimmy began to
+grow up. But how could she do that? There are things which seem to be
+impossible even to strong wills. Her will was very strong, but she had
+always used it not to renounce but to attain, not to hold her desires in
+check but to bring them to fruition. And it was late in the day to begin
+reversing the powerful engine of her will. She was not even sure that
+she could reverse it. Hitherto she had never genuinely tried to do that.
+She did not want to try now, partly--but only partly--because she hated
+to fail in anything she undertook. And she had a suspicion, which she
+was not anxious to turn into a certainty, that she who had ruled many
+people was only a slave herself. Perhaps some day Jimmy would force her
+to a knowledge of her exact condition.
+
+For the first time in her life she was half afraid of that mysterious
+energy which men and women call love; she began to understand, with
+a sort of ample fulness of comprehension, that of all loves the most
+determined is the love of a mother for her only son. A mother may,
+perhaps, have a son and not love him; but if once she loves him she
+holds within her a thing that will not die while she lives.
+
+And if the thing that was without lust stood up in battle against the
+thing that was full of lust--what then?
+
+The black and still night seemed a battlefield.
+
+Softly she stepped upon the highest terrace and stood for a moment under
+the great plane tree, where was the wooden seat on which she had waited
+for Dion to weep away the past and the good woman who had ruined his
+life. To-night she was invaded by an odd uncertainty. If she went to the
+pavilion and Dion were not there? If he did not come? Would some part
+of her, perhaps, be glad, the part that in a mysterious way was one with
+Jimmy? She stared into the darkness, looking towards the pavilion. Dion
+Leith had once said she looked punished. Perhaps when he had said that
+he had shown that he had intuition.
+
+Was he there? It was past eleven now. She had assumed that he would
+come, and she was inclined to believe that he had come. If so she need
+not see him even now. There was still time for her to go back to the
+villa, to shut herself in, to go to bed, as Jimmy had gone to bed. But
+if she did that she would not sleep. All night long she would lie wide
+awake, tossing from side to side, the helpless prey of her past life.
+
+She frowned and slipped through the darkness, almost like a fluid, to
+the pavilion.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+She came so silently that Dion heard nothing till against the background
+of the night he saw a shadow, her thin body, a faint whiteness, her
+face, motionless at the opening of the pavilion; from this shadow and
+this whiteness came a voice which said:
+
+"Did you come under the influence of _Defetgamm_?"
+
+"It's impossible that you see me!" he said.
+
+"I see you plainly with some part of me, not my eyes."
+
+He got up from the divan where he had been sitting in the dark and went
+to the opening of the pavilion.
+
+"Did you come under the influence of _Defetgamm_?" she repeated.
+
+"You know I didn't."
+
+He paused, then added:
+
+"I nearly didn't come to-night."
+
+"And I nearly went down, after I had come up here, without seeing you.
+And yet--we are together again."
+
+"Why do you want to see me here? We agreed--"
+
+"Yes, we agreed; but after to-day in the forest that agreement had to be
+broken. When you left me under the trees you looked like a man who was
+thinking of starting on a very long journey."
+
+She spoke with a peculiar significance which at once conveyed her full
+meaning to him.
+
+"No, I shall never do that," he said. "If I had been capable of it, I
+should have done it long ago."
+
+"Yes? Let me in."
+
+He moved. She slipped into the pavilion and sat down.
+
+"How can you move without making any sound?" he asked somberly.
+
+There had been in her movement a sort of perfection of surreptitiousness
+that was animal. He noticed it, and thought that she must surely be
+accustomed to moving with precaution lest she should be seen or heard.
+Rosamund could not move like that. A life story seemed to him to be
+faintly traced in Mrs. Clarke's manner of entering the pavilion and of
+sitting down on the divan.
+
+He stood beside her in the dark. She returned no answer to his question.
+
+"You spoke of a journey," he said. "The only journey I have thought
+of making is short enough--to Constantinople. I nearly started on it
+to-night."
+
+"Why do you want to go to Constantinople?"
+
+He was silent.
+
+"What would you do there?"
+
+"Ugly things, perhaps."
+
+"Why didn't you go? What kept you?"
+
+"I felt that I must ask you something."
+
+He sat down beside her and took both her hands roughly. They were dry
+and burning as if with fever.
+
+"You trick Jimmy," he said. "You trick the Ingletons, Vane, all the
+people here--"
+
+"Trick!" she interrupted coldly, almost disdainfully. "What do you
+mean?"
+
+"That you deceive them, take them in."
+
+"What about?"
+
+"You know quite well."
+
+After a pause, which was perhaps--he could not tell--a pause of
+astonishment, she said:
+
+"Do you really expect me to go about telling every one that I, a lonely
+woman, separated from my husband, unable to marry again, have met a man
+whom I care for, and that I've been weak enough--or wicked enough, if
+you like--to let him know it?"
+
+Dion felt his cheeks burn in the darkness. Nevertheless, something drove
+him on, forced him to push his way hardily through a sort of quickset
+hedge of reluctance and shame.
+
+"No, I don't expect absurdities. I am not such a fool. But--but you do
+it so well!"
+
+"Do what well?"
+
+"Everything connected with deception. You are such a mistress of it."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Isn't that rather strange?"
+
+"Do you expect a woman like me, a woman who can't pretend to stupidity,
+and who has lived for years in the diplomatic world, to blunder in what
+she undertakes?"
+
+"No, I don't. But you are too competent."
+
+He spoke with hard determination, but his cheeks were still burning.
+
+"It's impossible to be too competent. If I make up my mind that a thing
+must be done I resolve to do it thoroughly and to do it well. I despise
+blunderers and women who are afraid of what they do. I despise those who
+give themselves and others away. I cared for you. I saw you needed me
+and I gave myself to you. I am not sorry I did it, not a bit sorry. I
+had counted the cost before I did it."
+
+"Counted the cost? But what cost is there? Neither of us loses
+anything."
+
+"I risk losing almost everything a woman cares for. I don't want to
+dwell upon it. I detest women who indulge in reproaches, or who try
+to make men value them by pointing out how much they stand to lose by
+giving themselves. But you are so strange to-night. You have attacked
+me. I don't know why."
+
+"I've been walking on the quay and thinking."
+
+"What about?"
+
+"You!"
+
+"Go on."
+
+"I've been thinking that, as you take in Jimmy and all the people here
+so easily, there is no reason why you shouldn't be taking me in too."
+
+In the dark a feeling was steadily growing within him that his companion
+was playing with him as he knew she had played with others.
+
+"I'm forced to deceive the people here and my boy. My relation with you
+obliges me to do that. But nothing forces me to deceive you. I have been
+sincere with you. Ever since I met you in the street in Pera I've been
+sincere, even blunt. I should think you must have noticed it."
+
+"I have. In some ways you are blunt, but in many you aren't."
+
+"What is it exactly that you wish to know?"
+
+For a moment Dion was silent. In the darkness of the pavilion he saw
+Dumeny's lips smiling faintly, Hadi Bey's vivid, self-possessed eyes,
+the weak mouth of Brayfield and his own double. Was he a member of an
+ugly brotherhood, or did he stand alone? He wanted to know, yet he felt
+that he could not put such a hideous question to his companion.
+
+"Tell me exactly what it is," she said. "Don't be afraid. I wish to be
+quite sincere with you, though you think I don't. It is no pleasure
+to me to deceive people. What I do in the way of deception I do in
+self-defense. Circumstances often push us into doing what we don't enjoy
+doing. But you and I ought to be frank with one another."
+
+Her hands tightened on his.
+
+"Go on. Tell me."
+
+"I've been wondering whether your husband ought to have won his case,"
+said Dion, in a low voice.
+
+"Is that all?" she said, very simply and without any emotion.
+
+"All?"
+
+"Yes. Do you suppose, when I gave myself to you, I didn't realize that
+my doing it was certain to make you doubt my virtue? Dion, you don't
+know how boyish you still are. You will always be in some ways a boy.
+I knew you would doubt me after all that had happened. But what is the
+good of asking questions of a women whom you doubt? If I am what you
+suspect, of course I shall tell lies. If I am not, what is the good of
+my telling you the truth? What is to make you believe it?"
+
+He was silent. She moved slightly and he felt her thin body against his
+side. What sort of weapon was she? That was the great question for
+him. Since his struggle in the forest of _Defetgamm_ he had come to
+the resolve to strike fierce and reiterated blows on that disabling and
+surely contemptible love of his, that love which had confronted him like
+a specter when he was in the pavilion with Jimmy. He was resolved at
+last upon assassination, and he wanted a weapon that could slay, not a
+weapon that would bend, or perhaps break, in his hand.
+
+"I don't want to believe I am only one among many," he said at last.
+
+The sound of his voice gave her the cue to his inmost feeling. She had
+been puzzled in the forest, she had been half afraid, seeing that he
+had arrived at an acute emotional crisis and not understanding what had
+brought him to it. She did not understand that now, but she knew that he
+was asking from her more than he had ever asked before. He had been
+cast out and now he was knocking hard on her door. He was knocking, but
+lingering remnants of the influence of the woman who had colored his
+former life hung about him like torn rags, and his hands instinctively
+felt for them, pulled at them, to cover his nakedness. Still, while he
+knocked, he looked back to the other life. Nevertheless--she knew this
+with all there was of woman in her--he wanted from her all that the good
+woman had never given to him, was incapable of giving to him or to any
+one. He wanted from her, perhaps, powers of the body which would suffice
+finally for the killing of those powers of the soul by which he was
+now tormented ceaselessly. The sound of his voice demanded from her
+something no other man had ever demanded from her, the slaughter in him
+of what he had lived by through all his years. Nevertheless he was still
+looking back to all the old purities, was still trying to hear all the
+old voices. He required of her, as it were, that she should be good in
+her evil, gentle while she destroyed. Well, she would even be that. A
+rare smile curved her thin lips, but he did not see it.
+
+"Suppose I told you that you were one of many?" she said. "Would you
+give it all up?"
+
+"I don't know. Am I?"
+
+"No. Do you think, if you were, I should have kept my women friends,
+Tippie Chetwinde, Delia Ingleton and all the rest?"
+
+"I suppose not," he said.
+
+But he remembered tones in Mrs. Chetwinde's voice when she had spoken of
+"Cynthia Clarke," and even tones in Lady Ingleton's voice.
+
+"They stuck to me because they believed in me. What other reason could
+they have?"
+
+"Unless they were very devoted to you."
+
+"Women aren't much given to that sort of thing," she said dryly.
+
+"I think you have an unusual power of making people do what you wish.
+It is like an emanation," he said slowly. "And it seems not to be
+interfered with by distance."
+
+She leaned till her cheek touched his.
+
+"Dion, I wish to make you forget. I know how it is with you. You suffer
+abominably because you can't forget. I haven't succeeded with you yet.
+But wait, only wait, till Jimmy goes, till the summer is over and we can
+leave the Bosporus. It's all too intimate--the life here. We are all too
+near together. But in Constantinople I know ways. I'll stay there all
+the winter for you. Even the Christmas holidays--I'll give them up for
+once. I want to show you that I do care. For no one else on earth would
+I give up being with Jimmy in his holidays. For no one else I'd risk
+what I'm risking to-night."
+
+"Jimmy was asleep when you came?"
+
+"Yes, but he might wake. He never does, but he might wake just
+to-night."
+
+"Suppose he did! Suppose he looked for you in your room and didn't find
+you! Suppose he came up here!"
+
+"He won't!"
+
+She spoke obstinately, almost as if her assertion of the thing's
+impossibility must make it impossible.
+
+"And yet there's the risk of it," said Dion--"the great risk."
+
+"There are always risks in connection with the big things in life. We
+are worth very little if we won't take them."
+
+"If it wasn't for Jimmy would you come and live with me? Would you drop
+all this deception? Would you let your husband divorce you? Would you
+give up your place in society for me? I am an outcast. Would you come
+and be an outcast with me?"
+
+"Yes, if it wasn't for Jimmy."
+
+"And for Jimmy you'd give me up for ever in a moment, wouldn't you?"
+
+"Why do you ask these questions?" she said, almost fiercely.
+
+"I want something for myself, something that's really mine. Then
+perhaps----"
+
+He stopped.
+
+"Perhaps what?"
+
+"Perhaps I could forget--sometimes."
+
+"And yet when you knew Jimmy was coming here you wanted to go away. You
+were afraid then. And even to-day--"
+
+"I want one thing or the other!" he interrupted desperately. "I'm sick
+of mixing up good and bad. I'm sick of prevarications and deceptions.
+They go against my whole nature. I hate struggling in a net. It saps all
+my strength."
+
+"I know. I understand."
+
+She put her arm round his neck.
+
+"Perhaps I ought to give you up, let you go. I've thought that. But I
+haven't the courage. Dion, I'm lonely, I'm lonely."
+
+He felt moisture on his cheek.
+
+"About you I'm absolutely selfish," she said, in a low, swift voice.
+"Even if all this hypocrisy hurts you I can't give you up. I've told you
+a lie--even you."
+
+"When?"
+
+"I said to you on _that_ night----"
+
+She waited.
+
+"I know," he said.
+
+"I said that I hadn't cared for you till I met you in Pera, and saw
+what _she_ had done to you. That was a lie. I cared for you in England.
+Didn't you know it?"
+
+"Once or twice I wondered, but I was never at all sure."
+
+"It was because I cared that I wanted to make friends with your wife.
+I had no evil reason. I knew you and she were perfectly happy together.
+But I wanted just to see you sometimes. She guessed it. That was why she
+avoided me--the real reason. It wasn't only because I'd been involved
+in a scandal, though I told you once it was. I've sometimes lied to you
+because I didn't want to feel myself humiliated in your eyes. But now
+I don't care. You can know all the truth if you want to. You pushed
+me away--oh, very gently--because of her. Did you think I didn't
+understand? You were afraid of me. Perhaps you thought I was a nuisance.
+When I came back from Paris on purpose for Tippie Chetwinde's party
+you were startled, almost horrified, when you saw me. I saw it all so
+plainly. In the end, as you know, I gave it up. Only when you went to
+the war I had to send that telegram. I thought you might be killed, and
+I wanted you to know I was remembering you, and admiring you for what
+you had done. Then you came with poor Brayfield's letter----"
+
+She broke off, then added, with a long, quivering sigh:
+
+"You've made me suffer, Dion."
+
+"Have I?"
+
+He turned till he was facing her in the darkness.
+
+"Then at last you were overtaken by your tragedy, and she showed you her
+cruelty and cast you out. From that moment I was resolved some day
+to let you know how much I cared. I wanted you in your misery. But I
+waited. I had a conviction that you would come to me, drawn, without
+suspecting it, by what I felt for you. Well, you came at last. And now
+you ask me whether you are one of many."
+
+"Forgive me!" he whispered.
+
+"But of course I shall always forgive you for everything. Women who care
+for men always do that. They can't help themselves. And you--will you
+forgive me for my lies?"
+
+He took her in his arms.
+
+"Life's full of them. Only don't tell me any more, and make me forget if
+you can. You've got so much will. Try to have the power for that."
+
+"Then help me. Give yourself wholly to me. You have struggled against me
+furtively. You thought I didn't know it, but I did. You look back to the
+old ways. And that is madness. Turn a new page, Dion. Have the courage
+to hope."
+
+"To--hope!"
+
+Her hot hands closed on him fiercely.
+
+"You shall hope. I'll make you. Cut out the cancer that is in you, and
+cut away all that is round it. Then you'll have health again. She never
+knew how to feel in the great human way. She was too fond of God ever to
+care for a man."
+
+Let that be the epitaph over the tomb in which all his happiness was
+buried.
+
+In silence he made his decision, and Cynthia Clarke knew it.
+
+The darkness covered them.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Down below in the Villa Hafiz Jimmy was sleeping peacefully, tired by
+the long ride to and from the forest in the heat. He had gone to bed
+very early, almost directly after dinner. His mother had not advised
+this. Perhaps indeed, if she had not been secretly concentrated on
+herself and her own desires that evening, she would have made Jimmy stay
+up till at least half-past ten, even though he was "jolly sleepy."
+He had slept for at least two hours in the forest. She ought to have
+remembered that, but she had forgotten it, and when, at a quarter to
+nine, on an enormous yawn, Jimmy had announced that he thought he would
+"turn in and get between the sheets," she had almost eagerly acquiesced.
+She wanted her boy asleep, soundly asleep that night. When the clock had
+struck nine he had already traveled beyond the land of dreams.
+
+The night was intensely hot and airless. No breath of wind came from the
+sea. Drops of perspiration stood on the boy's forehead as he slept, with
+nothing over him but a sheet. He lay on his side, with his face towards
+the open window and one arm outside the sheet.
+
+People easily fall into habits of sleeping. Jimmy was accustomed to
+sleep for about eight hours "on end," as he put it. When he had had his
+eight hours he generally woke up. If he was not obliged to get up he
+often went to sleep again after an interval of wakefulness, but he
+seldom slept for as much as nine hours without waking.
+
+On this night between two o'clock and three it seemed as if a layer of
+sleep were gently lifted from him. He sighed, stirred, turned over and
+began to dream.
+
+He dreamed confusedly about Dion, and there were pain and apprehension
+in his dream. In it Dion seemed to be himself and yet not himself, to be
+near and at the same time remote, to be Jimmy's friend and yet, in some
+strange and horrible way, hostile to Jimmy. No doubt the boy was haunted
+in his sleep by an obscure phantom bred of that painful impression of
+the morning, when his friend had suddenly been changed in the pavilion,
+changed into a tragic figure from which seemed to emanate impalpable
+things very black and very cold.
+
+In the dream Jimmy's mother did not appear as an active figure; yet the
+dreamer seemed somehow to be aware of her, to know faintly that she was
+involved in unhappy circumstances, that she was the victim of distresses
+he could not fathom. And these distresses weighed upon him like a
+burden, as things weigh upon us in dreams, softly and heavily, and with
+a sort of cloudy awfulness. He wanted to strive against them for his
+mother, but he was held back from action, and Dion seemed to have
+something to do with this. It was as if his friend and enemy, Dion
+Leith, did not wish his mother to be released from unhappiness.
+
+Jimmy moved, lay on his back and groaned. His eyelids fluttered.
+Something from without, something from a distance, was pulling at him,
+and the hands of sleep, too inert, perhaps, for any conflict, relaxed
+their hold upon him. Thoughts from two minds in a dark pavilion were
+stealing upon him, were touching him here and there, were whispering to
+him.
+
+Another layer of sleep was softly removed from him.
+
+He clenched his large hands--he had already the hands and feet almost
+of the man he would some day grow into--and his eyes opened wide for a
+moment. But they closed again. He was not awake yet.
+
+At three o'clock he woke. He had slept for six hours in the villa and
+for two hours in the forest. He lay still in the dark for a few minutes.
+A faint memory of his dream hung about him like a tattered mist. He felt
+anxious, almost apprehensive, and strained his ears expectant of some
+sound. But the silence of the airless night was deep and large all about
+him. He began to think of his mother. What had been the matter with
+her? Who, or what, had persecuted her? He realized now that he had been
+dreaming, said to himself, with a boy's exaggeration, that he had had "a
+beastly nightmare!" Nevertheless his mother still appeared to him as the
+victim of distresses. He could not absolutely detach himself from the
+impressions communicated to him in his dream. He was obliged to think of
+his mother as unhappy and of Dion Leith as not wholly friendly either to
+her or to himself. And it was all quite beastly.
+
+Presently, more fully awake, he began to wonder about the time and to
+feel tremendously thirsty, as if he could "drink the jug."
+
+He stretched out a hand, found the matches and struck a light. It went
+out with a sort of feeble determination.
+
+"Damn!" he muttered.
+
+He struck another match and lit the candle. His silver watch lay
+beside it, and marked five minutes past three. Jimmy was almost angrily
+astonished. Only that! He now felt painfully wide awake, as if his sleep
+were absolutely finished. What was to be done? He remembered that he had
+slept in the forest. He had had his eight hours. Perhaps that was the
+reason of his present wakefulness. Anyhow, he must have a drink.
+He thrust away the sheet, rolled out of bed, and went to the
+washhand-stand. There was plenty of water in his bottle, but when he
+poured it into the tumbler he found that it was quite warm. He was
+certain warm water wouldn't quench his ardent thirst. Besides, he
+loathed it. Any chap would! How beastly everything was!
+
+He put down the tumbler without drinking, went to the window and looked
+out. The still hot darkness which greeted him made him feel again the
+obscure distress of his dream. He was aware of apprehension. Dawn could
+not be so very far off; yet he felt sunk to the lips in the heavy night.
+
+If only he could have a good drink of something very cold! This wish
+made him think again of his mother. He knew she did not require much
+sleep, and sometimes read during part of the night; he also knew that
+she kept some iced lemonade on the table beside her bed. Now the thought
+of his mother's lemonade enticed him.
+
+He hesitated for a moment, then stuck his feet into a pair of red
+Turkish slippers without heels, buttoned the jacket of his pyjamas,
+which he had thrown open because of the heat, took his candle in
+hand, and shuffled--he always shuffled when he had on the ridiculous
+slippers--to the door.
+
+There he paused.
+
+The landing was fairly wide. It looked dreary and deserted in the
+darkness defined by the light from his candle. He could see the head
+of the staircase, the shallow wooden steps disappearing into the empty
+blackness in which the ground floor of the house was shrouded; he could
+see the door of his mother's bedroom. As he stared at it, considering
+whether his thirst justified him in waking her up--for, if she were
+asleep, he felt pretty sure she would wake however softly he crept into
+her room--he saw that the door was partly open. Perhaps his mother had
+found the heat too great, and had tried to create a draught by opening
+her door. There was darkness in the aperture. She wasn't reading, then.
+Probably she was asleep. He was infernally thirsty; the door was open;
+the lemonade was almost within reach; he resolved to risk it. Carefully
+shading the candle with one hand he crept across the landing, adroitly
+abandoned his slippers outside the door, and on naked feet entered his
+mother's room.
+
+His eyes immediately rested on the tall jug of lemonade, which stood on
+a small table, with a glass and some books, beside the big, low bed.
+He stole towards it, always shielding the candle with his hand, and not
+looking at the bed lest his glance might, perhaps, disturb the sleeper
+he supposed to be in it. He reached the table, and was about to lay a
+desirous hand upon the jug, when it occurred to him that, in doing this,
+he would expose the candle ray. Better blow the candle out! He located
+the jug, and was on the edge of action--his lips were pursed for the
+puff--when the dead silence of the room struck him. Could any one,
+even his remarkably quiet mother, sleep without making even the tiniest
+sound? He shot a glance at the bed. There was no one in it. He bent
+down. It had not been slept in that night.
+
+Jimmy stood, with his mouth open, staring at the large, neat, unruffled
+bed. What the dickens could the mater be up to? She must, of course, be
+sitting up in her small sitting-room next door to the bedroom. Evidently
+the heat had made her sleepless.
+
+He took a pull at the lemonade, went to the sitting-room door and softly
+opened it, at the same time exclaiming, "I say, mater----"
+
+Darkness and emptiness confronted him.
+
+He shut the door rather hurriedly, and again stood considering.
+Something cracked. He started, and the candle rattled in his hand. A
+disagreeable sensation was stealing upon him. He would not, of course,
+have acknowledged that an unpleasant feeling of loneliness, almost of
+desertion. The servants slept in a small wing of the villa, shut off
+from the main part of the house by double doors. Mrs. Clarke detested
+hearing the servants at night, and had taken good care to make such
+hearing impossible. Jimmy began to feel isolated.
+
+Where could the mater be? And what could she be doing?
+
+For a moment he thought of returning to his room, shutting himself in
+and waiting for the dawn, which would change everything--would make
+everything seem quite usual and reasonable. But something in the depths
+of him, speaking in a disagreeably distinct voice, remarked, "That's
+right! Be a funk stick!" And his young cheeks flushed red, although he
+was alone. Immediately he went out on to the landing, thrust his feet
+again into the red slippers, and boldly started down the stairs into the
+black depths below. Holding the candle tightly, and trying to shuffle
+with manly decision, he explored the sitting-rooms and the dining-room.
+All of them were empty and dark.
+
+Now Jimmy began to feel "rotten." Horrid fears for his mother bristled
+up in his mind. His young imagination got to work and summoned up
+ugly things before him. He saw his mother ravished away from him
+by unspeakable men--Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Albanians--God knows
+whom--and carried off to some unknown and frightful fate; he saw her
+dead, murdered; he saw her dead, stricken by some sudden and horrible
+illness. His heart thumped. He could hear it. It seemed to be beating
+in his ears. And then he began to feel brave, to feel an intrepidity of
+desperation. He must act. That was certain. It was his obvious business
+to jolly well get to work and do something. His first thought was to
+rush upstairs, to rouse the servants, to call up Sonia, his mother's
+confidential maid, to--the pavilion!
+
+Suddenly he remembered the pavilion, and all the books on its shelves.
+His mother might be there. She might have been sleepless, might have
+felt sure she couldn't sleep, and so have stayed up. She might be
+reading in the darkness. She was afraid of nothing. Darkness and
+solitude wouldn't hinder her from wandering about if the fancy to wander
+took her. She wouldn't, of course, go outside the gates, but--he now
+felt sure she was somewhere in the garden.
+
+He looked round. He was standing by the grand piano in the drawing-room,
+and he now noticed for the first time that the French window which gave
+on to the rose garden was open. That settled it. He put the candle down,
+hurried out into the garden and called, "Mater!"
+
+No voice replied except the fountain's voice. The purring water rose
+in the darkness and fell among the lilies, rose and fell, active and
+indifferent, like a living thing withdrawn from him, wrapped in its own
+mystery.
+
+"Mater!" he called again, in a louder, more resolute, voice. "Mater!
+Mater!"
+
+* * * * *
+
+In an absolutely still night a voice can travel very far. On the highest
+terrace of the garden in the blackness of the pavilion Mrs. Clarke moved
+sharply. She sat straight up on the divan, rigid, with her hands pressed
+palm downwards on the cushions. Dion had heard nothing, and did not
+understand the reason for her abrupt, almost violent, movement.
+
+"Why . . . ?" he began.
+
+She caught his wrist and held it tightly, compressing her fingers on it
+with a fierce force that amazed him.
+
+"Mater!"
+
+Had he really heard the word, or had he imagined it?
+
+"Mater!"
+
+He had heard it.
+
+"It's Jimmy!"
+
+She had her thin lips close to his ear. She still held his wrist in a
+grip of iron.
+
+"He's at the bottom of the garden. He'll come up here. He won't wait. Go
+down and meet him."
+
+"But----"
+
+"Go down! I'll hide among the trees. Let him come up here, or bring him
+up. He must come. Be sure he comes inside. While you go I'll light the
+lamp. I can do it in a moment. You couldn't sleep. You came here to
+read. Of course you know nothing about me. Keep him here for five or
+ten minutes. You can come down then and help him to look for me. Go at
+once."
+
+She took away her hand.
+
+"My whole future depends upon you!"
+
+Dion got up and went out. As he went he heard her strike a match.
+
+Scarcely knowing for a moment what he was doing, acting mechanically,
+in obedience to instinct, but always feeling a sort of terrible driving
+force behind him, he traversed the terrace on which the pavilion stood,
+passed the great plane tree and the wooden seat, and began to descend.
+As he did so he heard again Jimmy's voice crying:
+
+"Mater!"
+
+"Jimmy!" he called out, in a loud voice, hurrying on.
+
+As the sound died away he knew it had been nonchalant. Surely she had
+made it so!
+
+"Jimmy!" he called again. "What's up. What's the matter?"
+
+There was no immediate reply, but in the deep silence Dion heard
+hurrying steps, and then:
+
+"Mr. Leith!"
+
+"Hallo!"
+
+"Mr. Leith--it is you, is it?"
+
+"Yes. What on earth's the matter?"
+
+"Stop a sec! I----"
+
+The feet were pounding upward. Almost directly, in pyjamas and the
+slippers, which somehow still remained with him, Jimmy stood by Dion in
+the dark, breathing hard.
+
+"Jimmy, what's the matter? What has happened?"
+
+"I say, why are you here?"
+
+"I couldn't sleep. The night was so hot. I had nothing to read in my
+rooms. Besides they're stuck down right against the quay. You know your
+mother's kind enough to let me have a key of the garden gate. I thought
+I might get more air on the top terrace. I was reading in the pavilion
+when I thought I heard a call."
+
+"Then the mater isn't there?"
+
+"Your mother?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Of course not. Come on up!"
+
+Dion took the boy by the arm with decision, and slowly led him upwards.
+
+"What's this about your mother? Do you mean she isn't asleep?"
+
+"Asleep? She isn't in her bedroom! She hasn't been there!"
+
+"Hasn't been there?"
+
+"Hasn't been to bed at all! I've been to her sitting-room--you know,
+upstairs--she isn't there. I've been in all the rooms. She isn't
+anywhere. She must be somewhere about here."
+
+They had arrived in front of the pavilion backed by trees. Looking in,
+Dion saw a lighted lamp. The slide of jeweled glass had been removed
+from it. A white ray fell on an open book laid on a table.
+
+"I was reading here"--he looked--"a thing called 'The Kasidah.' Sit
+down!" He pulled the boy down. "Now what is all this? Your mother must
+be in the house."
+
+"But I tell you she isn't!"
+
+Dion had sat down between Jimmy and the opening on to the terrace. It
+occurred to him that he ought to have induced the boy to sit with his
+back to the terrace and his face turned towards the room. It was too
+late to do that now.
+
+"I tell you she isn't!" Jimmy repeated, with a sort of almost fierce
+defiance.
+
+He was staring hard at Dion. His hair was almost wildly disordered, and
+his face looked pale and angry in the ray of the lamp. Dion felt that
+there was suspicion in his eyes. Surely those eyes were demanding of him
+the woman who was hiding among the trees.
+
+"Where have you looked?" he said.
+
+"I tell you I've looked everywhere," said Jimmy, doggedly.
+
+"Did you mother go to bed when you did?"
+
+"No. I went very early. I was so infernally sleepy."
+
+"Where did you leave her?"
+
+"In the drawing-room. She was playing the piano. But what's the good of
+that? What time did you come here?"
+
+"I! Oh, not till very late indeed."
+
+"Were there any lights showing when you came?"
+
+"Lights! No! But it was ever so much too late for that."
+
+"Did you go on to the terrace by the drawing-room?"
+
+"No. I came straight up here. It never occurred to me that any one
+would be up at such an hour. Besides, I didn't want to disturb any one,
+especially your mother."
+
+"Well, just now I found the drawing-room window wide open, and mater's
+bed hasn't been touched. What do you make of that?"
+
+Before Dion could reply the boy abruptly started up.
+
+"I heard something. I know I did."
+
+As naturally as he could Dion got between Jimmy and the opening on to
+the terrace, and, forestalling the boy, looked out. He saw nothing; he
+could not have said with truth that any definite sound reached his
+ears; but he felt that at that exact moment Mrs. Clarke escaped from the
+terrace, and began to glide down towards the house below.
+
+"There's nothing! Come and see for yourself," he said casually.
+
+Jimmy pushed by him, then stood perfectly still, staring at the darkness
+and listening intently.
+
+"I don't hear it now!" he acknowledged gruffly.
+
+"What did you think you heard?"
+
+"I _did_ hear something. I couldn't tell you what it was."
+
+"Have you looked all through the garden?"
+
+"You know I haven't. You heard me calling down at the bottom. You must
+have, because you answered me."
+
+"We'd better have a good look now. Just wait one minute while I put out
+the lamp. I'll put away the book I was reading, too."
+
+"Right you are!" said the boy, still gruffly.
+
+He waited on the terrace while Dion went into the pavilion. As Dion took
+up "The Kasidah" he glanced down at the page at which Mrs. Clarke had
+chanced to set the book open, and read:
+
+     "Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from
+         None but self expect applause----"
+
+With a feeling of cold and abject soul-nausea he shut the book, put
+it away on a bookshelf in which he saw a gap, and went to turn out the
+lamp. As the flame flickered and died out he heard Jimmy's foot shift on
+the terrace.
+
+
+"Do what thy manhood bids thee do----"
+
+
+Dion stood for a moment in the dark. He was in a darkness greater than
+any which reigned in the pavilion. His soul seemed to him to be pressing
+against it, to be hemmed in by it as by towering walls of iron. For
+an instant he shut his eyes. And when he did that he saw, low down, a
+little boy's figure, two small outstretched hands groping.
+
+Robin!
+
+"Aren't you coming, Mr. Leith? What's the matter?"
+
+"I was just seeing that the lamp was thoroughly out."
+
+"Well----"
+
+Dion came out.
+
+"We'll look all over the garden. But if your mother had been in it she
+must have heard you calling her. I did, although I was inside there
+reading."
+
+"I know. I thought of that too," returned Jimmy.
+
+And Dion fancied that the boy's voice was very cold; Dion fancied this
+but he was not sure. His conscience might be tricking him. He hoped that
+it was tricking him.
+
+"We'd better look among the trees," he said. "And then we'll go to the
+terrace below."
+
+"It's no use looking among the trees," Jimmy returned. "If she was up
+here she must have heard us talking all this time."
+
+Abruptly he led the way to the steps near the plane tree. Dion followed
+him slowly. Was it possible that Jimmy had guessed? Was it possible that
+Jimmy had caught a glimpse of his mother escaping? The boy's manner was
+surely almost hostile.
+
+They searched the garden in silence, and at length found themselves by
+the fountain close to the French window of the drawing-room.
+
+"You mother must be in the house," said Dion firmly.
+
+"But I know she isn't!" Jimmy retorted, with a sort of dull fixed
+obstinacy.
+
+"Did you rouse the servants?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Where do they sleep?"
+
+"Away from us, by themselves."
+
+"You'd better go and look again. If you can't find your mother perhaps
+you'd better wake the servants."
+
+"I know," said Jimmy, in a voice that had suddenly changed, become
+brighter, more eager--"I'll go to Sonia."
+
+"Your mother's maid? That's it. She may know something. I'll wait down
+here at the window. Got a candle?"
+
+"Yes. I left it in there by the piano."
+
+He felt his way in and, almost immediately, struck a light. The candle
+flickered across his face and his disordered hair as he disappeared.
+
+Dion waited by the fountain.
+
+Where would Mrs. Clarke be? How would she explain matters? Would she
+have had time to----? Oh yes! She would have had time to be ready with
+some quite simple, yet quite satisfactory, piece of deception. Jimmy
+would find her, and she would convince him of all that it was necessary
+he should be convinced of.
+
+Dion's chin sank down and his head almost drooped. He felt mortally
+tired as he waited here. Already a very faint grayness of the coming
+dawn was beginning to filter in among the darknesses.
+
+Another day to face! How could he face it? He had, he supposed, been
+what is called "true" to the woman who had given herself to him, but how
+damnably false he had been to himself that night!
+
+Meanwhile Jimmy went upstairs, frowning and very pale. He went again to
+his mother's bedroom and found it empty. The big bed, turned down, had
+held no sleeper. Nothing had been changed in the room since he had
+been away in the garden. He did not trouble to look once more in the
+adjoining sitting-room, but hurried towards the servants' quarters. The
+double doors were shut. Softly he opened them and passed through into
+a wooden corridor. At the far end of it were two rooms sacred to Sonia,
+the Russian maid. The first room she slept in; the second was a large
+airy chamber lined with cupboards. In this she worked. She was a very
+clever needlewoman, expert in the mysteries of dressmaking.
+
+As Jimmy drew near to the door of Sonia's workroom he heard a low murmur
+of voices coming from within. Evidently Sonia was there, talking to some
+one. He crept up and listened.
+
+Very tranquil the voices sounded. They were talking in French. One was
+his mother's, and he heard her say:
+
+"Another five minutes, Sonia, and perhaps I shall be ready for bed. At
+last I'm beginning to feel as if I might be able to sleep. If only
+I were like Jimmy! He doesn't know anything about the torments of
+insomnia."
+
+"Poor Madame!" returned Sonia, in her rather thick, but pleasantly soft,
+voice. "Your head a little back. That's better!"
+
+Jimmy was aware of an odd, very faint, sound. He couldn't make out what
+it was.
+
+"Mater!" he said.
+
+And he tapped on the door.
+
+"Who's that?" said Sonia's voice.
+
+"It's Jimmy!"
+
+The door was opened by the maid, and he saw his mother in a long, very
+thin white dressing-gown, seated in an arm-chair before a mirror. Her
+colorless hair flowed over the back of the chair, against which her
+little head was leaning, supported by a silk cushion. Her face looked
+very white and tired, and the lids drooped over her usually wide-open
+eyes, giving her a strange expression of languor, almost of drowsiness.
+Sonia held a silver-backed brush in each hand.
+
+"Monsieur Jimmy!" she said.
+
+"Jimmy!" said Mrs. Clarke. "What's the matter?"
+
+She lifted her head from the cushion, and sat straight up. But she still
+looked languid.
+
+"What is it? Are you ill?"
+
+"No, mater! But I've been looking for you everywhere!"
+
+There was a boyish reproach in his voice.
+
+"Looking for me in the middle of the night! Why?"
+
+Jimmy began to explain matters.
+
+"At last I thought I'd look in the garden. I shouted out for you, and
+who should answer but Mr. Leith?" he presently said.
+
+His mother--he noticed it--woke up fully at this point in the narrative.
+
+"Mr. Leith!" she said, with strong surprise. "How could he answer you?"
+
+"He was up in the pavilion reading a book."
+
+Mrs. Clarke looked frankly astonished. Her eyes traveled to Sonia, whose
+broad face was also full of amazement.
+
+"At this hour!" said Mrs. Clarke.
+
+"He couldn't sleep either," said Jimmy, quite simply. "He's waiting out
+there now to know whether I've found you."
+
+Mrs. Clarke smiled faintly.
+
+"What a to do!" she said, with just a touch of gentle disdain. "And all
+because I suffer from insomnia. Run down to him, Jimmy, and tell him
+that as I felt it was useless to go to bed I sat by the fountain till I
+was weary, then read in my sitting-room, and finally came to Sonia to be
+brushed into sleep. Set his mind at rest about me if you can."
+
+She smiled again.
+
+Somehow that smile made Jimmy feel very small.
+
+"And go back to bed, dear boy."
+
+She put out one hand, drew him to her, and gave him a gentle kiss with
+lips which felt very calm.
+
+"I'm sorry you were worried about me."
+
+"Oh, that's all right, mater!" said Jimmy, rather awkwardly. "I didn't
+know what to think. You see--"
+
+"Of course you couldn't guess that I was having my hair brushed. Now
+go straight to bed, after you've told Mr. Leith. I'm coming too in a
+minute."
+
+As Jimmy left the room Sonia was again at work with the two
+hair-brushes.
+
+A moment later Jimmy reappeared at the French window of the
+drawing-room. Dion lifted his head, but did not move from the place
+where he was standing close to the fountain.
+
+"It's all right, Mr. Leith," said Jimmy. "I've found mater."
+
+"Where was she?"
+
+"In Sonia's room having her hair brushed."
+
+Dion stared towards him but said nothing.
+
+"She told me I was to set your mind at rest."
+
+"Did she?"
+
+"Yes. I believe she thought us a couple of fools for kicking us such a
+dust about her."
+
+Dion said nothing.
+
+"I don't know, but I've an idea girls and women often think they can
+laugh at us," added Jimmy. "Anyhow, it'll be a jolly long time before
+I put myself in a sweat about the mater again. I thought--I don't know
+what I thought, and all the time she was half asleep and having her hair
+brushed. She made me feel ass number one. Good night."
+
+"Good night."
+
+The boy shut the window, bent down and bolted it on the inside.
+
+Dion looked at the gray coming of the new day.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Liverpool has a capacity for looking black which is perhaps, only
+surpassed by Manchester's, and it looked its blackest on a day at the
+end of March in the following year, as the afternoon express from London
+roared into the Lime Street Station. The rain was coming down; it was
+small rain, and it descended with a sort of puny determination; it was
+sad rain without any dash, any boldness; it had affinities with
+the mists which sweep over stretches of moorland, but its power of
+saturation was remarkable. It soaked Liverpool. It issued out of
+blackness and seemed to carry a blackness with it which descended into
+the very soul of the city and lay coiled there like a snake.
+
+Lady Ingleton was very sensitive to her surroundings, and as she lifted
+the rug from her knees, and put away the book she had been reading,
+she shivered. A deep melancholy floated over her and enveloped her. She
+thought, "Why did I come upon this adventure? What is it all to do
+with me?" But then the face of a man rose up before her, lean, brown,
+wrinkled, ravaged, with an expression upon it that for a long time had
+haunted her, throwing a shadow upon her happiness. And she felt that
+she had done right to come. Impulse, perhaps, had driven her; sentiment
+rather than reason had been her guide. Nevertheless, she did not regret
+her journey. Even if nothing good came of it she would not regret it.
+She would have tried for once at some small expense to herself to do a
+worthy action. She would for once have put all selfishness behind her.
+
+A white-faced porter, looking anxious and damp, appeared at the door of
+the corridor. Lady Ingleton's French maid arrived from the second class
+with Turkish Jane on her arm.
+
+"Oh, Miladi, how black it is here!" she exclaimed, twisting her pointed
+little nose. "The black it reaches the heart."
+
+That was exactly what Lady Ingleton was thinking, but she said, in a
+voice less lazy than usual.
+
+"There's a capital hotel, Annette. We shall be very comfortable."
+
+"Shall we stay here long, Miladi?"
+
+"No; but I don't know how long yet. Is Jane all right?"
+
+"She has been looking out of the window, Miladi, the whole way. She is
+in ecstasy. Dogs have no judgment, Miladi."
+
+When Lady Ingleton was in her sitting-room at the Adelphi Hotel, and had
+had the fire lighted and tea brought up, she asked to see the manager
+for a moment. He came almost immediately, a small man, very smart, very
+trim, self-possessed as a attache.
+
+"I hope you are quite comfortable, my lady," he said, in a thin voice
+which held no note of doubt. "Can I do anything for you?"
+
+"I wanted to ask you if you knew the address of some one I wish to send
+a note to--Mr. Robertson. He's a clergyman who--"
+
+"Do you mean Father Robertson, of Holy Cross, Manxby Street, my lady?"
+
+"Of Holy Cross; yes, that's it."
+
+"He lives at--"
+
+"Wait a moment. I'll take it down."
+
+She went to the writing-table and took up a pen.
+
+"Now, please!"
+
+"The Rev. George Robertson, Holy Cross Rectory, Manxby Street, my lady."
+
+"Thank you very much."
+
+"Can I do anything more for you, my lady?"
+
+"Please send me up a messenger in twenty minutes. Mr. Robertson is in
+Liverpool, I understand?"
+
+"I believe so, my lady. He is generally here. Holidays and pleasure are
+not much in his way. The messenger will be up in twenty minutes."
+
+He looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and went softly out, holding
+himself very erect.
+
+Lady Ingleton sat down by the tea-table. Annette was unpacking in the
+adjoining bedroom, and Turkish Jane was reposing in an arm-chair near
+the hearth.
+
+"What would Carey think of me, if he knew?" was her thought, as she
+poured out the tea.
+
+Sir Carey was at his post in Constantinople. She had left him and come
+to England to see her mother, who had been very ill, but who was now
+much better. When she had left Constantinople she had not known she was
+coming to Liverpool, but she had known that something was intruding upon
+her happiness, was worrying at her mind. Only when she found herself
+once more in England did she understand that she could not return to
+Turkey without making an effort to do a good deed. She had very little
+hope that her effort would be efficacious, but she knew that she had to
+make it.
+
+It was quite a new role for her, the role of Good Samaritan. She smiled
+faintly as she thought that. How would she play it?
+
+After tea she wrote this note:
+
+
+"ADELPHI HOTEL, Tuesday
+
+"DEAR MR. ROBERTSON,--As you will not know who I am, I must explain
+myself. My husband, Sir Carey Ingleton, is Ambassador at Constantinople.
+Out there we have made acquaintance with Mr. Dion Leith, who had the
+terrible misfortune to kill his little boy nearly a year and a half ago.
+I want very much to speak to you about him. I will explain why when I
+see you if you have the time to spare me an interview. I would gladly
+welcome you here, or I could come to you. Which do you prefer? I am
+telling the messenger to wait for an answer. To be frank, I have come to
+Liverpool on purpose to see you.--Yours sincerely,
+
+"DELIA INGLETON"
+
+
+The messenger came back without an answer. Father Robertson was out, but
+the note would be given to him as soon as he came home.
+
+That evening, just after nine o'clock, he arrived at the hotel, and sent
+up his name to Lady Ingleton.
+
+"Please ask him to come up," she said to the German waiter who had
+mispronounced his name.
+
+As she waited for her visitor she was conscious of a faint creeping of
+shyness through her. It made her feel oddly girlish. When had she last
+felt shy? She could not remember. It must have been centuries ago.
+
+The German waiter opened the door and a white-haired man walked in.
+Directly she saw him Lady Ingleton lost her unusual feeling. As she
+greeted him, and made her little apology for bothering him, and thanked
+him for coming out at night to see a stranger, she felt glad that she
+had obeyed her impulse and had been, for once, a victim to altruism.
+When she looked at his eyes she knew that she would not mind saying to
+him all she wanted to say about Dion Leith. They were eyes which shone
+with clarity; and they were something else--they were totally incurious
+eyes. Perhaps from perversity Lady Ingleton had always rebelled against
+giving to curious people the exact food they were in search of.
+
+"He won't be greedy to know," she thought. "And so I shan't mind telling
+him."
+
+Unlike a woman, she came at once to the point. Although she could be
+very evasive she could also be very direct.
+
+"You know Mrs. Dion Leith," she said. "My friend Tippie Chetwinde, Mrs.
+Willie Chetwinde, told me she was living here. She came here soon after
+the death of her child, I believe."
+
+"Yes, she did, and she has been here ever since."
+
+"Do you know Dion Leith, Mr. Robertson?" she asked, leaning forward in
+her chair by the fire, and fixing her large eyes, that looked like an
+Italian's, upon him.
+
+"No, I have never seen him. I hoped to, but the tragedy of the child
+occurred so soon after his return from South Africa that I never had an
+opportunity."
+
+"Forgive me for correcting you," she said, gently but very firmly. "But
+it is not the tragedy of a child. It's the tragedy of a man. I am going
+to talk very frankly to you. I make no apology for doing so. I am what
+is called"--she smiled faintly--"a woman of the world, and you, I
+think, are an unworldly man. Because I am of the world, and you, in
+spirit"--she looked at him almost deprecatingly--"are not of it, I can
+say what I have come here to try to say. I couldn't say it to a man of
+the world, because I could never give a woman away to such a man. Tell
+me though, first, if you don't mind--do you care for Mrs. Dion Leith?"
+
+"Very much," said Father Robertson, simply and warmly.
+
+"Do you care for her enough to tell her the truth?"
+
+"I never wish to tell her anything else."
+
+Suddenly Lady Ingleton's face flushed, her dark eyes flashed and then
+filled with tears, and she said in a voice that shook with emotion:
+
+"Dion Leith killed a body by accident, the body of his little boy. She
+is murdering a soul deliberately, the soul of her husband."
+
+She did not know at all why she was so suddenly and so violently moved.
+She had not expected this abrupt access of feeling. It had rushed upon
+her from she knew not where. She was startled by it.
+
+"I don't know why I should care," she commented, as if half ashamed of
+herself.
+
+Then she added, with a touch of almost shy defiance:
+
+"But I do care, I do care. That's why I've come here."
+
+"You are right to care if it is so," said Father Robertson.
+
+"Such lots of women wouldn't," she continued, in a quite different,
+almost cynical, voice. "But that man is an exceptional man--not in
+intellect, but in heart. And I'm a very happy woman. Perhaps you wonder
+what that has to do with it. Well sometimes I see things through my
+happiness, just because of it; sometimes I see unhappiness through it."
+
+Her voice had changed again, had become much softer. She drew her chair
+a little nearer to the fire.
+
+"Do you ever receive confessions, Mr. Robertson--as a priest, I mean?"
+she asked.
+
+"Yes, very often."
+
+"They are sacred, I know, even in your church."
+
+"Yes," he said, without emphasis.
+
+His lack of emphasis decided her. Till this moment she had been
+undecided about a certain thing, although she herself perhaps was not
+fully aware of her hesitation.
+
+"I want to do a thing that I have never yet done," she said. "I want to
+be treacherous to a friend, to give a friend away. Will you promise to
+keep my treachery secret forever? Will you promise to treat what I am
+going to tell you about her as if I told it to you in the confessional?"
+
+"If you tell it to me I will. But why must you tell it to me? I don't
+like treachery. It's an ugly thing."
+
+"I can't help that. I really came here just for that--to be
+treacherous."
+
+She looked into the fire and sighed.
+
+"I've covered a great sin with my garment," she murmured slowly, "and I
+repent me!"
+
+Then, with a look of resolve, she turned to her white-haired companion.
+
+"I've got a friend," she said--"a woman friend. Her name is Cynthia
+Clarke. (I'm in the confessional now!) You may have heard of her. She
+was a _cause celebre_ some time ago. Her husband tried to divorce her,
+poor man, and failed."
+
+"No, I never heard her name before," said Father Robertson.
+
+"You don't read _causes celebres_. You have better things to do. Well,
+she's my friend. I don't exactly know why. Her husband was Councillor in
+my husband's Embassy. But I knew her before that. We always got on. She
+has peculiar fascination--a sort of strange beauty, a very intelligent
+mind, and the strongest will I have ever known. She has virtues of a
+kind. She never speaks against other women. If she knew a secret of mine
+I am sure she would never tell it. She is thoroughbred. I find her a
+very interesting woman. There is absolutely no one like her. She's a
+woman one would miss. That's on one side. On the other--she's a cruel
+woman; she's a consummate hypocrite; she's absolutely corrupt. You
+wonder why she's my friend?"
+
+"I did not say so."
+
+"Nor look it. But you do. Well, I suppose I haven't many scruples except
+about myself. And I have been trained in the let-other-people-alone
+tradition. Besides, Cynthia Clarke never told me anything. No one has
+told me. Being a not stupid woman, I just know what she is. I'll put
+it brutally, Mr. Robertson. She is a huntress of men. That is what she
+lives for. But she deceives people into believing that she is a purely
+mental woman. All the men whom she doesn't hunt believe in her. Even
+women believe in her. She has good friends among women. They stick to
+her. Why? Because she intends them to. She has a conquering will. And
+she never tells a secret--especially if it is her own. In her last
+sin--for it is a sin--I have been a sort of accomplice. She meant me to
+be one and"--Lady Ingleton slightly shrugged her shoulders--"I yielded
+to her will. I don't know why. I never know why I do what Cynthia
+Clarke wishes. There are people like that; they just get what they want,
+because they want it with force, I suppose. Most of us are rather weak,
+I think. Cynthia Clarke hunted Dion Leith in his misery, and I helped
+her. Being an ambassadress I have social influence on the Bosporus, and
+I used it for Cynthia. I knew from the very first what she was about,
+what she meant to do. Directly she mentioned Dion Leith to me and asked
+me to invite him to the Embassy and be kind to him I understood. But
+I didn't know Dion Leith then. If I had thoroughly known him I should
+never have been a willing cat's-paw in a very ugly game. But once I had
+begun--I took them both for a yachting trip--I did not know how to
+get out of it all. On that yachting trip--I realized how that man was
+suffering and what he was. I have never before known a man capable of
+suffering so intensely as Dion Leith suffers. Does his wife know how he
+loves her? Can she know it? Can she ever have known it?"
+
+Father Robertson was silent. As she looked at his eyelids--his eyes no
+longer met hers with their luminous glowing sincerity--Lady Ingleton
+realized that he was the Confessor.
+
+"Sometimes I have been on the verge of saying to him, 'Go back to
+England, go to your wife. Tell her, show her what she has done. Put up
+a big fight for the life of your soul.' But I have never been able to
+do it. A grief like that is holy ground, isn't it? One simply can't set
+foot upon it. Besides, I scarcely ever see Dion Leith now. He's gone
+down, I think, gone down very far."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"In Constantinople. I saw him by chance in Stamboul, near Santa Sophia,
+just before I left for England. Oh, how he has changed! Cynthia Clarke
+is destroying him. I know it. Once she told me he had been an athlete
+with ideals. But now--now!"
+
+Again the tears started into her eyes. Father Robertson looked up and
+saw them.
+
+"Poor, poor fellow!" she said. "I can't bear to see him destroyed. Some
+men--well, they seem almost entirely body. But he's so different!"
+
+She got up and stood by the fire.
+
+"I have seen Mrs. Leith," she said. "I once heard her sing in London.
+She is extraordinarily beautiful. At that time she looked radiant. What
+did you say?"
+
+"Please go on," Father Robertson said, very quietly.
+
+"And she had a wonderful expression of joyous goodness which marked her
+out from other women. You have a regard for her, and you are good. But
+you care for truth, and so I'm going to tell you the truth. She may be a
+good woman, but she has done a wicked action. Can't you make her see it?
+Or shall I try to?"
+
+"You wish to see her?"
+
+"I am ready to see her."
+
+Father Robertson again looked down. He seemed to be thinking deeply,
+to be genuinely lost in thought. Lady Ingleton noticed this and did not
+disturb him. For some minutes he sat without moving. At last he looked
+up and put a question to Lady Ingleton which surprised her. He said:
+
+"Are you absolutely certain that your friend Mrs. Clarke and Dion Leith
+have been what people choose to call lovers?"
+
+"Have been and are--absolutely certain. I could not prove it, but I know
+it. He lives in Constantinople only for her."
+
+"And you think he has deteriorated?"
+
+"Terribly. I know it. The other day he looked almost degraded; as men
+look when they let physical things get absolute domination over them.
+It's an ugly subject, but--you and I know of these things."
+
+In her voice there was a sound of delicate apology. It was her tribute
+to the serene purity of which she was aware in this man.
+
+Again he seemed lost in thought. She trusted in his power of thought. He
+was a man--she was certain of it--who would find the one path which led
+out of the maze. His unself-conscious intentness was beautiful in its
+unconventional simplicity, and was a tribute to her sincerity which she
+was subtle enough to understand, and good woman enough to appreciate. He
+was concentrated not upon her but upon the problem which was troubling
+her.
+
+"I am very glad you have come to Liverpool," he said at length. "Very
+glad."
+
+He smiled, and she, without exactly knowing why, smiled back at him. And
+as she did so she felt extraordinarily simple, almost like a child.
+
+"How long are you going to stay?"
+
+"Till I know whether I can do any good," she said, "till I have done it,
+if that is possible."
+
+"Without mentioning any names, may I, if I think it wise, tell Mrs.
+Leith of the change in her husband?"
+
+"Oh, but would it be wise to say exactly what the nature of the change
+is? I've always heard that she is a woman with ideals, an exceptionally
+pure-natured woman. She might be disgusted, even revolted, perhaps,
+if--"
+
+"Forgive me!" Father Robertson interrupted, rather abruptly. "What was
+your intention then? What did you mean to tell Mrs. Leith if you saw
+her?"
+
+"Of his great wretchedness, of his broken life--I suppose I--I should
+have trusted to my instinct what to do when I saw her."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"But I can leave it to you," she said, but still with a faint note of
+hesitation, of doubt. "You know her."
+
+"Yes, I know her."
+
+He paused. Then, with an almost obstinate firmness, a sort of pressure,
+he added, "Have I your permission--I may not do it--to tell Mrs.
+Leith that her husband has been unfaithful to her with some one in
+Constantinople?"
+
+Lady Ingleton slightly reddened; she looked down and hesitated.
+
+"It may be necessary if your purpose in coming here is to be achieved,"
+said Father Robertson, still with pressure.
+
+"You may do whatever you think best," she said, with a sigh.
+
+He got up to go.
+
+"Would you mind very much staying on here for two or three days, even
+for a week, if necessary?"
+
+"No, no."
+
+He smiled.
+
+"A whole week of Liverpool!" he said.
+
+"How many years have you been here?"
+
+"A good many. I'm almost losing count."
+
+When he was gone Lady Ingleton sat for a long while before the fire.
+
+The sad influence of the blackness of rainy Liverpool had lifted from
+her. Her impulse had received a welcome which had warmed her.
+
+"I love that man," she thought. "Carey would love him too."
+
+He had said very little, and how loyal he had been in his silence, how
+loyal to the woman she had attacked. In words he had not defended her,
+but somehow he had conveyed to Lady Ingleton a sense of his protective
+love and immense pity for the woman who had been bereft of her child.
+How he had conveyed this she could not have said. But as she sat there
+before the fire she was aware that, since Father Robertson's visit, she
+felt differently about Dion Leith's wife. Mysteriously she began to feel
+the sorrow of the woman as well as, and side by side with, the sorrow of
+the man.
+
+"If it had been my child?" she thought. "If my husband had done it?"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+[Page missing in original book.]
+
+Since the death of Robin and Rosamund's arrival in Liverpool, Father
+Robertson had made acquaintance with her sister and with the mother of
+Dion. And both these women had condemned Rosamund for what she had done,
+and had begged him to try to bring about a change in her heart. Both of
+them, too, had dwelt upon the exceptional quality of Dion's love for
+his wife. Mrs. Leith had been unable to conceal the bitterness of her
+feeling against Rosamund. The mother in her way, was outraged. Beatrice
+Daventry had shown no bitterness. She loved and understood her sister
+too well to rage against her for anything that she did or left undone.
+But this very love of her sister, so clearly shown, had made her
+condemnation of Rosamund's action the more impressive. And her pity
+for Dion was supreme. Through Beatrice Father Robertson had gained an
+insight into Dion's love, and into another love, too; but of that he
+scarcely allowed himself even to think. There are purities so intense
+that, like fire, they burn those who would handle them, however
+tenderly. About Beatrice Father Robertson felt that he knew something
+he dared not know. Indeed, he was hardly sincere about that matter with
+himself. Perhaps this was his only insincerity.
+
+With his friend, Canon Wilton, too, he had spoken of Rosamund, and had
+found himself in the presence of a sort of noble anger. Now, in his
+little room, as he knelt in meditation, he remembered a saying of the
+Canon's, spoken in the paneled library at Welsley: "Leith has a great
+heart. When will his wife understand its greatness?"
+
+Father Robertson pressed his thin hands upon his closed eyes. He longed
+for guidance and he felt almost distressed. Rosamund had submitted
+herself to him, had given herself into his hands, but tacitly she had
+kept something back. She had never permitted him to direct her in regard
+to her relation with her husband. It was in regard to her relation with
+God that she had submitted herself to him.
+
+How grotesque that was!
+
+Father Robertson's face burned.
+
+Before Rosamund had come to him she had closed the book of her married
+life with a frantic hand. And Father Robertson had left the book closed.
+He saw his delicacy now as cowardice. In his religious relation with
+Rosamund he had been too much of a gentleman! When Mrs. Leith, Beatrice,
+Canon Wilton had appealed to him, he had said that he would do what he
+could some day, but that he felt time must be given to Rosamund, a long
+time, to recover from the tremendous shock she had undergone. He had
+waited. Something imperative had kept him back from ever going fully
+with Rosamund into the question of her separation from her husband. He
+had certainly spoken of it, but he had never discussed it, had never got
+to the bottom of it, although he had felt that some day he must be quite
+frank with her about it.
+
+Some day! No doubt he had been waiting for a propitious moment, that
+moment which never comes. Or had his instinct told him that anything he
+could say upon that subject to Rosamund would be utterly impotent, that
+there was a threshold his influence could not cross? Perhaps really his
+instinct had told him to wait, and he was not a moral coward. For to
+strive against a woman's deep feeling is surely to beat against the
+wind. When men do certain things all women look upon them with an
+inevitable disdain, as children being foolish in the dark.
+
+Had he secretly feared to seem foolish in Rosamund's eyes?
+
+He wondered, genuinely wondered.
+
+On the following morning he wrote to Rosamund and asked her to come to
+the vicarage at any hour when she was free. He had something important
+to say to her. She answered, fixing three-thirty. Exactly at that time
+she arrived in Manxby Street and was shown into Father Robertson's
+study.
+
+Rosamund had changed, greatly changed, but in a subtle rather than a
+fiercely definite way. She had not aged as many women age when overtaken
+by sorrow. Her pale yellow hair was still bright. There was no gray in
+it and it grew vigorously upon her classical head as if intensely alive.
+She still looked physically strong. She was still a young and beautiful
+woman. But all the radiance had gone out from her. She had been full of
+it; now she was empty of it.
+
+In the walled garden at Welsley, as she paced the narrow walks and
+listened to the distant murmur of the organ, and the faint sound of the
+Dresden Amen, in her joy she had looked sometimes almost like a nun.
+She had looked as if she had the "vocation" for religion. Now, in her
+"sister's" dress, she had not that inner look of calm, of the spirit
+lying still in Almighty arms, which so often marks out those who have
+definitely abandoned the ordinary life of the world for the dedicated
+life. Rosamund had taken no perpetual vows; she was free at any moment
+to withdraw from the Sisterhood in which she was living with many
+devoted women who labored among the poor, and who prayed, as some people
+work, with an ardor which physically tired them. But nevertheless she
+had definitely retired from all that means life to the average woman of
+her type and class, with no intention of ever going back to it. She had
+taken a step towards the mystery which many people think of casually on
+appointed days, and which many people ignore, or try to ignore. Yet now
+she did not look as if she had the vocation. When she had lived in the
+world she had seemed, in spite of all her _joie de vivre_, of all her
+animation and vitality, somehow apart from it. Now she seemed, somehow,
+apart from the world of religion, from the calm and laborious world in
+which she had chosen to dwell. She looked indeed almost strangely
+pure, but there was in her face an expression of acute restlessness,
+perpetually seen among those who are grasping at passing pleasures,
+scarcely ever seen among those who have deliberately resigned them.
+
+This was surely a woman who had sought and who had not found, who was
+uneasy in self-sacrifice, who had striven, who was striving still, to
+draw near to the gates of heaven, but who had not come upon the path
+which led up the mountain-side to them. Sorrow was stamped on the face,
+and something else, too--the seal of that corrosive disease of the soul,
+dissatisfaction with self.
+
+This was not Rosamund; this was a woman with Rosamund's figure, face,
+hair, eyes, voice, gestures, movements--one who would be Rosamund but
+for some terrible flaw.
+
+She was alone in the little study for a few minutes before Father
+Robertson came. She did not sit down, but moved about, looking now at
+this thing, now at that. In her white forehead there were two vertical
+lines which were never smoothed out. An irreligious person, looking at
+her just then, might have felt moved to say, with a horrible irony, "And
+can God do no more than that for the woman who dedicates her life to His
+service?"
+
+The truth of the whole matter lay in this: that whereas once God had
+seemed to stand between Rosamund and Dion, now Dion seemed to stand
+between Rosamund and God.
+
+But even Father Robertson did not know this.
+
+Presently the door opened and the Father came in.
+
+Instantly Rosamund noticed that he looked slightly ill at ease, almost,
+indeed, embarrassed. He shook hands with her in his gentle way and made
+a few ordinary remarks about little matters in which they were mutually
+interested. Then he asked her to sit down, sat down near her and was
+silent.
+
+"What is it?" she said, at last.
+
+He looked at her, and there was something almost piercing in his eyes
+which she had never noticed in them before.
+
+"Last night," he said, "when I came home I found here a note from a
+stranger, asking me to visit her at the Adelphi Hotel where she was
+staying. She wrote that she had come to Liverpool on purpose to see
+me. I went to the hotel and had an interview with her. This interview
+concerned you."
+
+"Concerned me?" said Rosamund.
+
+Her voice did not sound as if she were actively surprised. There was a
+lack of tone in it. It sounded, indeed, almost dry.
+
+"Yes. Did you ever hear of Lady Ingleton?"
+
+After an instant of consideration Rosamund said:
+
+"Yes. I believe I met her somewhere once. Isn't she married to an
+ambassador?"
+
+"To our Ambassador at Constantinople."
+
+"I think I sang once at some house where she was, in the days when I
+used to sing."
+
+"She has heard you sing."
+
+"That was it then. But what can she want with me?"
+
+"Your husband is in Constantinople. She knows him there."
+
+Rosamund flushed to the roots of her yellow hair. When he saw that
+painful wave of red go over her face Father Robertson looked away. All
+the delicacy in him felt the agony of her outraged reserve. Her body had
+stiffened.
+
+"I must speak about this," he said. "Forgive me if you can. But even if
+you cannot, I must speak."
+
+She looked down. Her face was still burning.
+
+"You have let me know a great deal about yourself," he went on. "That
+fact doesn't give me any right to be curious. On the contrary! But I
+think, perhaps, your confidence has given me a right to try to help you
+spiritually even at the cost of giving you great mental pain. For a long
+time I have felt that perhaps in my relation to you I have been morally
+a coward."
+
+Rosamund looked up.
+
+"You could never be a coward," she said.
+
+"You don't know that. Nobody knows that, perhaps, except myself. However
+that may be, I must not play the coward now. Lady Ingleton met your
+husband in Turkey. She brings very painful news of him."
+
+Rosamund clasped her hands together and let them lie on her knees. She
+was looking steadily at Father Robertson.
+
+"His--his misery has made such an impression upon her that she felt
+obliged to come here. She sent for me. But her real object in coming was
+to see you, if possible. Will you see her?"
+
+"No, no; I can't do that. I don't know her."
+
+"I think I ought to tell you what she said. She asked me if you had ever
+understood how much your husband loves you. Her exact words were, 'Does
+his wife know how he loves her? Can she know it? Can she ever have known
+it?'"
+
+All the red had died away from Rosamund's face. She had become very
+pale. Her eyes were steady. She sat without moving, and seemed to be
+listening with fixed, even with strained, attention.
+
+"And then she went on to tell me something which might seem to a great
+many people to be quite contradictory of what she had just said--and she
+said it with the most profound conviction. She told me that your husband
+has fallen very low."
+
+"Fallen----?" Rosamund said, in a dim voice.
+
+"Just before she left Constantinople she saw him in Stamboul by chance.
+She said that he had the dreadful appearance that men have when they are
+entirely dominated by physical things."
+
+"Dion!" she said.
+
+And there was sheer amazement in her voice now.
+
+After an instant she added:
+
+"I don't believe it. It wasn't Dion."
+
+"I must tell you something more," said Father Robertson painfully. "Lady
+Ingleton knows that your husband has been unfaithful to you; she
+knows the woman with whom he has been unfaithful. That unfaithfulness
+continues. So she affirms. And in spite of that, she asks me whether you
+can know how much your husband loves you."
+
+While he had been speaking he had been looking down. Now he heard a
+movement, a rustling. He looked up quickly. Rosamund was going towards
+the door.
+
+"Please--don't--don't!" she whispered, turning her face away.
+
+And she went out.
+
+Father Robertson did not follow her.
+
+Early in the following morning he received this note:
+
+
+"ST. MARY'S SISTERHOOD, LIVERPOOL, Thursday
+
+"DEAR FATHER ROBERTSON,--I don't think I can see Lady Ingleton. I am
+almost sure I can't. Perhaps she has gone already. If not, how long does
+she intend to stay here?
+
+"R. L."
+
+
+The Father communicated with Lady Ingleton, and that evening let
+Rosamund know that Lady Ingleton would be in Liverpool for a few more
+days.
+
+When Rosamund read his letter she wished, or believed that she wished,
+that Lady Ingleton had gone. Then this matter which tormented her would
+be settled, finished with. There would be nothing to be done, and
+she could take up her monotonous life again and forget this strange
+intrusion from the outside world, forget this voice from the near East
+which had told such ugly tidings. Till now she had not even known where
+Dion was. She knew he had given up his business in London and had left
+England; but that was all. She had refused to have any news of him. She
+had made it plainly understood long ago, when the wound was fresh in her
+soul, that Dion's name was never to be mentioned in letters to her. She
+had tried by every means to blot his memory out of her mind as she had
+blotted his presence out of her life. In this effort she had totally
+failed. Dion had never left her since he had killed Robin. In the flesh
+he had pursued her in the walled garden at Welsley on that dark night
+of November when for her the whole world had changed. In another
+intangible, mysterious guise he had attended her ever since. He had been
+about her path and about her bed. Even when she knelt at the altar in
+the Supreme Service he had been there. She had felt his presence as she
+touched the water, as she lifted the cup. Through all these months she
+had learnt to know that there are those whom, once we have taken them
+in, we cannot cast out of our lives.
+
+Since the death of Robin, in absence Dion had assumed a place in
+her life which he had never occupied in the days of their happiness.
+Sometimes she had bitterly resented this; sometimes she had tried to
+ignore it; sometimes, like a cross, she had taken it up and tried to
+bear it with patience or with bravery. She had even prayed against it.
+
+Never were prayers more vain than those which she put up against this
+strange and terrible possession of herself by the man she had tried
+to cast out of her life. Sometimes even it seemed to her that when
+she prayed thus Dion's power to affect her increased. It was as if
+mysteriously he drew nearer to her, as if he enveloped her with an
+influence from which she could not extricate herself. There were hours
+in the night when she felt afraid of him. She knew that wherever he
+was, however far off, his mind was concentrated upon her. She grew to
+realize, as she had never realized before, what mental power is. She had
+separated her body from Dion's, but his mind would not leave her alone.
+Often she was conscious of hostility. When she strove to give herself
+absolutely and entirely to the life of religion and of charity she
+was aware of a force holding her back. This force--so it seemed to
+her--would not permit her to enter into the calm and the peace of the
+dedicated life. She was like some one looking in at a doorway, desirous
+of entering a room. She saw the room clearly; she saw others enjoying
+its warmth and its shelter and its serene and guarded tranquillity; but
+she was unable to cross the threshold.
+
+That warm and sheltered room was not for her. And it was Dion's force
+which held her back from entering it and from dwelling in it.
+
+She could not give herself wholly to God because of Dion.
+
+Of her struggle, of her frustration, of her mental torment in this
+connexion she had never spoken to Father Robertson. Even in confession
+she had been silent. He knew of her mother-agony; he did not know of the
+stranger, more subtle agony beneath it. He did not know that whereas the
+one agony with the lapse of time was not passing away--it would never
+do that--but was becoming more tender, more full of tears and of sweet
+recollections, the other agony grew harsher, more menacing.
+
+Rosamund had gradually come to feel that Robin had been taken out of her
+arms for some great, though hidden, reason. And because of this feeling
+she was learning to endure his loss with a sort of resignation. She
+often thought that perhaps she had been allowed to have this consolation
+because she had made an immense effort. When Robin died she had driven
+Dion, who had killed her child, out of her life, but she had succeeded
+in saying to God, "Thy will be done!" She had said it at first as a mere
+formula, had repeated it obstinately again and again, without meaning
+it at all, but trying to mean it, meaning to mean it. She had made a
+prodigious, a truly heroic effort to conquer her powerfully rebellious
+nature, and, in this effort, she had been helped by Father Robertson. He
+knew of the anger which had overwhelmed her when her mother had died, of
+how she had wished to hurt God. He knew that, with bloody sweat, she had
+destroyed that enemy within her. She had wished to submit to the will of
+God when Robin had been snatched from her, and at last she had actually
+submitted. It was a great triumph of the spirit. But perhaps it had
+left her exhausted. At any rate she had never been able to forgive God's
+instrument, her husband. And so she had never been able to know the
+peace of God which many of these women by whom she was surrounded knew.
+In her misery she contemplated their calm. To labor and to pray--that
+seemed enough to many of them, to most of them. She had known calm in
+the garden at Welsley; in the Sisterhood she knew it not.
+
+The man who was always with her assassinated calm. She felt strangely
+from a distance the turmoil of his spirit. She knew of his misery
+occultly. She did not deduce it from her former knowledge of what he
+was. And his suffering made her suffer in a terrible way. He was her
+victim and she was his.
+
+_Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder._
+
+In the Sisterhood Rosamund had learnt, always against her will and
+despite the utmost effort of her obstinacy, the uselessness of that
+command; she had learnt that those whom God hath really joined together
+cannot be put asunder by man--or by woman. Dion had killed her child,
+but she had not been able to kill what she was to Dion and what Dion was
+to her. Through the mingling of their two beings there had been born a
+mystery which was, perhaps, eternal like the sound of the murmur in the
+pine trees above the Valley of Olympia.
+
+She could not trample it into nothingness.
+
+At first, after the tragedy of which Robin had been the victim, Rosamund
+had felt a horror of Dion which was partly animal. She had fled from him
+because she had been physically afraid of him. He had been changed for
+her from the man who loved her, and whom she loved in her different way,
+into the slayer of her child. She knew, of course, quite well that Dion
+was not a murderer, but nevertheless she thought of him as one thinks of
+a murderer. The blood of her child was upon his hands. She trembled at
+the thought of being near him. Nevertheless, because she was not mad,
+in time reason asserted itself within her. Dion disappeared out of her
+life. He did not put up the big fight for the big thing of which Lady
+Ingleton had once spoken to her husband. His type of love was far too
+sensitive to struggle and fight on its own behalf. When he had heard the
+key of his house door turned against him, when, later, Mr. Darlington
+with infinite precautions had very delicately explained to him why it
+had been done, Rosamund had attained her freedom. He had waited on for
+a time in England, but he had somehow never been able really to hope for
+any change in his wife. His effort to make her see the tragedy in its
+true light had exhausted itself in the garden at Welsley. Her frantic
+evasion of him had brought it to an end. He could not renew it. Even if
+he had been ready to renew it those about Rosamund would have dissuaded
+him from doing so. Every one who was near her saw plainly that "for the
+present"--as they put it--Dion must keep out of her life.
+
+And gradually Rosamund had lost that half-animal fear of him, gradually
+she had come to realize something of the tragedy of his situation. A
+change had come about in her almost in despite of herself. And yet she
+had never been able to forgive him for what he had done. Her reason knew
+that she had nothing to forgive; her religious sense, her conception of
+God, obliged her to believe that Dion had been God's instrument when
+he had killed his child; but something within her refused him pardon.
+Perhaps she felt that pardon could only mean one thing--reconciliation.
+And now had come Lady Ingleton's revelation. Instinctively as Rosamund
+left Father Robertson's little room she had tried to hide her face. She
+had received a blow, and the pain of it frightened her. She was startled
+by her own suffering. What did it mean? What did it portend? She had no
+right to feel as she did. Long ago she had abandoned the right to such a
+feeling.
+
+The information Lady Ingleton had brought outraged Rosamund. Anger and a
+sort of corrosive shame struggled for the mastery within her.
+
+She felt humiliated to the dust. She felt dirty, soiled.
+
+Dion had been unfaithful to her.
+
+With whom?
+
+The white face of Mrs. Clarke came before Rosamund in the murky street,
+two wide-open distressed and intent eyes started into hers.
+
+The woman was Mrs. Clarke.
+
+Mrs. Clarke--and Dion. Mrs. Clarke had succeeded in doing what long ago
+she had designed to do. She had succeeded in taking possession of Dion.
+
+"Because I threw him away! Because I threw him away!"
+
+Rosamund found herself repeating those words again and again.
+
+"I threw him away, I threw him away. Otherwise----"
+
+She reached the Sisterhood and went to her little room. How she
+got through the remaining duties of that day she never remembered
+afterwards. The calmness of routine flagellated her nerves. She felt
+undressed and feared the eyes of the sisters. After the evening service
+in the little chapel attached to the Sisterhood she was unable either to
+meditate, to praise, or to pray. During the long pause for silent prayer
+she felt like one on a galloping horse. In the intense silence her ears
+seemed to hear the beating of hoofs on an iron road. And the furious
+horse was bearing her away into some region of darkness and terror.
+
+There was a rustling movement. The sisters slowly rose from their knees.
+Again Rosamund was conscious of feeling soiled, dirty, in the midst of
+them. As they filed out, she with them, a burning hatred came to her.
+She hated the woman who was the cause of her feeling dirty. She wanted
+to use her hands, to tear something away from her body--the dirt, the
+foulness. For she felt it actually on her body. Her physical purity was
+desecrated by--she wouldn't think of it.
+
+When she was alone in her little sleeping-room, the door shut, one
+candle burning, her eyes went to the wooden crucifix beneath which every
+night before getting into her narrow bed she knelt in prayer, and she
+began to cry. She sat down on the bed and cried and cried. All her flesh
+seemed melting into tears.
+
+"My poor life! My poor life!"
+
+That was the interior cry of her being, again and again repeated--"My
+poor life--stricken, soiled, crushed down in the ooze of a nameless
+filth."
+
+Childless and now betrayed! How terrible had been her happiness on the
+edge of the pit! The days in Greece--Robin--Dion's return from the war!
+And she had wished to live rightly; she had loved the noble things; she
+had had ideals and she had tried to follow them. Purity before all she
+had----
+
+She sickened; her crying became violent. Afraid lest some of the sisters
+should hear her, she pressed her hands over her face and sank down on
+the bed.
+
+Presently she saw Mrs. Clarke before her, the woman whom she had thought
+to keep out of her life--the fringe of her life--and who had found the
+way into the sacred places.
+
+She cried for a long while, lying there on the bed, with her face
+pressed against her hands, and her hands pressed against the pillow; but
+at least she ceased from crying. She had poured out all the tears of her
+body.
+
+She sat up. It was long past midnight. The house was silent. Slowly she
+began to undress, hating her body all the time. She bathed her face
+and hands in cold water, and, when she felt the water, shivered at the
+thought of the stain. When she was ready for bed she looked again at the
+crucifix. She ought to pray, she must pray. She went to the crucifix and
+stood in front of it, but her knees refused to bend. Her pride of woman
+had received a terrific blow that day, and just because of that she felt
+she could not humble herself.
+
+"I cannot pray--I won't pray," she whispered.
+
+And she turned away, put out the light and got into bed.
+
+That Dion should have done that, should have been able to do that!
+
+And she remembered what it was she had first loved in Dion, the thing
+which had made him different from other men; she remembered the days and
+the nights in Greece. She saw two lovers in a morning land descending
+the path from the hill of Drouva, going down into the green recesses of
+quiet Elis. She saw Hermes and the child.
+
+All that night she lay awake. In the morning she sent the note to Father
+Robertson.
+
+She could not see Lady Ingleton and yet she dreaded her departure. She
+wanted to know more, much more. A gnawing hunger of curiosity assailed
+her. This woman had been with Dion--since. This woman knew of his
+infidelity; yet she affirmed his love for his wife. But the one
+knowledge surely gave the lie to the other.
+
+Why did she care? Why did she care so much? Rosamund asked herself the
+question almost with terror.
+
+She found no answer.
+
+But she could not pray. Whenever she tried to pray Mrs. Clarke came
+before her, and a man--could it be Dion?--stamped with the hideous
+imprint of physical lust.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Father Robertson was startled by the change in Rosamund's appearance
+when she visited him two days after she had sent him the note. She
+looked physically ill. Her color had gone. Her eyes were feverish and
+sunken, and the skin beneath them was stained with that darkness which
+betokens nights without sleep. Her lips and hands twitched with a
+nervousness that was painful. But that which distressed him more than
+any other thing was the expression in her face--the look of shame and of
+self-consciousness which altered her almost horribly. Even in her most
+frantic moments of grief for Robin there had always been something
+of directness, of fearlessness, in her beauty. Now something furtive
+literally disfigured her, and she seemed trying to cover it with a
+dogged obstinacy which suggested a will stretched to the uttermost,
+vibrating like a string in danger of snapping.
+
+"Has Lady Ingleton gone?" she asked, directly she was inside the room.
+
+"No, not yet. You remember I wrote to you that she would stay on for a
+few days."
+
+"But she might have gone unexpectedly."
+
+"She is still here."
+
+"I believe I shall have to see her," Rosamund said, with a sort of hard
+abruptness and determination.
+
+"Go to see her," said Father Robertson firmly. "Perhaps she was sent
+here."
+
+"Sent here?" said Rosamund, with a sharpness of sudden suspicion.
+
+"Oh, my child,"--he put his hand on her arm, and made her sit
+down,--"not by a human being."
+
+Rosamund looked down and was silent.
+
+"Before you go, if you are going," Father Robertson continued, sitting
+down by the deal table on which he wrote his letters, "I must do what I
+ought to have done long ago; I must speak to you about your husband."
+
+Rosamund did not look up, but he saw her frown, and he saw a movement of
+her lips; they trembled and then set together in a hard line.
+
+"I know what he was, not from you but from others; from his mother,
+from your sister, and from Canon Wilton. I'm going to tell you something
+Wilton said to me about you and him after you had separated from him."
+
+Father Robertson stopped, and fidgeted for a moment with the papers
+lying in disorder on his table. He hated the task he had set himself
+to do. All the tenderness in him revolted against it. He knew what this
+woman whom he cared for very much had suffered; he divined what she
+was suffering now. And he was going to add to her accumulated misery by
+striking a tremendous blow at the most sacred thing, her pride of woman.
+Would she be his enemy after he had spoken? It was possible. Yet he must
+speak.
+
+"He said to me--'Leith has a great heart. When will his wife understand
+its greatness?'"
+
+There was a long silence. Then, without changing her position or lifting
+her head, Rosamund said in a hard, level voice:
+
+"Canon Wilton was right about my husband."
+
+"He loved you. That's a great deal. But he loved you in a very beautiful
+way. And that's much more."
+
+"Who told you--about the way he loved me?"
+
+"Your sister, Beatrice."
+
+"Beattie! Yes, she knew--she understood."
+
+She bent her head a little lower, then added:
+
+"Beattie is worth more than I am."
+
+"You are worth a great deal, but--but I want to see you rise to the
+heights of your nature. I want to see you accomplish the greatest task
+of all."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Conquer the last citadel of your egoism. _Ego dormio et cor meum
+vigilat_--Send the insistent I to sleep. I said it to you long ago
+before I knew you. I say it to you now when I do know you, when I know
+the deep waters you have passed through, and the darkness that has beset
+you. Fetter your egoism. Release your heart and your spirit in one great
+action. Don't let him go down forever because of you. I believe
+your misery has been as nothing in comparison with his. If he has
+fallen--such a man--why is it?"
+
+"I know why," she almost whispered.
+
+"You can never mount up while you are driving a soul downwards. Do you
+remember those words in the Bible: 'Where thou goest I will go'?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Perhaps they might be changed in respect of you and the man who loved
+you so much and in such a beautiful way. You were linked; can the link
+ever be broken? You have tried to break it, but have you succeeded? And
+if not, wouldn't it be true, drastically true, if you said--Where thou
+goest I _must_ go? If he goes down because of you I think you'll go down
+with him."
+
+Rosamund sat absolutely still. When Father Robertson paused again there
+was not a sound in the little room.
+
+"And one thing more," he said, not looking towards her. "There's the
+child, your child and his. Is it well with the child?"
+
+Rosamund moved and looked up. Then she got up from her chair.
+
+"But--but--Robin's----"
+
+She stopped. Her eyes were fixed on Father Robertson. He looked up and
+met her eyes, and she saw plainly the mystic in him.
+
+"What do we know?" he said. "What do we know of the effects of our
+actions? Can we be certain that they are limited to this earth? Is it
+well with the child? I say we don't know. We dare not affirm that we
+know. He loved his father, didn't he?"
+
+Rosamund looked stricken. He let her go. He could not say any more to
+her.
+
+That evening Lady Ingleton called in Manxby Street and asked for Father
+Robertson. He happened to be in and received her at once.
+
+"I've had a note from Mrs. Leith," she said.
+
+"I am not surprised," said Father Robertson. "Indeed I expected it."
+
+"She wishes to see me to-morrow. She writes that she will come to the
+hotel. How have you persuaded her to come?"
+
+"I don't think I have persuaded her though I wish her to see you. But I
+have told her of her husband's infidelity."
+
+"You have told her----!"
+
+Lady Ingleton stopped short. She looked unusually discomposed, even
+nervous and agitated.
+
+"I said you might," she murmured.
+
+"It was essential."
+
+"If Cynthia knew!" said Lady Ingleton.
+
+"I mentioned no name."
+
+"She must have guessed. It's odd, when I told you I didn't feel
+treacherous--not really! But now I feel a brute. I've never done
+anything like this before. It's against all my code. I've come here,
+done all this, and now I dread meeting Mrs. Leith. I wish you could be
+there when she comes."
+
+She sent him a soft glance out of her Italian eyes.
+
+"You make me feel so safe," she added.
+
+"You and she must be alone. Remember this! Mrs. Leith must go out to
+Constantinople."
+
+"Leave the Sisterhood! Will she ever do that?"
+
+"You came here with the hope of persuading her, didn't you?"
+
+"A hope was it? A forlorn hope, perhaps."
+
+"Bring it to fruition."
+
+"But Cynthia! If she ever knows!"
+
+Suddenly Father Robertson looked stern.
+
+"If what you told me is true----"
+
+"It is true."
+
+"Then she is doing the devil's work. Put away your fears. They aren't
+worthy of you."
+
+As she took his hand in the saying of good-by she said:
+
+"Your code is so different from ours. We think the only possible thing
+to do--where a friend is concerned--is to shut the eyes and the lips,
+and to pretend, and to keep on always pretending. We call that being
+honorable."
+
+"Poor things!" said Father Robertson.
+
+But he pressed her hand as he said it, and there was an almost tender
+smile on his lips.
+
+"But your love of truth isn't quite dead yet," he added, on the
+threshold of the door, as he let her out into the rain. "You haven't
+been able to kill it. It's an indomitable thing, thank God."
+
+"I wish I--why do you live always in Liverpool?" she murmured.
+
+She put up her little silk umbrella and was gone.
+
+There was a fire in her sitting-room on the following-morning. The day
+was windy and cold, for March was going out resentfully. Before the fire
+lay Turkish Jane on a cushion, blinking placidly at the flames. Already
+she had become reconciled to her new life in this unknown city. Her
+ecstasy of the journey had not returned, but the surprise which had
+succeeded to it was now merged in a stagnant calm, and she felt no
+objection to passing the remainder of her life in the Adelphi Hotel. She
+supposed that she was comfortably settled for the day when she heard her
+mistress call for Annette and give the most objectionable order.
+
+"Please take Jane away, Annette," said Lady Ingleton.
+
+"Miladi!"
+
+"I don't want her here this morning. I'm expecting a visitor, and Jane
+might bark. I don't wish to have a noise in the room."
+
+Annette, who looked decidedly sulky, approached the cushion, bent down,
+and rather abruptly snatched the amazed doyenne of the Pekinese from her
+voluptuous reveries.
+
+"We shall probably leave here to-morrow," Lady Ingleton added.
+
+Annette's expression changed.
+
+"We're going back to London, Miladi?"
+
+"I think so. I'll tell you this afternoon."
+
+She glanced at her watch.
+
+"I don't wish to be disturbed for an hour. Don't leave Jane in my
+bedroom. Take her away to yours."
+
+"Very well, Miladi."
+
+Annette went out looking inquisitive, with Turkish Jane on her arm.
+
+When she was gone Lady Ingleton took up "The Liverpool Mercury" and
+tried to read the news of the day. The March wind roared outside and
+made the windows rattle. She listened to it and forgot the chronicle of
+the passing hour. She was a women who cared to know the big things that
+were happening in the big world. She had always lived among men who were
+helping to make history, and she was intelligent enough to understand
+their efforts and to join in their discussions. Her husband had often
+consulted her when he was in a tight place, and sometimes he had told
+her she had the brain of a man. But she had the nerves and the heart of
+a woman, and at this moment public affairs and the news of the day did
+not interest her at all. She was concentrated on woman's business.
+Into her hands she had taken a tangled love skein. And she was almost
+frightened at what she had ventured to do. Could she hope to be of any
+use, of any help, in getting it into order? Was there any chance for the
+man she had last seen in Stamboul near Santa Sophia? She almost dreaded
+Rosamund Leith's arrival. She felt nervous, strung up. The roar of the
+wind added to her uneasiness. It suggested turmoil, driven things, the
+angry passions of nature. Beyond the Mersey the sea was raging. She had
+a stupid feeling that nature and man were always in a ferment, that it
+was utterly useless to wish for peace, or to try to bring about peace,
+that destinies could only be worked out to their appointed ends in
+darkness and in fury. She even forgot her own years of happiness for a
+little while and saw herself as a woman always anxious, doubtful, and
+envisaging untoward things. When a knock came on the door she started
+and got up quickly from her chair. Her heart was beating fast. How
+ridiculous!
+
+"Come in!" she said.
+
+A waiter opened the door and showed in Rosamund
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+Lady Ingleton looked swiftly at the woman coming in at the doorway clad
+in the severe, voluminous, black gown and cloak, and black and white
+headgear, which marked out the members of the Sisterhood of St. Mary's.
+Her first thought was "What a cold face!" It was succeeded immediately
+by the thought, "But beautiful even in its coldness." She met Rosamund
+near the door, took her hand, and said:
+
+"I am glad you were able to come. I wanted very much to meet you. I
+came here really with the faint hope of seeing you. Let me take your
+umbrella. What a day it is! Did you walk?"
+
+"I came most of the way by tram. Thank you," said Rosamund, in a
+contralto voice which sounded inflexible.
+
+Lady Ingleton went to "stand" the umbrella in a corner. In doing
+this she turned away from her visitor for a moment. She felt more
+embarrassed, more "at a loss" than she had ever felt before; she even
+felt guilty, though she had done no wrong and was anxious only to do
+right. Her sense of guilt, she believed, was caused by the fact that
+in her heart she condemned her visitor, and by the additional, more
+unpleasant fact that she knew Rosamund was aware of her condemnation.
+
+"It's hateful--so much knowledge between two women who are strangers to
+each other!" she thought, as she turned round.
+
+"Do sit down by the fire," she said to Rosamund, who was standing near
+the writing-table immediately under a large engraving of "Wedded."
+
+She wished ardently that Rosamund wore the ordinary clothes of a
+well-dressed woman of the world. The religious panoply of the "sister's"
+attire, with its suggestion of a community apart, got on her nerves, and
+seemed to make things more difficult.
+
+Rosamund went to a chair and sat down. She still looked very cold, but
+she succeeded in looking serene, and her eyes, unworldly and pure, did
+not fall before Lady Ingleton's.
+
+Lady Ingleton sat down near her and immediately realized that she had
+placed herself exactly opposite to "Wedded." She turned her eyes away
+from the large nude arms of the bending man and met Rosamund's gaze
+fixed steadily upon her. That gaze told her not to delay, but to go
+straight to the tragic business which had brought her to Liverpool.
+
+"You know of course that my husband is Ambassador at Constantinople,"
+she began.
+
+"Yes," said Rosamund.
+
+"You and I met--at least we were in the same room once--at Tippie
+Chetwinde's," said Lady Ingleton, almost pleading with her visitor. "I
+heard you sing."
+
+"Yes, I remember. I told Father Robertson so."
+
+"I dare say you think it very strange my coming here in this way."
+
+In spite of the strong effort of her will Lady Ingleton was feeling with
+every moment more painfully embarrassed. All her code was absolutely
+against mixing in the private concerns of others uninvited. She had a
+sort of delicate hatred of curiosity. She longed to prove to the woman
+by the fire that she was wholly incurious now, wholly free from the
+taint of sordid vulgarity that clings to the social busybody.
+
+"I've done it solely because I'm very sorry for some one," she
+continued; "because I'm very sorry for your husband."
+
+She looked away from Rosamund, and again her eyes rested on the
+engraving of "Wedded." The large bare arms of the man, his bending,
+amorous head, almost hypnotized her. She disliked the picture of
+which this was a reproduction. Far too many people had liked it; their
+affection seemed to her to have been destructive, to have destroyed any
+value it had formerly had. Yet now, as she looked almost in despite of
+herself, suddenly she saw through the engraving, through the symbol,
+to something beyond; to the prompting conception in the painter's mind
+which had led to the picture, to the great mystery of the pathetic
+attempt of human beings who love, or who think they love, to unite
+themselves to each other, to mingle body with body and soul with soul.
+She saw a woman in the dress of a "sister," the woman who was with her;
+she saw a man in an Eastern city; and abruptly courage came to her on
+the wings of a genuine emotion.
+
+"I don't know how to tell you what I feel about him, Mrs. Leith," she
+said. "But I want to try to. Will you let me?"
+
+"Yes. Please tell me," said Rosamund, in a level, expressionless voice.
+
+"Remember this; I never saw him till I saw him in Turkey, nor did my
+husband. We were not able to draw any comparison between the unhappy man
+and the happy man. We were unprejudiced."
+
+"I quite understand that; thank you."
+
+"It was in the summer. We were living at Therapia on the Bosporus. He
+came to stay in a hotel not far off. My husband met him in a valley
+which the Turks call Kesstane Dereh. He--your husband--was sitting there
+alone by a stream. They talked. My husband asked him to call at our
+summer villa. He came the next day. Of course I--I knew something of
+his story"--she hurried on--"and I was prepared to meet a man who was
+unhappy. (Forgive me for saying all this.)"
+
+"But, please, I have come to hear," said Rosamund, coldly and steadily.
+
+"Your husband--I was alone with him during his first visit--made an
+extraordinary impression upon me. I scarcely know how to describe it."
+She paused for a moment. "There was something intensely bitter in his
+personality. Bitterness is an active principle. And yet somehow he
+conveyed to me an impression of emptiness too. I remember he said to me,
+'I don't quite know what I am going to do. I'm a free agent. I have no
+ties.' I shall never forget his look when he said those words. I never
+knew anything about loneliness--anything really--till that moment. And
+after that moment I knew everything. I asked him to come on the yacht to
+Brusa, or rather to Mudania; from there one goes to Brusa. He came.
+You may think, perhaps, that he was eager for society, for pleasure,
+distraction. It wasn't that. He was making a tremendous, a terrible
+effort to lay hold on life again, to interest himself in things. He was
+pushed to it."
+
+"Pushed to it!" said Rosamund, still in the hard level voice. "Who
+pushed him?"
+
+"I can only tell you it was as I say," said Lady Ingleton, quickly and
+with embarrassment. "We were very few on the yacht. Of course I saw a
+good deal of your husband. He was absolutely reserved with me. He
+always has been. You mustn't think he has ever given me the least bit
+of confidence. He never has. I am quite sure he never would. We are only
+acquaintances. But I want to be a friend to him now. He hasn't a friend,
+not one, out there. My husband, I think, feels rather as I do about him,
+in so far as a man can feel in our sort of way. He would gladly be more
+intimate with your husband. But your husband doesn't make friends. He's
+beyond anything of that kind. He tried, on the yacht and at Brusa. He
+did his utmost. But he was held back by his misery. I must tell you
+(it's very uninteresting)"--her voice softened here, and her face
+slightly changed, became gentler, more intensely feminine--"that my
+husband and I are very happy together. We always have been; we always
+shall be; we can't help it. Being with us your husband had to--to
+contemplate our happiness. It--I suppose it reminded him----"
+
+She stopped; she could not bring herself to say it. Again her eyes
+rested upon "Wedded," and, in spite of her long conviction of its
+essential banality--she classed it with "The Soul's Awakening,"
+"Harmony," and all the things she was farthest away from--she felt what
+it stood for painfully, almost mysteriously.
+
+"One day," she resumed, speaking more slowly, and trying to banish
+emotion from her voice, "I went out from the hotel where we stayed at
+Brusa, quite alone. There's a mosque at Brusa called Jeshil Jami,
+the Green Mosque. It stands above the valley. It is one of the most
+beautiful things I know, and quite the most beautiful Osmanli building.
+I like to go there alone. Very often there is no one in the mosque.
+Well, I went there that day. When I went in--the guardian was on the
+terrace; he knows me and that I'm the British Ambassadress, and never
+bothers me--I thought at first the mosque was quite empty. I sat down
+close to the door. After I had been there two or three minutes I felt
+there was some one else in the mosque. I looked round. Before the Mihrab
+there was a man. It was your husband. He was kneeling on the matting,
+but--but he wasn't praying. When I knew, when I heard what he was doing,
+I went away at once. I couldn't--I felt that----"
+
+Again she paused. In the pause she heard the gale tearing at the
+windows. She looked at the woman in the sister's dress. Rosamund was
+sitting motionless, and was now looking down. Lady Ingleton positively
+hated the sister's dress at that moment. She thought of it as a sort
+of armor in which her visitor was encased, an armor which rendered her
+invulnerable. What shaft could penetrate that smooth black and white,
+that flowing panoply, and reach the heart Lady Ingleton desired to
+pierce? Suddenly Lady Ingleton felt cruel. She longed to tear away from
+Rosamund all the religion which seemed to be protecting her; she longed
+to see her naked as Dion Leith was naked.
+
+"I didn't care to look upon a man in hell," she said, in a voice which
+had become almost brutal, a voice which Sir Carey would scarcely have
+recognized if he had heard it.
+
+Rosamund said nothing, and, after a moment, Lady Ingleton continued:
+
+"With us on the yacht was one of my husband's secretaries of Embassy,
+Cyril Vane, who had just become engaged to be married. He is married
+now. In his cabin on the yacht he had a photograph of the girl. One
+night he was walking up and down on deck with your husband, and your
+husband--I'd just told him about Vane's engagement--congratulated him.
+Vane invited Mr. Leith into the cabin and showed him the photograph.
+Vane told me afterwards that he should never forget the look on your
+husband's face as he took the photograph and gazed at it. When he put it
+down he said to Vane, 'I hope you may be happy. She looks very kind, and
+very good, too; but there's no cruelty on earth like the cruelty of a
+good woman.'" (Did the sister's dress rustle faintly?) "Vane--he's only
+a boy--was very angry for a moment, though he's usually imperturbable.
+I don't know exactly what he said, but I believe he made a rather strong
+protest about knowing his fiancee's character _au fond_. Anyhow, your
+husband took hold of his arm and said to him, 'Don't love very much
+and you may be happy. That's the only chance for a man--not to love the
+woman very much.' Vane came to me and told me. I remember it was late at
+night and my husband was there. When Vane was leaving us Carey said to
+him, 'Forget the advice that poor fellow gave you. Love her as much
+as you can, my boy. Dion Leith speaks out of the bitterness that is
+destroying him. But very few men can love as he can, and very few men
+have been punished by their love as he has been punished by his. His
+sorrow is altogether exceptional, and has made him lose the power of
+moral vision. His soul has been poisoned at the source.' My husband was
+right."
+
+"You came here to tell me that?" said Rosamund, lifting her head and
+speaking coldly and very clearly.
+
+"I didn't know what I was going to tell you. At the time I am speaking
+of I had no thought of ever trying to see you. That thought came to me
+long afterwards."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I'm a happy woman. In my happiness I've learnt to respect love very
+much, and I've learnt to recognize it at a glance. Your husband is the
+victim of a great love, Mrs. Leith. I feel as if I couldn't stand by and
+see him utterly destroyed by it."
+
+"Father Robertson tells me----" said Rosamund.
+
+And then she was silent. All this time she was struggling almost
+furiously against pride and an intense reserve which seemed trying to
+suffocate every good impulse within her. She held on to the thought of
+Father Robertson (she was unable to hold on to the thought of God);
+she strove not to hate the woman who was treading in her sanctuary, and
+whose steps echoed harshly and discordantly to its farthest, its holiest
+recesses; but she felt herself to be hardening against her will, to be
+congealing, turning to ice. Nevertheless she was resolute not to leave
+the room in which she was without learning all that this woman had to
+tell her.
+
+"Yes?" said Lady Ingleton.
+
+And the thought went through her mind:
+
+"Oh, how she is hating me!"
+
+"Father Robertson told me there was someone else."
+
+"Yes, there is. Otherwise I might never have come here. I'm partly to
+blame. But I--but I can't possibly go into details. You mustn't ask me
+for any details, please. Try to accept the little I can say as truth,
+though I'm not able to give you any proof. You must know that women who
+are intelligent, and have lived long in the--well, in the sort of world
+I've lived in, are never mistaken about certain things. They don't need
+what are called proofs. They know certain things are happening, or not
+happening, without holding any proofs for or against. Your husband has
+got into the wrong hands."
+
+"What do you mean by that?" said Rosamund steadily, even obstinately.
+
+"In his misery and absolute loneliness he has allowed himself to be
+taken possession of by a woman. She is doing him a great deal of harm.
+In fact she is ruining him."
+
+She stopped. Perhaps she suspected that Rosamund, in defiance of her
+own denial of proofs, would begin asking for them; but Rosamund said
+nothing.
+
+"He is going down," Lady Ingleton resumed. "He has already deteriorated
+terribly. I saw him recently by chance in Stamboul (he never comes to
+us now), and I was shocked at his appearance. When I first met him, in
+spite of his bitterness and intense misery I knew at once that I was
+with a man of fine nature. There was something unmistakable, the rare
+imprint; that's fading from him now. You know Father Robertson very
+well. I don't. But the very first time I was with him I knew he was
+a man who was seeking the heights. Your husband now is _seeking_ the
+depths, as if he wanted to hide himself and his misery in them. Perhaps
+he hasn't found the lowest yet. I believe there is only one human being
+who can prevent him from finding it. I'm quite sure there is only one
+human being. That's why I came here."
+
+She was silent. Then she added:
+
+"I've told you now what I wished to tell you, all I can tell you."
+
+In thinking beforehand of what this interview would probably be like
+Lady Ingleton had expected it to be more intense, charged with greater
+surface emotion than was the case. Now she felt a strange coldness in
+the room. The dry rattling of the window under the assault of the gale
+was an interpolated sound that was in place.
+
+"Your husband has never mentioned your name to me," she said, influenced
+by an afterthought. "And yet I've come here, because I know that the
+only hope of salvation for him is here."
+
+Again her eyes went to "Wedded," and then to the sister's dress and
+close-fitting headgear which disguised Rosamund. And suddenly the
+impulsiveness which was her inheritance from her Celtic and Latin
+ancestors took complete possession of her. She got up swiftly and went
+to Rosamund.
+
+"You hate me for having come here, for having told you all this. You
+will always hate me, I think. I've intruded upon your peaceful life in
+religion--your peaceful, comfortable, sheltered life."
+
+Her great dark eyes fixed themselves upon the cross which lay on
+Rosamund's breast. She lifted her hand and pointed to it.
+
+"You've nailed _him_ on a cross," she said, with almost fierce
+intensity. "How can you be happy in that dress, worshiping God with a
+lot of holy women?"
+
+"Did I tell you I was happy?" said Rosamund.
+
+She got up and stood facing Lady Ingleton. Her face still preserved
+something of the coldness, but the color had deepened in the cheeks, and
+the expression in the eyes had changed. They looked now much less like
+the eyes of a "sister" than they had looked when she came into the room.
+
+"Take off that dress and go to Constantinople!" said Lady Ingleton.
+
+Rosamund flushed deeply, painfully; her mouth trembled, and tears came
+into her eyes, but she spoke resolutely.
+
+"Thank you for telling me," she said. "You were right to come here and
+to tell me. If I hate you, as you say, that's my fault, not yours."
+
+She paused. It was evident that she was making a tremendous effort to
+conquer something; she even shut her eyes for a brief instant. Then she
+added in a very low voice;
+
+"Thank you!"
+
+And she put out her hand.
+
+Tears started into Lady Ingleton's eyes as she took the hand. Rosamund
+turned and went quickly out of the room.
+
+Some minutes after she had gone Lady Ingleton heard rain beating upon
+the window. The sound reminded her of the umbrella she had "stood"
+in the corner of the room when Rosamund came in. It was still there.
+Impulsively she went to the corner and took it up; then, realizing that
+Rosamund must already be on her way, she laid it down on the table. She
+stood for a moment looking from "Wedded" to the damp umbrella.
+
+Then she sat down on the sofa and cried impetuously.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+It was the month of May. Already there had been several unusually hot
+days in Constantinople, and Mrs. Clarke was beginning to think about the
+villa at Buyukderer. She was getting tired of Pera. She had fulfilled
+her promise to Dion Leith. She had given up going to England for Jimmy's
+Christmas holidays and had spent the whole winter in Constantinople. But
+now she had had enough of it for the present, indeed more than enough of
+it.
+
+She was feeling weary of the everlasting diplomatic society, of the
+_potins_ political and social, of the love affairs and intrigues of her
+acquaintances which she knew of or divined, of the familiar voices
+and faces. She wanted something new; she wanted to break away. The
+restlessness that was always in her, concealed beneath her pale aspect
+of calm, was persecuting her as the spring with its ferment drew near to
+the torrid summer.
+
+The spring had got into her veins and had made her long for novelty.
+
+One morning when Sonia came into Mrs. Clarke's bedroom with the coffee
+she brought a piece of news.
+
+"Miladi Ingleton arrived at the Embassy from England yesterday," said
+Sonia, in her thick, soft voice.
+
+The apparent recovery of Lady Ingleton's mother had been a deception.
+She had had a relapse almost immediately after Lady Ingleton's return
+from Liverpool to London; an operation had been necessary, and Lady
+Ingleton had been obliged to stay on in England several weeks.
+During this time Mrs. Clarke had had no news from her. Till Sonia's
+announcement she had not known the date fixed for her friend's return.
+She received the information with her usual inflexibility, and merely
+said:
+
+"I'll go to see her this afternoon."
+
+Then she took up a newspaper which Sonia had brought in with her and
+began to sip the coffee.
+
+As soon as she was dressed she sent a note to the British Embassy to ask
+if her friend would be in at tea-time.
+
+Lady Ingleton drew her brows together when she read it. She was
+delighted to be again in Constantinople, for she had missed Carey quite
+terribly, but she wished that Cynthia Clarke was anywhere else. Ever
+since her visit to Liverpool she had been dreading the inevitable
+meeting with the friend whose secret she had betrayed. Yet the meeting
+must take place. She would be obliged some day to look once more into
+Cynthia Clarke's earnest and distressed eyes. When that happened
+would she hate herself very much for what she had done? She had often
+wondered. She wondered now, as she read the note written in her friend's
+large upright hand, as she wrote a brief answer to say she would be in
+after five o'clock that day.
+
+She was troubled by the fact that her visit to Liverpool had not yielded
+the result she had hoped for. Rosamund Leith had not sought her husband.
+But she had taken off the sister's dress and had given up living in the
+north.
+
+Lady Ingleton knew this from Father Robertson, with whom she
+corresponded. She had never seen Rosamund or heard from her since the
+interview in the Adelphi Hotel. And she was troubled, although she
+had recently received from Father Robertson a letter ending with these
+words:
+
+
+"Pressure would be useless. I have found by experience that one cannot
+hurry the human soul. It must move at its own pace. You have done your
+part. Try to leave the rest with confidence in other hands. Through you
+she knows the truth of her husband's condition. She has given up the
+Sisterhood. Surely that means that she has taken the first step on the
+road that leads to Constantinople."
+
+
+But now May was here with its heat, and its sunshine, and its dust, and
+Lady Ingleton must soon meet the eyes of Cynthia Clarke, and the man she
+had striven to redeem was unredeemed.
+
+She sighed as she got up from her writing-table. Perhaps perversely she
+felt that she would mind meeting Cynthia Clarke less if her treachery
+had been rewarded by the accomplishment of her purpose. A useless
+treachery seemed to her peculiarly unpardonable. She hated having done
+a wrong without securing a _quid pro quo_. Even if Father Robertson was
+right, and Rosamund Leith's departure from the Sisterhood were the first
+step on the road to Constantinople, she might arrive too late.
+
+Although she was once more with Carey, Lady Ingleton felt unusually
+depressed.
+
+Soon after five the door of her boudoir was opened by a footman, and
+Mrs. Clarke walked slowly in, looking Lady Ingleton thought, even
+thinner, even more haggard and grave than usual. She was perfectly
+dressed in a gown that was a marvel of subtle simplicity, and wore a hat
+that drew just enough attention to the lovely shape of her small head.
+
+"Certainly she has the most delicious head I ever saw," was Lady
+Ingleton's first (preposterous) thought. "And the strongest will I ever
+encountered," was the following thought, as she looked into her friend's
+large eyes.
+
+After they had talked London and Paris for a few minutes Lady Ingleton
+changed the subject, and with a sort of languid zest, which was intended
+to conceal a purpose she desired to keep secret, began to speak of
+Pera and of the happenings there while she had been away. Various
+acquaintances were discussed, and presently Lady Ingleton arrived,
+strolling, at Dion Leith.
+
+"Mr. Leith is still here, isn't he?" she asked. "Carey hasn't seen him
+lately but thinks he is about."
+
+"Oh yes, he is still here," said Mrs. Clarke's husky voice.
+
+"What does he do? How does he pass his time?"
+
+"I often wonder," replied Mrs. Clarke, squeezing a lemon into her cup,
+which was full of clear China tea.
+
+She put the lemon, thoroughly squeezed, down on its plate, looking
+steadily at her friend, and continued:
+
+"You remember last summer when I asked you to be kind to him, and told
+you why I was interested in him, poor fellow?"
+
+"Oh yes."
+
+"I really thought at that time it would be possible to assist him to get
+back into life, what we understand by life. You helped me like a true
+friend."
+
+"Oh, I really did nothing."
+
+"You enabled me to continue my acquaintance with him here," said Mrs.
+Clarke inflexibly.
+
+Lady Ingleton was silent, and Mrs. Clarke continued:
+
+"You know what I did, my efforts to interest him in all sorts of things.
+I even got Jimmy out because I knew Mr. Leith was fond of him, threw
+them together, even tried to turn Mr. Leith into a sort of holiday
+tutor. Anything to take him out of himself. Later on, when Jimmy went
+back to England, I though I would try hard to wake up Dion Leith's
+mind."
+
+"Did you?" said Lady Ingleton, in her most languid voice.
+
+"I took him about in Stamboul. I showed him all the interesting things
+that travelers as a rule know nothing about. I tried to make him feel
+Stamboul. I even spent the winter here chiefly because of him, though,
+of course, nobody must know that but you."
+
+"Entendu, ma chere!"
+
+"But I've made a complete failure of it all."
+
+"You meant that Mr. Leith can't take up life again?"
+
+"He simply doesn't care for the things of the mind. He has very few
+mental resources. I imagined that there was very much more in him
+to work upon than there is. If his heart receives a hard blow, an
+intellectual man can always turn for consolation to the innumerable
+things of art, philosophy, literature, that are food for the mind.
+But Mr. Leith unfortunately isn't an intellectual man. And another
+thing----"
+
+She had been speaking very quietly; now she paused.
+
+"Yes?" said Lady Ingleton.
+
+"Jimmy came out for the Easter holidays. It was absurd, because they're
+so short, but I had to see him, and I couldn't very well go to England.
+Well, Jimmy's taken a violent dislike to Mr. Leith."
+
+"I thought Jimmy was very fond of him."
+
+"He was devoted to him, but now he can't bear him. In fact, Jimmy won't
+have anything to do with Dion Leith. I suppose--boys of that age are
+often very sharp--I suppose he sees the deterioration in Mr. Leith and
+it disgusts him."
+
+"Deterioration!" said Lady Ingleton, leaning forward, and speaking more
+impulsively than before.
+
+"Yes. It is heart-rending."
+
+"Really!"
+
+"And it makes things difficult for me."
+
+"I'm sorry for that."
+
+There was a moment of silence; then, as Mrs. Clarke did not speak, but
+sat still wrapped in a haggard immobility, Lady Ingleton said:
+
+"When do you go to Buyukderer?"
+
+"I shall probably go next week. I've very tired of Pera."
+
+"You look tired."
+
+"I didn't mean physically. I'm never physically tired."
+
+"Extraordinary woman!" said Lady Ingleton, with a faint, unhumorous
+smile. "Come and see some Sevres I picked up at Christie's. Carey is
+delighted with it, although, of course, horrified at the price I paid
+for it."
+
+She got up and went with Mrs. Clarke into one of the drawing-rooms. Dion
+Leith was not mentioned again.
+
+That evening the Ingletons dined alone. Sir Carey said he must insist
+on a short honeymoon even though they were obliged to spend it in an
+Embassy. They had dinner in Bohemian fashion on a small round table in
+Lady Ingleton's boudoir, and were waited upon by Sir Carey's valet, a
+middle-aged Italian who had been for many years in his service and who
+had succeeded, in the way of Italian servants, in becoming one of the
+family. The Pekinese lay around solaced by the arrival of their mistress
+and of their doyenne.
+
+When dinner was over and Sir Carey had lit his cigar, he breathed a sigh
+of contentment.
+
+"At last I'm happy once more after all those months of solitude!"
+
+He looked across at his wife, and added:
+
+"But are you happy at being with me again?"
+
+She smiled.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I know, of course."
+
+"Then why do you ask?"
+
+"Well, I'm a trained observer, like every competent diplomatist,
+and--there's something. I see in the lute of your happiness a tiny rift.
+It's scarcely visible, but--I see it."
+
+"I'm not quite happy to-night."
+
+"And you won't tell me why, on our honeymoon?"
+
+"I want to tell you but I can't. I have no right to tell you."
+
+"You only can judge of that."
+
+"I've done something that even you might think abominable, something
+treacherous. I had a great reason--but still!" She sighed. "I shall
+never be able to tell you what it is, because to do that would increase
+my sin. To-night I'm realizing that I'm not at all sorry for what I
+have done. And that not being sorry--as well as something else--makes me
+unhappy in a new way. It's all very complicated."
+
+"Like Balkan politics! Shall we"--he looked round the room
+meditatively--"shall we set the dogs at it?"
+
+She smiled.
+
+"Even they couldn't drive my _tristesse_ quite away. You have more power
+with me than many dogs. Read me something. Read me 'Rabbi ben Ezra.'"
+
+Sir Carey went to fetch the exorcizer.
+
+The truth was that Lady Ingleton's interview with Cynthia Clarke had
+made her realize two things: that since she had come to know Father
+Robertson, and had betrayed to him the secret of her friend's life, any
+genuine feeling of liking she had had for Cynthia Clarke had died; and
+that Cynthia Clarke was tired of Dion Leith.
+
+That day Mrs. Clarke's hypocrisy had, perhaps, for the first time,
+absolutely disgusted, and even almost horrified, Lady Ingleton. For
+years Lady Ingleton had known of it, but for years she had almost
+admired it. The cleverness, the subtlety, the competence of it had
+entertained her mind. She had respected, too, the courage which never
+failed Mrs. Clarke. But she was beginning to see her with new eyes.
+Perhaps Father Robertson had given his impulsive visitor a new moral
+vision.
+
+During the conversation that afternoon at certain moments Lady Ingleton
+had almost hated Cynthia Clarke--when Cynthia had spoken of trying to
+wake up Dion Leith's mind, of his not being an intellectual man, of
+Jimmy Clarke's shrinking from him because of his deterioration. And when
+Cynthia had said that deterioration was "heart-rending" Lady Ingleton
+had quite definitely detested her. This feeling of detestation had
+persisted while, in the drawing-room, Cynthia was lovingly appreciating
+the new acquisition of Sevres. Lady Ingleton sickened now when she
+thought of the lovely hands sensitively touching, feeling, the thin
+china. There really was something appalling in the delicate mentality,
+in the subtle taste, of a woman in whom raged such devastating physical
+passions.
+
+Lady Ingleton shuddered as she remembered her conversation with her
+"friend." But it had brought about something. It had driven away any
+lingering regret of hers for having spoken frankly to Father Robertson.
+Cynthia was certainly tired of Dion Leith. Was she about to sacrifice
+him as she had sacrificed others? Lady Ingleton dreaded the future. For
+during the interview at the Adelphi Hotel she had realized Rosamund's
+innate and fastidious purity. To forgive even one infidelity would be
+a tremendous moral triumph in such a woman as Rosamund. But if Cynthia
+Clarke threw Dion Leith away, and he fell into promiscuous degradation,
+then surely Rosamund's nature would rise up in inevitable revolt. Even
+if she came to Constantinople then it would surely be too late.
+
+Lady Ingleton had seen clearly enough into the mind of Cynthia Clarke,
+but there was hidden from her the greater part of a human drama not yet
+complete.
+
+Combined with the ugly passion which governed her life, Mrs. Clarke had
+an almost wild love of personal freedom. As much as she loved to fetter
+she hated to be fettered. This hatred had led her into many difficulties
+during the course of her varied life, difficulties which had always
+occurred at moments when she wanted to get rid of people. Ever since she
+had grown up there had been recurring epochs when she had been tormented
+by the violent desire to rid herself of some one whom she had formerly
+longed for, whom she had striven to bind to her. Until now she had
+always eventually succeeded in breaking away from those who were
+beginning to involve her in weariness or to disgust her. There had
+sometimes been perilous moments, painful scenes, bitter recriminations.
+But by the exercise of her indomitable power of will, helped by her
+exceptional lack of scruple, she had always managed to accomplish her
+purpose. She had always found hitherto that she was more pitiless,
+and therefore more efficient, than anyone opposed to her in a severe
+struggle of wills. But Dion Leith was beginning to cause her serious
+uneasiness. She had known from the beginning of their acquaintance that
+he was an exceptional man; since his tragedy she had realized that the
+exceptional circumstances of his life had accentuated his individuality.
+In sorrow, in deterioration, he had broken loose from restraint. She had
+helped to make him what he had now become, the most difficult man she
+had ever had to deal with. When he had crossed the river to her he
+had burnt all the boats behind him. If he had sometimes been weak in
+goodness, in those former days long past, in what he considered
+as evil--Mrs. Clarke did not see things in white and black--he had
+developed a peculiar persistence and determination which were very like
+strength.
+
+Looking back, Mrs. Clarke realized that the definite change in Dion,
+which marked the beginning of a new development, dated from the night in
+the garden at Buyukderer when Jimmy had so nearly learnt the truth. On
+that night she had forced Dion to save her reputation with her child
+by lying and playing the hypocrite to a boy who looked up to him and
+trusted in him. Dion had not forgotten his obedience. Perhaps he hated
+her because of it in some secret place of his soul. She was sure that
+he intended to make her pay for it. He had obeyed her in what she
+considered as a very trifling matter. (For of course Jimmy had to be
+deceived.) But since then he had often shown a bitter, even sometimes a
+brutal, disposition to make her obey him. She could not fully understand
+the measure of his resentment because she had none of his sense of honor
+and did not share his instinctive love of truth. But she knew he had
+suffered acutely in tricking and lying to Jimmy.
+
+On that night, then, he had burnt his boats. She herself had told him
+to do it when she had said to him, "Give yourself wholly to me." She was
+beginning to regret that she had ever said that.
+
+At first, in her perversity, she had curiously enjoyed Dion's misery. It
+had wrapped him in a garment that was novel. It had thrown about him
+a certain romance. But now she was becoming weary of it. She had had
+enough of it and enough of him. That horrible process, which she knew
+so well, had repeated itself once more: she had wanted a thing; she had
+striven for it; she had obtained it; she had enjoyed it (for she knew
+well how to enjoy and never thought that the game was not worth the
+candle). And then, by slow, almost imperceptible degrees, her power of
+enjoyment had begun to lessen. Day by day it had lost in strength. She
+had tried to stimulate it, to deceive herself about its decay, but the
+time had come, as it had come to her many times in the past, when she
+had been forced to acknowledge to herself that it was no longer living
+but a corpse. Dion Leith had played his part in her life. She wished now
+to put him outside of her door. She had made sacrifices for him; for
+him she had run risks. All that was very well so long as he had had
+the power to reward her. But now she was beginning to brood over those
+risks, those sacrifices, with resentment, to magnify them in her mind;
+she was beginning to be angry as she dwelt upon that which distortedly
+she thought of as her unselfishness.
+
+After Jimmy had left Turkey to go back to Eton, and the summer had died,
+Mrs. Clarke had fulfilled her promise to Dion. She had settled at Pera
+for the winter, and she had arranged his life for him. From the moment
+of Jimmy's departure Dion had given himself entirely to her. He had
+even given himself with a sort of desperation. She had been aware of his
+fierce concentration, and she had tasted it with a keenness of pleasure,
+she had savored it deliberately and fully in the way of an epicure. The
+force of his resolution towards evil--it was just that--had acted upon
+her abominably sensitive temperament as a strong tonic. That period had
+been the time when, to her, the game was worth the candle, was worth a
+whole blaze of candles.
+
+Already, then, Dion had begun to show the new difficult man whom she,
+working hand in hand with sorrow, had helped to create within him;
+but she had at first enjoyed his crudities of temper, his occasional
+outbursts of brutality, his almost fierce roughness and the hardness
+which alternated with his moments of passion.
+
+She had understood that he was flinging away with furious hands all the
+baggage of virtue he had clung to in the past, that he was readjusting
+his life, was reversing all the habits which had been familiar and
+natural to him in the existence with Rosamund. So much the better, she
+had thought. The fact that he was doing this proved to her her power
+over him. She had smiled, in her unsmiling way, upon his efforts to do
+what she had told him to do, to cut away the cancer that was in him and
+to cut away all that was round it. Away with the old moralities, the
+old hatred of lies and deceptions, the old love of sanity and purity of
+life.
+
+But away, too, with the old reverence for, and worship of, the woman
+possessed.
+
+Dion had taken to heart a maxim once uttered to him by Mrs. Clarke in
+the garden at Buyukderer. Mention had been made of the very foolish
+and undignified conduct of a certain woman in Pera society who had been
+badly treated by a young diplomat. In discussing the matter Dion had
+chanced to say:
+
+"But if she does such things how can any man respect her?"
+
+Mrs. Clarke's reply, spoken with withering sarcasm, had been:
+
+"Women don't want to be _respected_ by men."
+
+Dion had not forgotten that saying. It had sunk deep into his heart.
+He had come to believe it. Even when he thought of Rosamund still he
+believed it. He had respected her, and had shown his respect in the
+most chivalrous way at his command, and she had never really loved him.
+Evidently women were not what he had thought they were. Mrs. Clarke knew
+what they were and a thousand things that he did not know. He grasped
+at her cynicism, and he often applied it, translated through his
+personality, to herself. He even went farther in cynicism than she had
+ever gone, behaving like a convert to a religion which had the charm
+of novelty. He praised her for her capacities as a liar, a hypocrite, a
+subtle trickster, a thrower of dust in the eyes of her world. One of his
+favorite names for her was "dust-thrower." Sometimes he abused her. She
+believed that at moments he detested her. But he clung to her and he did
+not mean to give her up. And she knew that.
+
+After that horrible night when Jimmy had waked up she had succeeded in
+making Dion believe that he was deeply loved by her. She had really had
+an ugly passion for him, and she had contrived easily enough to dress
+it up and present it as love. And he clung to that semblance of love,
+because it was all that he had, because it was a weapon in his hand, and
+because he had made for it a sacrifice. He had sacrificed the truth that
+was in him, and he had received in part payment the mysterious dislike
+of the boy who had formerly looked up to him.
+
+Jimmy had never been friendly with Dion since the night of their search
+for his mother in the garden.
+
+His manner towards his mother had changed but little. He was slightly
+more reserved with her than he had been. Her faint air of sarcasm when,
+in Sonia's room, he had shown her his boyish agitation, had made a
+considerable impression upon him. He was unable to forget it. And he was
+a little more formal with his mother; showed her, perhaps, more respect
+than before. But the change was trifling. His respect for Dion, however,
+was obviously dead. Indeed he had begun to show a scarcely veiled
+hostility towards Dion in the summer holidays, and in the recent Easter
+holidays, spent by him in Pera, he had avoided Dion as much as possible.
+
+"That fellow still here!" he had said, with boyish gruffness, when his
+mother had first mentioned Dion's name immediately after his arrival.
+And when he had seen Dion he had said straight out to his mother that he
+couldn't "stand Leith at any price now." She had asked him why, fixing
+her eyes upon him, but the only reply she had succeeded in getting had
+been that he didn't trust the fellow, that he hadn't trusted Leith for a
+long time.
+
+"Since when?" she had said.
+
+"Can't remember," had been the non-committal answer.
+
+It seemed as if Jimmy had seen through Dion's insincerity in the garden
+at Buyukderer. Yet there was nothing to show that he had not accepted
+his mother's insincerity in Sonia's room at its face value. Even Mrs.
+Clarke had not been able to understand exactly what was in her boy's
+mind. But Jimmy's hostility to Dion had troubled her obscurely, and had
+added to her growing weariness of this intrigue something more vital.
+Her intelligence divined, rather than actually perceived, the coming
+into her life of a definite menace to her happiness, if happiness it
+could be called. She felt as if Jimmy were on the track of her secret,
+and she was certain that Dion was the cause of the boy's unpleasant new
+alertness. In the past she had taken risks for Dion. But she had had
+the great reason of what she chose to call passion. That reason was gone
+now. She was resolved not to take the greatest of all risks for a man
+whom she wanted to get rid of.
+
+She was resolved; but she encountered now in Dion a resolve which she
+had not suspected he was capable of, and which began to render her
+seriously uneasy.
+
+Lady Ingleton's remark, "you look tired," had struck unpleasantly on
+Mrs. Clarke's ears, and she came away from the Embassy that day with
+them in her mind. She was on foot. As she came out through the great
+gateway of the Embassy she remembered that she had been coming from it
+on that day in June when she had seen Dion Leith for the first time in
+Pera. A sharp thrill had gone through her that day. He had come. He had
+obeyed the persistent call of her will. What she had desired for so
+long would be. And she had been fiercely glad for two reasons; one an
+ordinary reason, the other less ordinary. A mysterious reason of the
+mind. If her will had played her false for once, had proved inadequate,
+she would have suffered strangely. When she knew it had not she had
+triumphed. But now, as she walked onward slowly, she wished she had
+never seen Dion Leith in Pera, she wished that her will had played
+her false. It would have been better so, for she was in a difficult
+situation, and she foresaw that it was going to become more difficult.
+She was assailed by that recurring desire which is the scourge of the
+sensualist, the desire to rid herself violently, abruptly and forever
+of the possession she had schemed and made long efforts to obtain. Her
+torch was burnt out. She wished to stamp out the flame of another torch
+which still glowed with a baleful fire.
+
+"And Delia has noticed something!" she thought.
+
+The thought was scarcely out of her mind when she came face to face with
+Dion Leith. He stopped before her.
+
+"Have you been to the Embassy?" he said.
+
+"Yes. Delia Ingleton came back yesterday. You aren't going to call
+there?"
+
+"Of course not. I happened to see you walking in that direction, so I
+thought I would wait for you."
+
+With the manner of a man exercising a right he turned to walk back
+with her. A flame of irritation scorched her, but she did not show any
+emotion. She only said quietly:
+
+"You know I am not particularly fond of being seen with men in the
+Grande Rue."
+
+"Very well. If you like, I'll come to your flat by a round-about way.
+I'll be there five minutes after you are."
+
+Before she had time to say anything he was gone, striding through the
+crowd.
+
+Mrs. Clarke walked on and came into the Grande Rue.
+
+She lived in a flat in a street which turned out of the Grande Rue on
+the left not very far from the Taxim Garden. As she walked on slowly she
+was trying to make up her mind to force a break with Dion. She had
+great courage and was naturally ruthless, yet for once she was beset
+by indecision. She did not any longer feel sure that she could dominate
+this man. She had bent him to her will when she took him; but could she
+do so when she wished to get rid of him?
+
+When she reached the house, on the second floor of which was her flat,
+she found him there waiting for her.
+
+"You must have walked very quickly, Dion," she said.
+
+"No, I didn't," he replied bruskly. "You walked very slowly."
+
+"I feel tired to-day."
+
+"I thought you were never tired."
+
+"Every woman is tired sometimes."
+
+They began to ascend the staircase. There was no lift.
+
+"Are you going out to-night?" she heard him say behind her.
+
+"No. I shall go to bed early."
+
+"I'll stay till then."
+
+"You know you can't stay very late here."
+
+She heard him laugh.
+
+"When you've just said you are going to bed early!"
+
+She said nothing more till they reached the flat. He followed her in and
+put his hat down.
+
+"Will you have tea?"
+
+"No, thanks; nothing."
+
+"Go into the drawing-room. I'll come in a moment."
+
+She left him and went into her bedroom.
+
+He waited for her in the drawing-room. At first he sat down. The room
+was full of the scent of flowers, and he remembered the strong flowery
+scent which had greeted him when he visited the villa at Buyukderer
+for the first time. How long ago that seemed--aeons ago! A few minutes
+passed, registered by the ticking of a little clock of exquisite bronze
+work on the mantelpiece. She did not come. He felt restless. He always
+felt restless in Constantinople. Now he got up and walked about the
+room, turning sharply from time to time, pausing when he turned, then
+resuming his walk. Once, as he turned, he found himself exactly opposite
+to a mirror. He stared into it and saw a man still young, but lined,
+with sunken eyes, a mouth drooping and bitter, a head on which the dark
+hair was no longer thick and springy. His hair had retreated from the
+temples, and this fact had changed his appearance, had lessened his good
+looks, and at the same time had given to his face an odd suggestion
+of added intellectuality which was at war with the plain stamp of
+dissipation imprinted upon it. Even in repose his face was almost
+horribly expressive.
+
+As he stared into the glass he thought:
+
+"If I cut off my mustache I should look like a tragic actor who was a
+thorough bad lot."
+
+He turned away, frowning, and resumed his walk. Presently he stood still
+and looked about the room. He was getting impatient. Irritability crept
+through him. He almost hated Mrs. Clarke for keeping him waiting so
+long.
+
+"Why the devil doesn't she come?" he thought.
+
+He stood trying to control his nervous anger, clenching his muscular
+hands, and looking from one piece of furniture to another, from one
+ornament to another ornament, with quickly shifting eyes.
+
+His attention was attracted by something unusual in the room which he
+had not noticed till now. On a writing-table of ebony near one of the
+windows he saw a large photograph in a curious frame of ruddy arbutus
+wood. He had never before seen a photograph in any room lived in by Mrs.
+Clarke, and he had heard her say that photographs killed a room, and
+might easily kill, too, with their staring impotence, any affection one
+felt for the friends they represented. Whose photograph could this be
+which triumphed over such a dislike? He walked to the table, bent down
+and saw a standing boy in flannels, bare-headed, with thick, disordered
+hair and bare arms, holding in his large hands a cricket bat. It was
+Jimmy, and his eyes looked straight into Dion's.
+
+A door clicked. There was a faint rustling. Mrs. Clarke walked into the
+room.
+
+Dion turned round.
+
+"What's this photograph doing here?" he asked roughly.
+
+"Doing?"
+
+"Yes. You hate photographs. I've heard you say so."
+
+"Jimmy gave it to me on my birthday just before he left for England.
+It's quite a good one."
+
+"You are going to keep it here?"
+
+"Yes. I am going to keep it here. Come and sit down."
+
+He did not move.
+
+"Jimmy loathes me," he said.
+
+"Nonsense."
+
+"He does. Through you he has come to loathe me, and you keep his
+photograph here----"
+
+"I don't allow any one to criticize what I do in my own drawing-room,"
+she interrupted. "You are really childish to-day."
+
+His intense irritability had communicated itself to her. She felt
+an almost reckless desire to get rid of him. His look of embittered
+wretchedness tormented her nerves. She wondered how it had ever been
+able to interest her, even to lure her. She was amazed at her own
+perversity.
+
+"I cannot allow you to come here if you are going to try to interfere
+with my arrangements," she added, with a sort of fierce coldness.
+
+"I have a right to come here."
+
+"You have not. You have no rights over me, none at all. I have made a
+great many sacrifices for you, far too many, but I shall never sacrifice
+my complete independence for you or for any one."
+
+"Sacrifices for me!" he exclaimed.
+
+He snatched up the photograph, held it with both his hands, exerted his
+strength, smashed the glass, broke the frame, tore the photograph in
+half, and threw it, the fragments of red wood and the bits of glass on
+the table.
+
+"You've made your boy hate me, and you shan't have him there," he said
+savagely.
+
+"How dare you!" she exclaimed, in a low, hoarse voice.
+
+She flung out her hands. In snatching at the ruined photograph she
+picked up with it a fragment of glass. It cut her hand slightly, and a
+thin thread of blood ran down over her white skin.
+
+"Oh, your hand!" exclaimed Dion, in a changed voice. "It's bleeding!"
+
+He pulled out his handkerchief.
+
+"Leave it alone! I forbid you to touch it!"
+
+She put the fragments of the photograph inside her dress, gently,
+tenderly even. Then she turned and faced him.
+
+"To-morrow I shall telegraph to England for another photograph to be
+sent out, and it will stand here," she said, pointing with her bleeding
+hand at the writing-table. "It will always stand on my table here and in
+the Villa Hafiz."
+
+Then she bound her own handkerchief about her hand and rang the bell.
+Sonia came.
+
+"I've stupidly cut my hand, Sonia. Come and tie it up. Mr. Leith is
+going in a moment, and then you shall bathe it."
+
+Sonia looked at Dion, and, without a word, adjusted the handkerchief
+deftly, and pinned it in place with a safety-pin which she drew out of
+her dress. Then she left the room with her flat-footed walk. As she shut
+the door Dion said doggedly:
+
+"You'd better let her bathe it now, because I'm not going in a moment."
+
+"When I ask you to go you will go."
+
+"Sit down. I must speak to you."
+
+He pointed to a large sofa. She went very deliberately to a chair and
+sat down.
+
+"Why don't you sit on the sofa?"
+
+"I prefer this."
+
+He sat on the sofa.
+
+"I must speak to you about Jimmy."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"What's the matter with him? What have you been up to with him?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Then why should he turn against me and not against you?"
+
+"I don't understand what you mean."
+
+"You do. It's since that night in the garden when you made me lie to
+him. Ever since that night he's been absolutely different with me. You
+know it."
+
+"I can't help it."
+
+"He believed your lies to him, apparently. Why doesn't he believe mine?"
+
+"Of course he believed what you told him."
+
+"He didn't, or he wouldn't have changed. He hates your having anything
+to do with me. He's told you so. I'm sure of it."
+
+"Jimmy would never dare to do that."
+
+"Anyhow, you know he does."
+
+She did not deny it.
+
+"Remember this," Dion said, looking straight at her, "I'm not going to
+be sacrificed a second time on account of a child."
+
+After a long pause, during which Mrs. Clarke sat without moving, her
+lovely head leaning against a cushion which was fastened near the top of
+the back of the chair, she said:
+
+"What do you mean exactly by being sacrificed, Dion?"
+
+Her manner had changed. The hostility had gone out of it. Her husky
+voice sounded gentle almost, and she looked at him earnestly.
+
+"I mean just this: my life with the woman I once cared for was smashed
+to pieces by a child, my own dead child. I'm not going to allow my
+life with you to be smashed to pieces by Jimmy. Isn't a man more than a
+child? Can't he feel more than a child feels, give more than a child can
+give? Isn't a thing full grown as valuable, as worth having as a thing
+that's immature?"
+
+He spoke with almost passionate resentment.
+
+"D'you mean to tell me that a man's love always means less to a woman
+than a child's love means?"
+
+Silently, while he spoke, she compared the passion she had had for Dion
+Leith with the love she would always have for Jimmy. The one was dead;
+the other could not die. That was the difference between such things.
+
+"The two are so different that it is useless to compare them," she
+replied. "Surely you could not be jealous of a child."
+
+"I could be jealous of anything that threatened me in my life with you.
+It's all I've got now, and I won't have it interfered with."
+
+"But neither must you attempt to interfere with my life with my child,"
+she said, very calmly.
+
+"You dragged me into your life with Jimmy. You have always used Jimmy as
+a means. It began long ago in London when you were at Claridge's."
+
+"There is no need--"
+
+"There is need to make you see clearly why I have every right to take a
+stand now against--against----"
+
+"Against what?"
+
+"I feel you're changing. I don't trust you. You are not to be trusted.
+Since Jimmy has been here again I feel that you are different."
+
+"I am obliged to be specially careful now the boy is beginning to grow
+up. He notices things now he wouldn't have noticed a year or two ago.
+And it will get worse from year to year. That isn't my fault."
+
+His sunken eyes looked fixedly at her from the midst of the network of
+wrinkles which disfigured his face.
+
+"Now what are you trying to lead up to?" he said.
+
+"It's very foolish of you to be always suspicious. Only stupid people
+are always suspecting others of sharp practise."
+
+"I'm stupid compared with you, but I'm not so stupid that I haven't
+learnt to know you better than other people know you, better, probably,
+than any one else on earth knows you. It is entirely through you that
+Jimmy has got to hate me. I'm not going to let you use his hatred of
+me as a weapon against me. I've been wanting to tell you this, but I
+thought I'd wait till he had gone."
+
+"Why should I want to use a weapon against you?"
+
+"I don't know. It isn't always easy to know why you want things. You're
+such an inveterate liar, and so tricky that you'd puzzle the devil
+himself."
+
+"Do you realize that all you are saying to-day implies something? It
+implies that in your opinion I am not a free agent, that you consider
+you have a right to govern my actions. But I deny that."
+
+She spoke firmly, but without any heat.
+
+"Do you mean to say that what we are to each other gives me no more
+rights over you than mere acquaintances have?"
+
+"It gives you no more rights over me than mere acquaintances have."
+
+He sat looking at her for a minute. Then he said:
+
+"Cynthia, come and sit here, please, beside me."
+
+"Why should I?"
+
+"Please come."
+
+"Very well."
+
+She got up, came to the sofa with a sort of listless decision, and sat
+down beside him. He took her uninjured hand. His hand was burning with
+heat. He closed and unclosed his fingers as he went on speaking.
+
+"What is there in such a relation as ours if it carries no rights?
+You have altered my whole life. Is that nothing? I live out here only
+because of you. I have nothing out here but you. All these months, ever
+since we left Buyukderer, I've lived just as you wished. I went into
+society at Buyukderer because you wished me to. When you didn't care any
+more about my doing that I lived in the shade in Galata. I've fallen
+in with every deception you thought necessary, I've told every lie you
+wished me to tell. Ever since you made me lie to Jimmy I haven't cared
+much. But you'll never know, because you can't understand such things,
+what the loss of Jimmy's confidence and respect has meant to me.
+However, that's all past. I'm as much of a hypocrite as you are; I'm
+as false as you are; I'm as rotten as you are--with other people. But
+don't, for God's sake, let's be rotten with each other. That would be
+too foul, like thieves falling out."
+
+"I've always been perfectly straight with you," she said coldly. "I have
+nothing to reproach myself with."
+
+The closing of his fingers on her hand, and their unclosing, irritated
+her whole body. To-day she disliked his touch intensely, so intensely
+that she could scarcely believe she had ever liked it, longed for it,
+schemed for it.
+
+"Please keep your hand still!" she said.
+
+"What?"
+
+"It makes me nervous your doing that. Either hold my hand or don't hold
+it."
+
+"I don't understand. What was I doing?"
+
+"Oh, never mind. I've always been straight with you. I don't know why
+you are attacking me."
+
+"I feel you are changing towards me. So I thought I'd tell you that I
+don't intend to be driven out a second time by a child. It's better you
+should know that. Then you won't attempt the impossible."
+
+She looked into his sunken eyes.
+
+"Jimmy has got to dislike you," she said. "It's unfortunate, but it
+can't be helped. I don't know exactly why it is so. It may be because
+he's older, just at the age when boys begin to understand about men and
+women. You're not always quite so careful before him as you might be.
+I don't mean in what you say, but in your manner. I think Jimmy fancies
+you like me in a certain way. I think he probably took it into his head
+that you were hanging about the garden that night because perhaps you
+hoped to meet me there. A very little more and he might begin to suspect
+me. You have been frank with me to-day. I'll be frank with you. I want
+you to understand that if there ever was a question of my losing Jimmy's
+love and respect I should fight to keep them, sacrifice anything to
+keep them. Jimmy comes first with me, and always will. It couldn't be
+otherwise. I prefer that you should know it."
+
+He shot a glance at her that was almost cunning. She had been prepared
+for a perhaps violent outburst, but he only said:
+
+"Jimmy won't be here again for some time, so we needn't bother about
+him."
+
+She was genuinely surprised, but she did not show it.
+
+"It was you who brought up the question," she said.
+
+"Never mind. Don't worry about it. If Jimmy comes out for the summer
+holidays----"
+
+"He will, of course."
+
+"Then I can go away from Buyukderer just for those few weeks."
+
+"I----" She paused; then went on: "I must tell you that you mustn't come
+to Buyukderer again this summer."
+
+"Then you won't go there?"
+
+"Of course I must go. I have the villa. I am going there next week."
+
+"If you go, then I shall go. But I'll leave when Jimmy comes, as you are
+so fussed about him."
+
+She could scarcely believe that it was Dion who was speaking to her.
+Often she had heard him speak violently, irritably, even cruelly and
+rudely. But there was a sort of ghastly softness in his voice. His hand
+still held hers, but its grasp had relaxed. In his touch, as in his
+voice, there was a softness which disquieted her.
+
+"I'm sorry, but I can't let you come to Buyukderer this summer," she
+said. "Once did not matter. But if you came again my reputation would
+suffer."
+
+"Then I'll stay at some other place on the Bosporus and come over."
+
+"That would be just as bad."
+
+"Do you seriously mean that we are to be entirely separated during the
+whole of this summer?"
+
+"I must be careful of my reputation now Jimmy's growing up. The Bosporus
+is the home of malicious gossip."
+
+"Do answer my question. Do you mean that we are to be separated during
+the summer?"
+
+"I don't see how it can be helped."
+
+"It can be helped very easily. Don't go to Buyukderer."
+
+"I must. I have the villa."
+
+"Let it."
+
+"I couldn't possibly stand Constantinople in the summer."
+
+"There's no need to do that. There are other places besides
+Constantinople and Buyukderer. You might go to one of them. Or you might
+travel."
+
+She sat down for a moment looking down.
+
+"Do you mean that I might travel with you?" she said, at last.
+
+"Not with me. But I could happen to be where you are."
+
+"That's not possible. Some one would get to know of it."
+
+"How absurdly _ingenue_ you have become all of a sudden!" he said, with
+soft, but scathing, irony.
+
+And he laughed, let out a long, low, and apparently spontaneous laugh,
+as if he were genuinely amused.
+
+"Really one would hardly imagine that you were the heroine of the famous
+divorce case which interested all London not so very long ago. When
+I remember the life you acknowledged you had lived, the life you were
+quite defiant about, I can't help being amused by this sudden access
+of conventional Puritanism. You declared then that you didn't choose
+to live a dull, orthodox life. One would suppose that the leopard could
+change his spots after all."
+
+While he was speaking she lifted her head and looked fixedly at him.
+
+"It's just that very divorce case which has made me alter my way of
+living," she said. "Any one who knew anything of the world, any one but
+a fool, could see that."
+
+"Ah, but I am a fool," he returned doggedly. "I was a fool when I ran
+straight, and it seems I'm a fool when I run crooked. You've got to make
+the best of me as I am. Take your choice. Go to Buyukderer if you like.
+If you do I shall stay on the Bosporus. Or travel if you like, and I'll
+happen to be where you are. It's quite easy. It's done every day. But
+you know that as well as I do. I can't give you points in the game of
+throwing dust in the eyes of the public."
+
+"It's too late now to let the villa, even if I cared to. And I can't
+afford to shut it up and leave it standing empty while I wander about in
+hotels. I shall go to Buyukderer next week."
+
+"All right. I'll go back to the rooms I had last year, and we can live
+as we did then. Give me the key of the garden gate and I can use the
+pavilion as my sitting-room again. It's all quite simple."
+
+A frown altered her white face. His mention of the pavilion had suddenly
+recalled to her exactly what she had felt for him last year. She
+compared it with what she felt for him now. With an impulsive movement
+she pulled her hand away from his.
+
+"I shall not give you the key. I can't have you there. I will not.
+People have begun to talk."
+
+"I don't believe it. They never see us together here. You have taken
+good care of that in the last few months. Why, we've met like thieves in
+the night."
+
+"Here, yes. In a great town one can manage, but not in a place like
+Buyukderer."
+
+He leaned forward and said, with dogged resolution:
+
+"One thing is certain--I will not be separated from you during the
+summer. Do whatever you like, but remember that. Make your own plans. I
+will fall in with them. But I shall pass the summer where you pass it."
+
+"I--really I didn't know you cared so much about me," she murmured, with
+a faint smile.
+
+"Care for you!"
+
+He stared into her face and the twinkles twitched about his eyes.
+
+"How should I not care for you?"
+
+He gripped her hand again.
+
+"Haven't you taught me how to live in the dust? Haven't you shown me the
+folly of being honorable and the fun of deceiving others? Haven't you
+led me into the dark and made me able to see in it? And there's such
+a lot to see in the dark! Why, good God, Cynthia, you've made a man in
+your own image and then you're surprised at his worshipping you. Where's
+your cleverness?"
+
+"I often believe you detest me."
+
+"Oh, as for that, a woman such as you are can be loved and hated almost
+at the same time. But she can't be given up. No!"
+
+As she looked at him she saw the red gleam of the torch he carried. Hers
+had long ago died out into blackness.
+
+"Is it possible that you really wish to ruin my reputation?"
+
+"Not a bit of it! You're so clever that you can always guard against
+that."
+
+"Yes, I can when I'm dealing with gentlemen," she said, with sudden,
+vicious sharpness. "But you are behaving like a cad. Of all the men I--"
+
+She stopped. A sort of nervous fury possessed her. It had nearly driven
+her to make a false step. And yet--would it be a false step? As she
+paused, looking at Dion, marking the hard obstinacy in his eyes, feeling
+the hard, hot grip of his hand, it occurred to her that perhaps she had
+blundered upon the one way out, the way of escape. Amid the wreckage of
+his beliefs she knew that Dion still held to one belief, which had been
+shaken once, but which her cool adroitness had saved and made firm in a
+critical moment. If she destroyed it now would he let her go? Just how
+low had he fallen through her? She wished she knew. But she did not
+know, and she waited, looking at him.
+
+"Go on!" he said. "Of all the men you--what?"
+
+"How low down is he? How low down?" she asked herself.
+
+"Can you go on?" he said harshly.
+
+"Of all the men who have cared for me you are the only man who has ever
+dared to interfere with my freedom," she said.
+
+Her voice had become almost raucous, and a faint dull red strangely
+discolored and altered her face.
+
+"I will not permit it. I shall go to Buyukderer, and I forbid you to
+follow me there. Now it's getting late and I'm tired. Please go away."
+
+"Men who have cared for you!"
+
+"Yes. Yes."
+
+"What d'you mean by that? D'you mean Brayfield?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have there been many others who have cared as Brayfield did?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Hadi Bey was one of them, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And Dumeny was another?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Poor fellows!"
+
+His lips were smiling, but his eyes looked dreadfully intent and
+searching.
+
+"You made them suffer and gave them no reward. I can see you doing it
+and enjoying it."
+
+"That's untrue."
+
+"What is untrue?"
+
+"To say that I gave them no reward."
+
+At this moment there was a tap on the door.
+
+"Come in!" said Mrs. Clarke, in her ordinary voice.
+
+Sonia opened the door and came in.
+
+"Excuse me, Madame," she said, "but you told me I was to bathe your
+hand. If it is not bathed it will look horrible to-morrow. I have the
+warm water all ready."
+
+She stood in front of her mistress, broad, awkward and yet capable. Dion
+felt certain this woman meant to get rid of him because she was aware
+that her mistress wanted him to go. He had always realized that Sonia
+knew Mrs. Clarke better than any other woman did. As for himself--she
+had never shown any feeling towards him. He did not know whether she
+liked him or disliked him. But now he knew that he disliked her.
+
+He looked almost menacingly at her.
+
+"Your mistress can't go at present," he said. "Her hand is all right. It
+was only a scratch."
+
+Sonia looked at her mistress.
+
+"Sonia is quite right," said Mrs. Clarke, getting up. "And as the water
+is warm I will go. Good-by."
+
+"I will stay here till you have finished," he said, still looking at
+Sonia.
+
+"It's getting very late. We might finish our talk to-morrow."
+
+"I will stay."
+
+After a slight pause Mrs. Clarke, whose face was still discolored with
+red, turned to the maid and said:
+
+"Go away, Sonia."
+
+Sonia went away very slowly. At the door she stopped for a moment and
+looked round. Then she disappeared, and the door closed slowly and as if
+reluctantly behind her.
+
+"Now what did you mean?" Dion said.
+
+He got up.
+
+"What did you mean?"
+
+"Simply this, that my husband ought to have won his case."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+He stood with his hands hanging at his sides, looking impassive, with
+his head bent and the lids drooping over his eyes. She waited--for her
+freedom. She did not mind the disgust which she felt like an emanation
+in the darkening room, if only it would carry him far enough in hatred
+of her. Would it do that?
+
+There was a very long silence between them. During it he remained
+motionless. With his hanging hands and his drooping head he looked, she
+thought, almost as much like a puppet as like a man. His whole body had
+a strange aspect of listlessness, almost of feebleness. Yet she knew how
+muscular and powerful he still was, although he had long ago ceased from
+taking care of his body. The silence lasted so long, and he stood so
+absolutely still, that she began to feel uneasy, even faintly afraid.
+The nerves in her body were tingling. They could have braced themselves
+to encounter violence, but this immobility and dumbness tormented them.
+She wanted to speak, to move, but she felt obliged to wait for him.
+At last he looked up. He came to her, lifted his hands and laid them
+heavily on her emaciated shoulders.
+
+"So that's what you are!"
+
+He stared into her haggard face. She met his eyes resolutely.
+
+"That's what you are!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why have you told me this to-day?"
+
+"Of course you knew it long ago."
+
+"Answer me. Why have you told me to-day?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"I do. You have told me to-day because you have had enough of me. You
+meant to use Jimmy to get rid of me as you once used him to get to know
+me more intimately. When you found that wouldn't serve your turn, you
+made up your mind to speak a word or two of truth. You thought you would
+disgust me into leaving you."
+
+"Of course you knew it long ago," she repeated in a dull voice.
+
+"I didn't know it. I might have suspected it. In fact, once I did, and
+I told you so. But you drove out my suspicion. I don't know exactly how.
+And since then--after you got your verdict in London I saw Dumeny smile
+at you as he went out of the Court. I have never been able to forget
+that smile. Now I understand it. One by one you've managed to get rid
+of them all. And now at last you've arrived at me, and you've said to
+yourself, 'It's his turn to be kicked out now.' Haven't you?"
+
+"Nothing can last forever," she murmured huskily.
+
+"No. But this time you're not going to scrawl 'finis' exactly when you
+want to."
+
+"It's getting dark, and I'm tired. My hand is hurting me."
+
+He gripped her shoulders more firmly.
+
+"If you meant some day to get rid of me, to kick me out as you've kicked
+out the others," he said grimly, "you shouldn't have made me come to
+you that night when Jimmy was at Buyukderer. That was a mistake on your
+part."
+
+"Why?" she asked, almost in a whisper.
+
+"Because that night through you I lost something; I lost the last shred
+of my self-respect. Till that night I was still clinging on to it. You
+struck my hands away and made me let go. Now I don't care. And that's
+why I'm not going to let you make the sign of the cross over me and
+dismiss me into hell. Your list closes with me, Cynthia. I'm not going
+to give you up."
+
+She shook slightly under his hands.
+
+"Why are you trembling?"
+
+"I'm not trembling; but I'm tired; let me alone."
+
+"You can go to Sonia now if you like, and have your hand bathed."
+
+He lifted his hands from her shoulders, but she did not move.
+
+"What are you going to do?" she asked.
+
+"I shall wait for you here."
+
+"Wait for me?"
+
+"Yes. We'll dine together to-night."
+
+"Where?" she said helplessly.
+
+"Here, if you like."
+
+"There's scarcely anything to eat. I didn't intend----"
+
+"I'll take you out somewhere. It's going to be a dark night. We'll
+manage so that no one sees us. We'll dine together and, after
+dinner----"
+
+"I must come home early. I'm very tired."
+
+"After dinner we'll go to those rooms you found so cleverly near the
+Persian Khan."
+
+She shuddered.
+
+"Now go and bathe your hand, and I'll wait here. Only don't be too long
+or I shall come and fetch you. And don't send Sonia to make excuses, for
+it will be no use."
+
+He sat down on the sofa.
+
+She stood for a moment without moving. She put her bandaged hand up to
+her discolored face. Then she went slowly out of the room.
+
+He sat waiting for her to come back, with his elbows on his knees and
+his face hidden in his hands.
+
+He felt like a man sunk in mire. He felt the mire creeping up to his
+throat.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Almost at that same hour beside a platform at Victoria Station in London
+a long train with "Dover" placarded on it was drawn up. Before the door
+of a first-class carriage two women in plain traveling dresses were
+standing with a white-haired clergyman. Presently the shorter of the two
+women said to the other:
+
+"I think I'll get in now, and leave you to last words."
+
+She held out her hand to the clergyman.
+
+"Good-by, Father Robertson."
+
+He grasped her hand warmly, and looked at her with a great tenderness
+shining in his eyes.
+
+"Take good care of her. But you will, I know," he said.
+
+Beatrice Daventry got into the carriage, and stood for a moment at the
+door. There were tears in her eyes as she looked at the two figures now
+pacing slowly up and down on the platform; she wiped them away quickly,
+and sat down. She was bound on a long journey. And what would be the
+end? In her frail body Beatrice had a strong soul, but to-night she
+was stricken with a painful anxiety. She said to herself that she
+cared about something too much. If the object of this journey were not
+attained she felt it would break her heart. She shut her eyes, and she
+conjured up a child whom she had loved very much and who was dead.
+
+"Come with us, Robin!" she whispered. "Come with us to your father."
+
+And the whisper was like a prayer.
+
+"Beattie!"
+
+Rosamund's voice was speaking.
+
+"We are just off."
+
+"Are we?"
+
+"Take your seats, please!" shouted a loud bass voice.
+
+There was a sound of the banging of doors.
+
+Rosamund leaned out of the window.
+
+"Good-by, Father!"
+
+The train began to move.
+
+"Good-by. _Cor meum vigilat_."
+
+Rosamund pulled down her veil quickly over her face.
+
+She was weary of rebellion. Yet she knew that deep down within her dwelt
+one who was still a rebel. She was starting on a great journey but she
+could not foresee what would happen at its end. For she no longer knew
+what she was capable of doing, and what would be too great a task for
+her poor powers. She was trying; she would try; that was all she knew.
+
+As the train pushed on through the fading light she said to herself
+again and again:
+
+"_La divina volontate! La divina volontate!_"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+A week had passed, and the Villa Hafiz had not yet opened its door to
+receive its mistress. The servants, with the exception of Sonia, had
+arrived. The Greek butler had everything in order downstairs. Above
+stairs the big, low bed was made, and there were flowers in the vases
+dotted about here and there in the blue-and-green sitting-room. Osman,
+the gardener, had trimmed the rose-bushes, had carefully cleaned the
+garden seats, and had swept straying leaves from the winding paths. The
+fountain sang its under-song above the lilies. On the highest terrace,
+beyond the climbing garden, the pavilion waited for the woman and man
+who had hidden themselves in it to go down into the darkness. But no one
+slept in the big, low bed, or sat in the blue-and-green room; the garden
+was deserted; by night no feet trod softly to the pavilion.
+
+For the first time in her life Cynthia Clarke was in the toils. She who
+loved her personal freedom almost wildly no longer felt free. She dared
+not go to Buyukderer.
+
+She looked back to that night when she had told Dion Leith the truth,
+and it stood out among all the nights of her life, more black and fatal
+than any of them, because on it she had been false to herself, had
+been weak. She had not followed up her strength in words by strength in
+action! She had allowed Dion Leith to dominate her that night, to make
+of her against her will his creature. In doing that she had taken a step
+down--a step away from the path in which hitherto she had always walked.
+And that departure from inflexible selfishness seemed strangely to have
+weakened her will.
+
+She was afraid of Dion because she felt that he was ungovernable by her,
+that her will no longer meant anything to him. He did not brace himself
+to defy it; simply, he did not bother about it. He seemed to have passed
+into a region where such a trifle as a woman's will faded away from his
+perception.
+
+His serpent had swallowed up hers.
+
+She ought to have defied him that night, to have risked a violent
+scene, to have risked everything. Instead, she had come back to the
+drawing-room, had gone out into the night with him, had even gone to
+the rooms near the Persian Khan. She had put off, had said to herself
+"To-morrow"; she had tried to believe that Dion's desperate mood would
+pass, that he needed gentle handling for the moment, and that, if
+treated with supreme tact, he would eventually be "managed" into letting
+her have her will.
+
+But now she had no illusions. Her distressed eyes saw quite clearly,
+and she knew that she had made a fatal mistake in being obedient to Dion
+that night. She felt like one at the beginning of an inclined plane that
+was slippery as ice. She had stepped upon it, and she could not step
+back. She could only go forward and downward.
+
+Dion was reckless. Appeals to reason, to chivalry, to pity, had no
+effect upon him. He only laughed at them, took them as part of her
+game of hypocrisy. In her genuine and growing fear and distress she had
+become almost horribly sincere, but he would not believe in, or heed,
+her sincerity. She knew her increasing hatred of him was matched by his
+secret detestation of her. Yes, he detested her with all that was most
+characteristic in him, with all those inherent qualities of which, do
+what he would he was unable to rid himself. And yet there was a link
+which bound them together--the link of a common degradation of body.
+She longed to smash that link which she had so carefully and sedulously
+labored to forge. But he wished to make it stronger. By her violent will
+she had turned him to perversity, and now he was actually more perverse
+than she was. She saw herself outdistanced on the course towards the
+ultimate blackness, saw herself forced to follow where he led.
+
+She dared not got to Buyukderer. She could not, she knew, keep him away
+from there. He would follow her from Constantinople, would resume his
+life of last summer, would perhaps deliberately accentuate his intimacy
+with her instead of being careful to throw over it a veil. In his hatred
+and recklessness he might be capable even of that, the last outrage
+which a man can inflict upon a woman, to whose safety and happiness
+his chivalrous secrecy is essential. His clinging to her in hatred was
+terrible to her. She began to think that perhaps he had in his mind
+abominable plans for the destruction of her happiness.
+
+One day he told her that if she went to Buyukderer he would not only
+follow her there, but he would remain there when Jimmy came out for the
+summer holidays.
+
+"Jimmy must learn to like me again," he said. "That is necessary."
+
+She shuddered when she realized the tendency of Dion's mind. Fear made
+her clairvoyant. There were moments when she seemed to look into that
+mind as into a room through an open window, to see the thoughts as
+living things going about their business. There was something appalling
+in this man's brooding desire to strike her in the heart combined with
+his determination to continue to be her lover. It affected her as she
+had never been affected before. By torturing her imagination it made
+havoc of her will-power. Her situation rendered her almost desperate,
+and she could not find an outlet from it.
+
+What was she to do? If she went to Buyukderer she felt certain there
+would be a scandal. Even if there were not, she could not now dare to
+risk having Jimmy out for his holidays. Jimmy and Dion must not meet
+again. She might travel in the summer, as Dion had suggested, but if
+she did that she would be forced to endure a solitude _a deux_ with him
+untempered by any social distractions. She could not endure that. To be
+alone with his bitterness, his misery, and his monopolizing hatred of
+her would be unbearable. And the problem of Jimmy's holidays would not
+be solved by travel. Unless she traveled to England!
+
+A gleam of hope came to her as she thought of England. Dion had fled
+from England. Would he dare to go back there, to the land which had seen
+his tragedy, and where the woman lived who had cast him out? Mrs. Clarke
+wondered, turning the thought of England over and over in her mind.
+
+The longer she thought on the matter the more convinced she became that
+she had hit upon a final test, by means of which it would be possible
+for her to ascertain Dion's exact mental condition. If he was ready
+to follow her even to England, to show himself there as her intimate
+friend, if not as her lover, than the man whom she had known in London
+was dead indeed beyond hope of resurrection.
+
+She resolved to find out what Dion's feeling about England was.
+
+Since the evening when she had told him the truth she had seen him--he
+had obliged her to see him--every day, but he had not come again to her
+flat. They had met in secret, as they had been meeting for many months.
+For the days when they had wandered about Stamboul together, when she
+had tried to play to him the part Dumeny had once played to her, were
+long ago over.
+
+On the day when the thought of England occurred to Mrs. Clarke as a
+possible place of refuge she had promised to meet Dion late in the
+evening at their rooms near the Persian Khan. She loathed going to those
+rooms. They reminded her painfully of all she had felt for Dion and felt
+no longer. They spoke to her of the secrecy of a passion that was dead.
+She was afraid of them. But she was still more afraid of seeing Dion
+in her flat. Nevertheless, now the gleam of hope which had come to her
+suddenly woke up in her something of her old recklessness. Since the
+servants had gone to the Villa Hafiz she had been living in the flat
+with Sonia, who was an excellent cook as well as a capital maid. She
+resolved to ask Dion to dinner that night, and to try her fortune once
+more with him. England must be horrible to him. Then she would go to
+England. And if he followed her there he would at least be punished for
+his persecution of her.
+
+Already she called his determination not to break their intrigue
+persecution. She had a short memory.
+
+After a talk with Sonia she summoned a messenger and sent Dion a note,
+asking him to dinner that night. He replied that he would come. His
+answer ended with the words: "We can go to the rooms later."
+
+As Mrs. Clarke read them her fingers closed on the paper viciously, and
+she said to herself:
+
+"I'll not go. I'll never go to them again."
+
+She told Sonia about the dinner. Then she dressed and went out.
+
+It was a warm and languid day. She took a carriage and told the coachman
+to drive to Stamboul--to drive on till she gave him the direction where
+to go in Stamboul. She had no special object in view. But she longed to
+be out in the air, to drive, to see people about her, the waterway,
+the forest of shipping, the domes and the minarets, the cypresses, the
+glades stretching towards Seraglio Point, the long, low hills of Asia.
+She longed, too, to hear voices, hurrying feet, the innumerable sounds
+of life. She hoped by seeing and hearing to fortify her will. The spirit
+of adventure was the spirit that held her, was the most vital part
+within her, and such a spirit needed freedom to breathe in. She was
+fettered. She had been a coward, or almost a coward, false, perhaps, to
+her fortunate star. Hitherto she had always followed Nietzsche's advice
+and had lived perilously. Was she now to be governed by fear? Even to
+keep Jimmy's respect and affection could she endure such dominion? As
+the sun touched her with his fingers of gold, and the air, full of a
+strangely languid vitality, whispered about her, as she heard the cries
+from the sea, and saw human beings, vividly egoistic, going by on their
+pilgrimage, she said to herself, "Not even for Jimmy!" The clamorous
+city, with its fierce openness and its sinister suggestions of hidden
+things, woke up in her the huntress, and, for the moment, lulled the
+mother to sleep.
+
+"Not even for Jimmy!" she thought. "I must be myself. I cannot be
+otherwise. I must live perilously. To live in any other way for me would
+be death."
+
+And the line in "The Kasidah" which Dion had pondered over came to her,
+and she thought of the "death that walks in form of life."
+
+As the carriage went upon the bridge she looked across to Stamboul, and
+was faced by the Mosque of the Valideh. So familiar to her was the sight
+of its facade, of its cupolas and minarets, that she seldom now even
+thought of it when she crossed the bridge; but to-day, perhaps because
+she was unusually strung up, was restive and almost horribly alert, she
+gazed at it and was intensely conscious of it. She had once said to Dion
+that Stamboul was the City of the Unknown God, and now suddenly she felt
+that she was nearing His altars. A strange, perverse desire to pray came
+to her; to go up into one of the mosques of this mysterious city which
+she loved, and to pray for her release from Dion Leith.
+
+She smiled faintly as this idea came into her mind. The Unknown God had
+surely made her as she was, had made her a huntress. Well, then, surely
+she had the right to pray to Him to give her a free course for her
+temperament.
+
+"Santa Sophia!" she called to the coachman.
+
+He cracked his whip and drove furiously on to Stamboul. In less than
+a quarter of an hour he pulled up his horses before the vast Church of
+Santa Sophia.
+
+Mrs. Clarke sat still in the carriage for a moment looking up at the
+ugly towering walls, covered with red and white stripes. Her face was
+haggard in the sunshine, and her pale lips were set together in a hard
+line. A beggar with twisted stumps instead of arms whined a petition to
+her, but she neither saw him nor heard him. As she stared at the walls
+on which the sun blazed she was wondering about her future. The love
+of life was desperately strong within her that day. The longing for new
+experiences tormented her physically. She felt as if she could not wait,
+could not be patient any more. If Dion to-night refused again to give
+her her freedom she must do something desperate. She must get away
+secretly and hide herself from him, take a boat to Greece or Rumania, or
+slip into the Orient express and vanish over the tracks of Europe.
+
+But first she must go into the church and pray to the Unknown God.
+
+She got out of the carriage. The beggar thrust one of his diseased
+stumps in front of her face. She turned on him with a malignant look,
+and the whining petition died on his lips. Then she made her way to
+the Porta Basilica and passed into the church. But as its great spaces
+opened out before her a thought, childishly superstitious, came to her,
+and she turned abruptly, went out, made her way to the beggar who had
+worried her, gave him a coin and said something kind to him. His almost
+soprano voice, raised in clamorous benediction, followed her as she
+returned to the church, moving slowly with horrible loose slippers
+protecting its floor from her Christian feet. She always laughed in
+her mind when she wore those slippers and thought of what she was. This
+sanctuary of the unknown God must, it seemed, be protected from her
+because she was a Christian!
+
+There were a good many people in the church, but it looked almost empty
+because of its immense size. She knew it very well, better perhaps than
+she knew any other sacred building, and she cared for it very much.
+She was fond of mosques, delighting in their airy simplicity, in their
+casual holiness which seemed to say to her, "Worship in me if you will.
+If you will not, never mind; dream in me with open eyes, or, if you
+prefer it, go to sleep in a corner of me. When you wake you can mutter a
+prayer, or not, just as you please."
+
+Santa Sophia did not, perhaps, say that, though it had now for long
+years been in use as a mosque, and always seemed to Mrs. Clarke more
+like a mosque than like a church. It was richly adorned, and something
+of Christianity still lingered within it. In it there seemed, even
+to Mrs. Clarke, to be something impelling which asked of each one who
+entered it more than mere dreams, more than those long meditations which
+are like prayers of the mind separated from the prayers of the heart
+and soul. But it possessed the air of freedom which is characteristic
+of mosques, did not seize those who entered it in a clutch of tenacious
+sanctity; but seemed to let them alone, and to influence them by just
+being wonderful, beautiful, unself-consciously sacred.
+
+At first Mrs. Clarke wandered slowly about the church, without any
+purpose other than that of gathering to herself some of its atmosphere.
+During the last few days she had been feeling really tormented. Dion had
+once said she looked punished. Now he had made her feel punished. And
+she sought a moment of peace. It could not come to her from mysticism,
+but it might come to her from great art, which suggests to its votaries
+mystery, the something beyond, untroubled and shiningly serene.
+
+Presently Mrs. Clarke felt the peace of Santa Sophia, and she felt it in
+a new way, because she had recently suffered, indeed was suffering still
+in a new way; she felt it as something desirable, which might be of
+value to her, if she were able to take it to herself and to fold it
+about her own life. Had she made a mistake in living perilously through
+many years? Her mind went to the woman who had abandoned Dion and
+entered a Sisterhood to lead a religious life. She seldom thought about
+Rosamund except in relation to Dion. She had scarcely known her, and
+since her first few interviews with Dion in this land of the cypress he
+had seldom mentioned his wife. She neither liked, nor actively disliked,
+Rosamund, whose tacit rejection of her acquaintance had not stirred in
+her any womanly hatred; for though she was a ruthless woman she was not
+venomous towards other women. She did not bother about them enough for
+that. But now she considered that other woman with whom she had shared
+Dion Leith, or rather who, not knowing it doubtless, had shared Dion
+Leith with her. And she wondered whether Rosamund, in her Sisterhood,
+was happier than she was in the world. In the Sisterhood there must
+surely be peace--monotony, drudgery, perhaps, but peace.
+
+Santa Sophia, with its vast spaces, its airy dome, its great arches and
+galleries, its walls of variegated marble, its glittering mosaics
+and columns of porphyry, to-day made her realize that in her life of
+adventure and passion she was driven, as if by a demon with a whip,
+and that her horrible situation with Dion was but the culmination of
+a series of horrible situations. She had escaped from them only after
+devastating battles, in which she had had to use all her nervous energy
+and all her force of will. Was it worth while? Was the game she was
+always playing worth the candles she was always burning? Would it not be
+wiser to seek peace and ensue it? As she drove to Santa Sophia she had
+longed fiercely to be free so that she might begin again; might again
+have adventures, might again explore the depths of human personalities,
+and satisfy her abnormal curiosities and desires. Now she was full of
+unusual hesitation. Suppose she did succeed in getting rid of Dion by
+going to England, suppose her prayer--she had not offered it up yet, but
+she was going to offer it up in a moment--to the Unknown God received a
+favorable answer, might it not be well for her future happiness if she
+retired from the passionate life, with its perpetual secrecies, and
+intrigues, and lies, and violent efforts, into the life of the ideal
+mother, solely devoted to her only child?
+
+She felt that the struggle with Dion, the horrible scenes she had had
+with him, the force of her hatred of him and his hatred of her, the
+necessity of yielding to him in hatred that which should never be given
+save with desire, had tried her as nothing else had ever tried her.
+She felt that her vitality was low, and she supposed that out of that
+lowered vitality had come her uncharacteristic desire for peace. She had
+almost envied for a moment the woman whom she had replaced in the life
+of Dion. Even now--she sighed; a great weariness possessed her. Was she
+going to be subject to a weakness which she had always despised, the
+weakness of regret?
+
+She paused beside a column not very far from the raised tribune on the
+left of the dome which is set apart for the use of the Sultan, and is
+called the Sultan's seat. Her large eyes stared at it, but at first
+she did not see it. She was looking onward upon herself. Then, in some
+distant part of the mosque, a boy's voice began to sing, loudly, almost
+fiercely. It sounded fanatical and defiant, but tremendously believing,
+proud in the faith which it proclaimed to faithful and unfaithful alike.
+It echoed about the mosque, raising a clamor which nobody seemed to
+heed; for the few ulemas who were visible continued reading the Koran
+aloud on the low railed-in platforms which they frequent; a Dervish in
+a pointed hat slept peacefully on, stretched out in a corner; before
+the prayer carpet of the Prophet, not far from the Mihrab, a half-naked
+Bedouin, with a sheep-skin slung over his bronzed shoulders, preserved
+his wild attitude of savage adoration; and here and there, in the
+distance, under the low hanging myriads of lamps, the figures of Turkish
+soldiers, of street children, of travelers, moved noiselessly to and
+fro.
+
+The voice of this boy, heedless and very powerful, indeed almost
+impudent, stirred Mrs. Clarke. It brought her back to her worship of
+force. One must worship something, and she chose force--force of will,
+of temperament, of body, of brain. Now she saw the Sultan's tribune, and
+it made her think of an opera box and of the worldly life. The boy sang
+on, catching at her mind, pulling her towards the East. The curious
+peace of any religious life was certainly not for her, yet to-day she
+felt weary of the life in her world. And she wished she could have
+in her existence peace of some kind; she wished that she were not a
+perpetual wanderer. She remembered some of those with whom from time to
+time, she had linked herself--her husband, Hadi Bey, Dumeny, Brayfield,
+Dion Leith. Now she was struggling, and so far in vain, to thrust Dion
+out of her life. If she succeeded--what then? Where was stability in her
+existence? Her love for Jimmy was the only thing that lasted, and that
+often made her afraid now. She was seized by an almost sentimental
+desire to lose herself in a love for a man that would last as her love
+for Jimmy had lasted, to know the peace of an enduring and satisfied
+desire.
+
+The voice of the boy died away. She turned in the direction of the
+Mihrab to offer up her prayer to the Unknown God, as the pious Mussulman
+turns in the direction of the Sacred City when he puts up his prayer to
+Allah.
+
+Her eyes fell upon the Bedouin.
+
+As she looked at him, this man of the desert come up into the City, with
+the fires of the dunes in his veins, the vast spaces mirrored in
+his eyes, the passion for wandering in his soul, she felt that in a
+mysterious and remote way she was akin to him, despite all her culture,
+her subtle mentality, the difference of her life from his. For she had
+her wildness of nature, dominant and unceasing, as he had his. He was
+forever traveling in body and she in mind. He sought fresh, and ever
+fresh, camping-places, and so did she. The black ashes of burnt-out
+fires marked his progress and hers. She looked at him as she uttered her
+prayer to the Unknown God.
+
+And she prayed for a master, that she might meet a man who would be able
+to dominate her, to hold her fast in the grip of his nature. At this
+moment Dion dominated her in an ugly way, and she knew it too well. But
+she needed some one whom she would willingly obey, whom she would lust
+to obey, because of love. The restlessness in her life had been caused
+by a lack; she had never yet found the man who could be not her tyrant
+for a time, but her master while she lived. Now she prayed for that, the
+only peace that she really wanted.
+
+While she prayed she was conscious always of the attitude of the
+Bedouin, which suggested the fierce yielding of one who could never be
+afraid of the God he worshiped. Nor could she be afraid. For she was
+not ashamed of what she was, though she hid what she was from motive of
+worldly prudence and for the sake of her motherhood. She believed that
+she was born into the world not in order to be severely educated, but in
+order that she might live to the uttermost, according to the dictates of
+her temperament. Now at last she knew what that temperament needed,
+what it had been seeking, why it had never been able to cease from its
+journeying. Santa Sophia had told her.
+
+Her knowledge roused in her a sort of fury of longing for release from
+Dion Leith. She saw the Bedouin riding across the sands in the freedom
+he had captured, and she ached to be free that she might seek her
+master. Somewhere there must be the one man who had the power to fasten
+the yoke on her neck.
+
+"Let me find him!" she prayed, almost angrily, and using her will.
+
+She had forgotten Jimmy. Her whole nature was concentrated in the desire
+for immediate release from Dion Leith in order that she might be free
+to pursue consciously the search which till this moment she had pursued
+unconsciously.
+
+The Bedouin did not move. His black, bird-like eyes were wide open, but
+he seemed plunged in a dream as he gazed at the Sacred Carpet. He
+was absolutely unaware of his surroundings and of Mrs. Clarke's
+consideration of him. There was something animal and something royal in
+his appearance and his supreme unconsciousness of others. He looked as
+if he were a law unto himself, even while he was adoring. How different
+he was from Dion Leith.
+
+She shut her eyes as she prayed that Dion might be removed from her
+life, somehow, anyhow, by death if need be. In the dark she created for
+herself she saw the minarets pointing to the sky as she and Dion had
+seen them together from the hill of Eyub as they sat under the giant
+cypress. Then she had wanted Dion; now she prayed:
+
+"Take him away! Let me be free from him! Let me never see him again!"
+
+And she felt as if the Unknown God were listening to her somewhere far
+off, knew all that was in her mind.
+
+A stealthy movement quite near to her made her open her eyes. The
+Bedouin had risen to his feet and was approaching her, moving with a
+little step over the matting on his way out of the church. As he passed
+Mrs. Clarke he enveloped her for a moment in an indifferent glance of
+fire. He burnt her with his animal disdain of her observation of him, a
+disdain which seemed to her impregnated with flame. She felt the sands
+as he passed. When he was gone a sensation of loneliness, even of
+desolation, oppressed her.
+
+She hesitated for a moment; then she turned and followed him slowly. He
+went before her, wrapped in his supreme indifference, through the Porta
+Basilica, and came out into the blaze of the sunshine. As she emerged,
+she saw him standing quite still. He seemed--she was just behind him--to
+be staring at a very fair woman who, accompanied by a guide, was coming
+towards the church. Mrs. Clarke, intent on the Bedouin, was aware of
+this woman's approach, but felt no sort of interest in her until she was
+quite close; then something, some dagger-thrust of the mind, coming from
+the woman, pierced Mrs. Clarke's indifference.
+
+She looked up and met the sad, pure eyes of Rosamund Leith.
+
+For a moment she stood perfectly still gazing into those eyes.
+
+Rosamund had stopped, but she made no gesture of recognition and did not
+open her lips. She only looked at Mrs. Clarke, and as she looked a deep
+flush slowly spread over her face and down to her throat.
+
+The Greek guide said something to her; she moved, lowered her eyes and
+went on into the church without looking back.
+
+The Bedouin strode slowly away into the blaze of the sunshine.
+
+Mrs. Clarke remained where she was, motionless. For the first time
+perhaps in her life she was utterly amazed by an event. Rosamund Leith
+here in Constantinople! What did that mean?
+
+Mrs. Clarke knew the arrival of Rosamund meant something that might be
+tremendously important to herself. As she stood there before the church
+she was groping to find this something; but her mental faculties seemed
+to be paralyzed, and she could not find it. Rosamund Leith's eyes had
+told Mrs. Clarke something, that Rosamund knew of Dion's unfaithfulness
+and who the woman was. What did the fact of Rosamund's coming to
+Constantinople in possession of that knowledge mean?
+
+From the minaret above her head the _muezzin_ in a piercing and nasal
+voice began the call to prayer. His cry seemed to tear its way through
+Mrs. Clarke's inertia. Abruptly she was in full possession of her
+faculties. That Eastern man up there, nearer to the blue than she was,
+cried, "Come to prayer!" But she had already uttered her prayer, and
+surely Rosamund Leith was the answer.
+
+As she drove away towards the Golden Horn she passed the Bedouin
+striding along in the sun.
+
+She looked at him, but he took no notice of her; the indifference of the
+desert was about him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+Mrs. Clarke was in her bedroom with the door open that evening when she
+heard a bell sound in the flat. She had fixed eight for the dinner hour.
+It was now only half-past six. Nevertheless she felt sure that it was
+Dion who had just rung. She went swiftly across the room and shut the
+bedroom door. Two or three minutes later Sonia came in.
+
+"Mr. Leith has come already, Madame," she said, looking straight at her
+mistress.
+
+"I expected him early, Sonia. You can tell him I will come almost
+directly."
+
+"Yes, Madame."
+
+"Sonia, wait a minute! How am I looking this evening?"
+
+"How?" said Sonia, with rather heavy emphasis.
+
+"Yes. I feel--feel as if I were looking unlike my usual self."
+
+Sonia stared hard at Mrs. Clarke. Then she said:
+
+"So you are, Madame."
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"You look almost excited and younger than usual."
+
+"Younger!"
+
+"Yes, as if you were expecting something, almost as a girl expects. I
+never saw you just like this before."
+
+Mrs. Clarke looked at herself in a mirror earnestly, and for a long
+time.
+
+"That's all, Sonia," she said, turning round. "You can tell Mr. Leith."
+
+Sonia went out.
+
+Mrs. Clarke followed her ten minutes later. When she came into the
+little hall she saw lying on a table beside Dion's hat several letters.
+She stopped by the table and looked down at them. They lay there in
+a pile held together by an elastic band, and she could only see the
+writing on the envelope which was at the top. It was addressed to Dion
+and had been through the post. She wondered whether among those letters
+there was one from Rosamund. Had she written to the husband whom she had
+cast out to tell him of the great change which had led her to give up
+the religious life, to come out to the land of the cypress?
+
+Mrs. Clarke glanced round; then she bent down noiselessly, picked up
+the packet, slipped off the elastic band and examined the letters one by
+one. She had never chanced to see Rosamund's handwriting, but she felt
+sure she would know at once if she held in her hand the letter which
+might mean her own release. She did not find it; but on two envelopes
+she saw Beatrice's delicate handwriting, which she knew very well. She
+longed to know what Beatrice had written. With a sigh she slipped the
+elastic band back into its place, put the packet down and went into the
+drawing-room.
+
+Directly she saw Dion she was certain that he knew nothing of the change
+in Rosamund's life. There was no excitement in his thin and wrinkled
+brown face; no expectation lit up his sunken eyes making them youthful.
+He looked hard, wretched and strangely old, but ruthless and forceful in
+a kind of shuttered and ravaged way. She thought of a ruined house with
+a cold strong light in the window. He was sitting when she came in,
+leaning forward, with his hands hanging down between his knees. When he
+saw her he got up slowly.
+
+"I was near here and had nothing to do, so I came early," he said, not
+apologetically, but carelessly.
+
+He looked at her and added:
+
+"What's happened to you to-day?"
+
+"Nothing. What an extraordinary question!"
+
+"Is it? You look different. There's a change."
+
+A suspicious expression made his face ugly.
+
+"Have you met any one?"
+
+"Of course. How can one go out in Constantinople without meeting
+people?"
+
+"Any one new, I meant."
+
+"No."
+
+"You look as if you had."
+
+"Do I?" she said, with indifference.
+
+"Yes. You look--I don't know----"
+
+He paused.
+
+"I think it's younger," he added. "You never are tired or ill, but you
+generally look both. To-day you don't."
+
+"Please don't blame me for looking moderately well for once in my life."
+
+"Why did you ask me to dinner here?"
+
+The sound of his voice was as suspicious as the expression on his face.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. Once in a while it doesn't matter. And all the
+servants have gone away to Buyukderer."
+
+"Then you are going there?"
+
+"I'm not sure if I shall be able to stay there for more than a few days
+if I do go."
+
+"Why not?" he said slowly.
+
+"It's just possible I may have to go over to England on business.
+Something's gone wrong with my money matters, not the money my husband
+allows me, but my own money. I had a letter from my lawyer."
+
+"When?"
+
+"To-day."
+
+He stood before her in silence.
+
+"By the way," she added, "I saw all those letters for you on the hall
+table. Why don't you read them?"
+
+"Going to England, are you?" he said, frowning.
+
+"I may have to."
+
+"Surely you must know from your lawyer's letter whether it will be
+necessary or not."
+
+"I expect it will be necessary."
+
+He turned slowly away from her and went to the window, where he stood
+for a moment, apparently looking out. She sat down on the sofa and
+glanced at the clock. How were they to get through a long evening
+together? She wished she could bring about a crisis in their relations
+abruptly. Dion turned round. He had his hands in his pockets.
+
+"I wish you'd let me look at that lawyer's letter," he said.
+
+"It wouldn't interest you."
+
+"If it's about money matters I might be able to help you. You know they
+used to be my job. Even now anything to do with investments----"
+
+"Oh, I won't bother you," she said coolly. "I always do business through
+some one I can pay."
+
+"Well, you can pay me."
+
+"No, I can't."
+
+"But I say you can."
+
+"How?" she said.
+
+And instantly she regretted having asked the question.
+
+He looked at her in silence for a minute, then he said:
+
+"By sticking always to me, by proving yourself loyal."
+
+Her mouth twitched. The intense irony in the last word made her feel
+inclined to laugh hysterically.
+
+"But you don't always behave in such a way as to make me feel loyal,"
+she said, controlling herself.
+
+"I'm going to try to be more clever with you in the future."
+
+She got up abruptly.
+
+"I didn't expect you quite so early, and I've got a letter to write to
+Jimmy--"
+
+"And a letter to your lawyer!" he interrupted.
+
+"No, that can wait till to-morrow. I must think things over. But I must
+write to Jimmy now."
+
+"Give him a kind message from me."
+
+"What will you do while I am writing?"
+
+"I'll sit here."
+
+"But do something! Why not read your letters?"
+
+"Yes, I may as well look at them. There was quite a collection waiting
+for me at the British Post Office. I haven't been there for months."
+
+"Why don't you go more regularly?"
+
+"Because I've done with the past!" he exclaimed, with sudden savagery.
+"And letters from home only rake it up."
+
+She looked at him narrowly.
+
+"But have we ever done with the past?" she said, with her eyes upon him.
+"If we think so isn't that a stupidity on our part?"
+
+"You're talking like a parson!"
+
+"Even a parson may hit upon a truth now and then."
+
+"It depends upon oneself. I say I have done with the past."
+
+"And yet you're afraid to read letters from England."
+
+"I'm not."
+
+"And you never go to England."
+
+"There's nothing to prevent me from going to England."
+
+"Except your own feelings about things."
+
+"One gets over feelings with the help of Time. I'm not such a sensitive
+fool as I used to be. Life has knocked all that sort of rot out of me."
+
+She sat down at the writing-table from which Jimmy's photograph had
+vanished.
+
+"Read your letters, or read a book," she said.
+
+And she picked up a pen.
+
+She did not look at him again, and she tried hard to detach her mind
+from him. She took a sheet of writing-paper, and began to write to
+Jimmy, but she was painfully aware of Dion's presence in the room, of
+every slightest movement that he made. She heard him sit down and move
+something on a table, then sigh; complete silence followed. She felt as
+if her whole body were flushing with irritation. Why didn't he get his
+letters? She was positive Beatrice had written to tell him that Rosamund
+had left the Sisterhood, and she was longing to know what effect that
+news would have upon him.
+
+Presently he moved again and got up, and she heard him go over to the
+window. She strove, with a bitter effort, to concentrate her thoughts on
+Jimmy, but now the Bedouin came between her and the paper; she saw him
+striding indifferently through the blaze of sunshine.
+
+"About the summer holidays this year--I am not quite sure yet what my
+plans will be----" she wrote slowly.
+
+Dion was moving again. He came away from the window, crossed the room
+behind her, and opened the door. He was going to fetch his letters. She
+wrote hurriedly on. He went out into the little hall and returned.
+
+"I'm going to have a look at my letters," he said, behind her.
+
+She glanced round.
+
+"What did you say? Oh--your letters."
+
+"They look pretty old," he said, turning them over.
+
+She saw Beatrice's handwriting.
+
+"Here's one from Beatrice Daventry," he added, in a hard voice.
+
+"Does she often write to you?"
+
+"She hasn't written for a long time."
+
+He thrust a finger under the envelope. Mrs. Clarke turned and again bent
+over her letter to Jimmy.
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Dinner is ready, Madame!"
+
+Mrs. Clarke looked up from the writing-table at Sonia standing squarely
+in the doorway, then at the clock.
+
+"Dinner! But it's only a quarter-past seven."
+
+"I thought you ordered it for a quarter-past seven, Madame," replied
+Sonia, with quiet firmness.
+
+"Oh, did I? I'd forgotten."
+
+She pushed away the writing-paper and got up.
+
+"D'you mind dining so early?" she asked Dion, looking at him for the
+first time since he had read his letters.
+
+"No," he replied, in a voice which had no color at all. His face was set
+like a mask.
+
+"Do you want to wash your hands? If so, Sonia will bring you some hot
+water to the spare room."
+
+"Thanks, I'll go; but I prefer cold water."
+
+He went out of the room carrying the opened letters with him. After a
+moment Sonia came back.
+
+"I hope I didn't do wrong about dinner, Madame," she said. "I thought as
+Monsieur Leith came so early Madame would wish dinner earlier."
+
+Mrs. Clarke put her hand on her servant's substantial arm.
+
+"You always understand things, Sonia," she said. "I'm tired. I mean to
+go to bed very early to-night."
+
+"But will he----?"
+
+She raised her heavy eyebrows.
+
+"I must rest to-night," said Mrs. Clarke. "I must, I must."
+
+"Let me tell him, then, if he--"
+
+"No, no."
+
+Mrs. Clarke put one hand to her lips. She heard Dion in the hall. When
+he came in she saw at once that he had been dashing cold water on his
+face. His eyes fell before hers. She could not divine what he had found
+in his letters or what was passing in his mind.
+
+"Come to dinner," she said.
+
+And they went at once to the dining-room.
+
+During the meal they talked because Mrs. Clarke exerted herself. She was
+helped, perhaps, by her concealed excitement. She had never before felt
+so excited, so almost feverishly alert in body and mind as she felt that
+night, except at the climax of her divorce case. And she was waiting now
+for condemnation or acquittal as she had waited then. It was horrible.
+She was painfully conscious of a desperate strength in Dion. It was as
+if he had grown abruptly, and she had as abruptly diminished. His savage
+assertion about the past had impressed her disagreeably. It might be
+true. He might really have succeeded in slaying his love for his wife.
+If so, what chance had the woman who had taken him of regaining her
+freedom of action. She was afraid to play her last card.
+
+When dinner was over Dion said:
+
+"Shall we be off?"
+
+She did not ask where they were going; she had no need to ask. After a
+moment's hesitation she said:
+
+"Not just yet. Come into the drawing-room. You can smoke, and if you
+like I'll play you something."
+
+"All right."
+
+They went into the drawing-room. It was dimly lighted. Blinds and
+curtains were drawn. Dion sank down heavily in a chair.
+
+"The cigarettes are there!"
+
+"Yes, I see. Thanks."
+
+A strange preoccupation seemed to be descending upon him and to be
+covering him up. Sonia came in with coffee. Dion put his cup, full, down
+beside him on a table. He did not sip the coffee, nor did he light a
+cigarette. While Mrs. Clarke was drinking her coffee he sat without
+uttering a word.
+
+She went to the piano. She played really well. Otherwise she would not
+have played to him, or to any one. She was specially at home in the
+music of Chopin, and had studied minutely many of the "Etudes." Now
+she began to play the Etude in E flat. As she played she felt that
+the intense nervous irritation which had possessed her was diminishing
+slightly, was becoming more bearable. She played several of the Etudes,
+and presently began the one in Thirds and Sixths which she had once
+found abominably difficult. She remembered what a struggle she had had
+with it before she had conquered it. She had been quite a girl then,
+but already she had been a worshipper of will-power, and had resolved to
+cultivate and to increase her own will. And she had used this Etude as
+a means of testing herself. Over and over again, when she had almost
+despaired of ever overcoming its difficulties, she had said to herself,
+"Vouloir c'est pouvoir;" and at last she had succeeded in playing the
+excessively difficult music as if it were quite easy to her. That had
+been the first stepping upwards towards power.
+
+She remembered that now and she set her teeth. "Vouloir c'est pouvoir."
+She had proved the saying true again and again; she must prove it true
+to-night. She willed her release; she would somehow obtain it.
+
+Directly she finished the Etude she got up from the piano.
+
+"You play that wonderfully well," Dion said, with a sort of hard
+recognition of her merit, but with no enthusiasm. "Do you know that
+there's something damnably competent in you?"
+
+She stood looking down on him.
+
+"I'm very glad there is. I don't care to bungle what I undertake."
+
+"I believe I knew that the first time I saw you, standing by Echo. You
+held my hand that day. Do you remember?"
+
+He laughed faintly.
+
+"No, I don't remember."
+
+"The hand of Stamboul was upon me then. By God, we are under the yoke.
+It was fated then that you should destroy me."
+
+"Destroy you?"
+
+"Yes. What's the good of what lies between us? You've destroyed me.
+That's why you want to get rid of me. Your instinct tells you the work
+is done, and you're right. But you must stick to the wreckage. After
+all, it's your wreckage."
+
+"No. A man can only destroy himself," she said, with cold defiance.
+
+"Don't let's argue about it. The thing's done--done!"
+
+In his voice there was a sound of almost wild despair, but his face
+preserved its hard, mask-like look.
+
+"And there's no returning from destruction," he added. "Those who try to
+fancy there is are just fools."
+
+He looked up at her as she stood before him, and seemed suddenly struck
+by the expression on her face.
+
+"Who's to be the one to destroy you?" he said. "D'you think the Unknown
+God has singled me out for the job? Or do you really expect to escape
+scot-free after making the sign of the cross over so many lost souls."
+
+"The sign of the cross?"
+
+"Yes. Don't you remember when I told you of Brayfield's death? You've
+never given him a thought since, I suppose. But I'll make you keep on
+thinking about me."
+
+"What has happened to-night?" she asked sharply.
+
+"Happened?"
+
+"To make you talk like this?"
+
+"Nothing has happened."
+
+"That's not true. Since you came into the house you've quite changed."
+
+"Merely because I've been reckoning things up, taking stock of the
+amount of damage that's been done. It'll have to be paid for, I suppose.
+Everything's paid for in the end, isn't it? When are you going to
+England?"
+
+"I didn't say it was absolutely decided."
+
+"No; but it is. I want to know the date, so that I may pack up to
+accompany you. It will be jolly to see Jimmy again. I shall run down to
+Eton and take him out."
+
+"I am not going to allow you to do me any harm. Because lately I've
+given in to you sometimes, you mustn't think you can make a slave of
+me."
+
+"And you mustn't think you'll get rid of me in one way if you can't in
+another. This English project is nothing but an attempt to give me the
+slip. You thought I couldn't face England, so you chose England as the
+place you would travel to. You've never had a letter from your lawyer,
+and there's no reason why you should go to England on business. But I
+can face England. I've never done anything _there_ that I'm ashamed of.
+My record there is a clean one."
+
+Suddenly he thrust his hand into his jacket and pulled out the letters
+he had brought from the British Post Office.
+
+"And apart from that, you made a mistake in reckoning on my
+sensitiveness."
+
+"Honestly, I don't know what you mean by that," she said, with frigid
+calm.
+
+"Yes, you do. You thought I wouldn't follow you to England because I
+should shrink from facing my mother, perhaps, and my wife's relatives,
+and all the people who know what I've done. I don't shrink from meeting
+any one, and I'll prove it to you."
+
+He pulled a letter out of its envelope.
+
+"This is from Beatrice Daventry. In it she tells me a piece of news."
+(He glanced quickly over the sheets.) "My wife has got tired of leading
+a religious life and has left the Sisterhood in which she was, and gone
+to live in London. Here it is: 'Rosamund is living once more in Great
+Cumberland Place with my guardian. She never goes into society, but
+otherwise she is leading an ordinary life. I am quite sure she will
+never go back to Liverpool.'--So if I go to London I may run across my
+wife any day. Why not?"
+
+"You wife has left the Sisterhood!" said Mrs. Clarke slowly, forcing a
+sound of surprise into her husky voice.
+
+"I've just told you so. You and I may meet her in London. If we do, I
+should think she'll be hard put to it to recognize me. Now put on your
+things and we'll be off."
+
+"I shall not go out to-night. I intend----"
+
+She paused.
+
+"What do you intend?"
+
+"I don't mean ever to go to those rooms again."
+
+"Indeed. Why not?" he asked, with cold irony.
+
+"I loathe them."
+
+"You found them. You chose the furniture for them. Your perfect taste
+made them what they are."
+
+"I tell you I loathe them!" she repeated violently.
+
+"We'll change them, then. We can easily find some others that will do
+just as well."
+
+"Don't you understand that I loathe them because I meet you in them?"
+
+"I understood that a good while ago."
+
+"And yet you--"
+
+"My dear!" he interrupted her. "Didn't I tell you you had destroyed me?
+The man I was might have bothered about trifles of that kind, the man I
+am simply doesn't recognize them. Jimmy hates me too, but I haven't done
+with Jimmy yet, nevertheless."
+
+"You shall never meet Jimmy again. I shall prevent it."
+
+"How can you?"
+
+"You're not fit to be with him."
+
+"But you have molded me into what I am. He must get accustomed to his
+own mother's handiwork."
+
+"Jimmy can't bear you. He told me so when he was last here. He detests
+you."
+
+"Ah!" said Dion, with sudden savagery, springing up from his chair. "So
+you and he have talked me over! I was sure of it. And no doubt you told
+Jimmy he was right in hating me."
+
+"I never discussed the matter with him at all. I couldn't prevent his
+telling me what he felt about you."
+
+Dion had become very pale. He stood for a moment without speaking,
+clenching his hands and looking at her with blazing eyes. For a moment
+she thought that perhaps he was going to strike her. He seemed to be
+struggling desperately with himself, to be striving to conquer something
+within him. At last he turned away from her. She heard him twice mutter
+the name of her boy, "Jimmy! Jimmy!" Then he went away from her to the
+far end of the room, where the piano was, and stood by it. She saw his
+broad shoulders heaving. He held on to the edge of the piano with both
+hands, leaning forward. She stayed where she was, staring at him. She
+realized that to-night he might be dangerous to her. She had set out to
+defy him. But she was not sure now whether, perhaps, gentleness and an
+air of great sincerity might not be the only effective weapons against
+him in his present abnormal condition. Possibly even now it was not too
+late to use them. She crossed the room and came to him swiftly.
+
+"Dion!" she said.
+
+He did not move.
+
+"Dion!" she repeated, putting her hand on his shoulder.
+
+He turned round. His pale face was distorted. She scarcely recognized
+him.
+
+"Dion, let us look things in the face."
+
+"Oh, God--that is what I'm doing," he said.
+
+His lips twisted, his face was convulsed. She looked at him in silence,
+wondering what was going to happen. For a moment she was almost
+physically afraid. Something in him to-night struck hard upon her
+imagination and she felt as if it were trembling.
+
+"Come and sit down," he said, at last.
+
+And she saw that for the moment he had succeeded in regaining
+self-control.
+
+"Very well."
+
+She went to sit down; he sat opposite her.
+
+"You hate me, don't you?" he said.
+
+She hesitated.
+
+"Don't you?" he repeated.
+
+"We needn't use ugly words," she said at last.
+
+"For ugly things? I believe it's best. You hate me and I hate you. D'you
+know why I hate you? Not because you deliberately made me care for
+you with my body, in the beastly, wholly physical way, but because you
+wouldn't let the other thing alone."
+
+"The other thing?"
+
+"Haven't we got something else as well as the body? Look here--before
+I ever knew you I was always trying to build. At first I tried to build
+for a possible future which might never come. Well, it did come, and I
+was glad I'd stuck to my building--sometimes when it was difficult. Then
+I tried to build for--for my wife--and then my child came and I tried to
+build for him, too. So it went on. I was always building, or trying to.
+In South Africa I was doing it, and I came back feeling as if I'd got
+something to show, not much, but something, for my work. Then the crash
+came, and I thought I knew sorrow and horror down to the bones. But I
+didn't. I've only got to know them to the bones here. You've made
+me know them. If you'd loved me I should never have complained, have
+attacked you, been brutal to you; but when I think that you've never
+cared a rap about me, never cared for anything but my body, and
+that--that----" his voice broke for a moment; then he recovered himself
+and went on, more harshly,--"and that merely from desire, or whatever
+you choose to call it, you've sent the last stones of my building to
+dust, I sometimes feel as if I could murder you. If you meant to kick
+me out and be free of me when you had had enough of me, you should
+never have brought Jimmy into the matter; for in a way you could never
+understand Jimmy was linked up with my boy, with Robin. When you made
+me earn Jimmy's hatred by being utterly false to all I really was, you
+separated me from my boy. I killed him, but till then I was
+sometimes near him. Ever since that night of lying and dirty pretense
+he's--he's--I've lost him. You've taken my boy from me. Why should I
+leave you yours?"
+
+"But you're mad--when my boy's alive and--"
+
+"And so's mine!"
+
+She stared at him in silence.
+
+"You can't give him back to me. Jimmy shrinks from me not because of
+what I've done, but because of what I've become, and my boy feels as
+Jimmy does. He--he----"
+
+Mrs. Clarke pushed back her chair bruskly. She was now feeling really
+afraid. She longed to call in Sonia. She wished the other servants were
+in the flat instead of at Buyukderer.
+
+"You boy's dead," she said, dully, obstinately. "Jimmy has nothing to do
+with him--never had anything to do with him. And as for me, I have never
+interfered between you and your child."
+
+She got up. So did he.
+
+"Never, never!" she repeated. "But your mind is warped and you don't
+know what you're saying."
+
+"I do. But we won't argue about it. You're a materialist and you can't
+understand the real things."
+
+His own words seemed suddenly to strike upon him like a great blow.
+
+"The real things!" he exclaimed. "I've lost them all for ever. But I'll
+keep what I've got. I'll keep what I've got. You hate me and I hate you,
+but we belong to each other and we'll stick together, and Jimmy must
+make up his mind to it. Once you said that if he was twenty-one you'd
+tell him all about it. If you're going to England I'll go there too, and
+we can enlighten Jimmy a little sooner. Now let us be off to the rooms.
+As you've taken a dislike to them we'll give them up. But we must pay a
+last visit to them, a visit of good-bye."
+
+She shuddered. The thought of being shut up alone with him horrified her
+imagination. She waited a moment; then she said:
+
+"Very well. I'll go and put on my things."
+
+And she went out of the room. She wanted to gain time, to be alone for a
+moment.
+
+When she was in her bedroom she did not summon Sonia, who was in
+the kitchen washing up. Slowly she went to get out a wrap and a hat.
+Standing before the glass she adjusted the hat on her head carefully,
+adroitly; then she drew the wrap around her shoulders and picked up a
+pair of long gloves. After an instant of hesitation she began to pull
+them on. The process took several minutes. She was careful to smooth out
+every wrinkle. While she did so she was thinking of Rosamund Leith.
+
+All through the evening she had been on the verge of telling Dion that
+his wife was in Constantinople, but something had held her back. And
+even now she could not make up her mind whether to tell him or not. She
+was afraid to risk the revelation because she did not know at all how he
+would take it. When he knew she might be free. There was the possibility
+of that. He must realize, he would surely be obliged to realize, that
+his wife could have but one purpose in deliberately traveling out to
+the place where he was living. She must be seeking a reconciliation, in
+spite of the knowledge which Mrs. Clarke had read in her eyes that day.
+But would Dion face those eyes with the hard defiance of one irreparably
+aloof from his former life? If he were really ready and determined to
+show himself in London as the lover of another woman would he not be
+ready to do the same thing here in Constantinople?
+
+To tell him seemed to Mrs. Clarke the one chance of escape for her now,
+but she was afraid to tell him because she was afraid to know that what
+seemed the only possible avenue to freedom was barred against her. She
+had said to herself at the piano "Vouloir c'est pouvoir," and she had
+determined to be free, but again Dion's will of a desperate man had
+towered up over hers. It was the fact that he was desperate which gave
+to him this power.
+
+At last the gloves lay absolutely smooth on her hands and arms, and she
+went back to the drawing-room. Till she opened the door of it she did
+not know what she was going to do.
+
+"So you're dressed!" Dion said as she came in. "That's right. Let's be
+off."
+
+"What is the good of going? You have said we hate each other. How can
+this sort of thing go on in hatred? Dion, let us give it all up."
+
+"Why have you put on your things?"
+
+"I don't know. Let us say good-by to-night, and not in anger. We were
+not suited to be together for long. We are too different."
+
+"How many men have you said all this to already? Come along!"
+
+He took her firmly by the wrist.
+
+"Wait, Dion!"
+
+"Why should we wait?"
+
+"There's something I must tell you before we go."
+
+He kept his hand on her wrist.
+
+"Well? What is it?"
+
+"I went to Santa Sophia to-day."
+
+As she spoke the Bedouin came before her again. She saw his
+bronze-colored arms and his bird-like eyes.
+
+"Santa Sophia! Did you go to pray?"
+
+She stared at him. His lips were curled in a smile.
+
+"No," she said. "But I like to go there sometimes. As I was coming away
+I met some one."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Some one you know--a woman."
+
+"A woman? Lady Ingleton?"
+
+"No; your wife."
+
+The fingers which held her wrist became suddenly cold, but they still
+pressed firmly upon her flesh.
+
+"That's a lie!" he said hoarsely.
+
+"It isn't!"
+
+"How dare you tell me such a lie?"
+
+He bent and gazed into her eyes.
+
+"Liar! Liar!"
+
+But though his lips made the assertion, his eyes, in agony, seemed to be
+asking a question. He seized her other wrist.
+
+"What's your object in telling me such a lie? What are you trying to
+gain by it? Do you think you'll get rid of me for to-night, and that
+to-morrow, by some trick, you'll escape from me forever? D'you think
+that?"
+
+"I met your wife to-day just outside Santa Sophia," she said steadily.
+"When she saw me she stopped. We looked at each other for a minute.
+Neither of us spoke a word. But she told me something."
+
+"Told you . . . ?"
+
+"With her eyes. She knows about you and me."
+
+His hands fell from her wrists. By the look in his eyes she saw that he
+was beginning to believe her.
+
+"She knows," Mrs. Clarke repeated. "And yet she had come here. What does
+that mean?"
+
+"What does that mean?" he repeated, in a muttering voice.
+
+"Do you believe what I say?"
+
+"Yes; she is here."
+
+A fierce wave of red went over his face. For a moment his eyes shone.
+Then a look of despair and horror made him frightful, and stirred even
+in her a sensation of pity.
+
+He began to tremble.
+
+"Don't! Don't!" she said, putting out her hands and moving away.
+
+"She can't know!" he said, trembling more violently.
+
+"She does know."
+
+"She wouldn't have come. She doesn't know. She doesn't know."
+
+"She does know. Now I'm ready, if you want to go to the rooms."
+
+Dion went white to the lips. He came towards her. His eyes were so
+menacing that she felt sure he was going to do her some dreadful injury;
+but when he was close to her he controlled himself and stood still. For
+what seemed to her a very long time he stood there, looking at her as a
+man looks at the heap of his sins when the sword has cloven a way into
+the depths of his spirit. Then he said:
+
+"You're free."
+
+He went out of the room, leaving the door open. A moment later Mrs.
+Clarke heard the front door shut, and his footsteps on the stone stairs
+outside. They died away.
+
+Then she began to sob. She felt shaken and frightened almost like a
+child. But presently her sobs ceased. She took off her hat and wrap and
+her gloves, lay down on the sofa, put her hands behind her small head,
+and, motionless, gazed at the pale gray wall of the room. It seemed to
+fade away after she had gazed at it for two or three minutes; a world
+opened out before her, and she saw a barrier, like a long deep trench,
+stretching into a far distance. On one side of this trench stood a boy
+with densely thick hair and large hands and frank, observant eyes; on
+the other stood a Bedouin of the desert.
+
+Then she shuddered. Dion had told her she was free. But was she free?
+Could she ever be free now?
+
+Suddenly she broke into a passion of tears. She was inundated with
+self-pity. She had prayed to the Unknown God. He had answered her
+prayer, but nevertheless, he had surely cursed her. For love and lust
+were at merciless war within her. She was tormented.
+
+That night she knew she had run up a debt which she would be forced to
+pay; she knew that her punishment was beginning.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+When Dion came out into the street he stood still on the pavement. It
+was between ten and eleven o'clock. Stamboul, the mysterious city, was
+plunged in darkness, but Pera was lit and astir, was full of blatant
+and furtive activities. He listened to its voices as he stood under the
+stars, and presently from them the voice of a woman detached itself, and
+said clearly and with a sort of beautifully wondering slowness, "I can
+see the Pleiades."
+
+Tears started into his eyes. He was afraid of that voice and yet his
+whole being longed desperately to hear it again. The knowledge that
+Rosamund was here in Constantinople, very near to him--how it had
+changed the whole city for him! Every light that gleamed, every sound
+that rose up, seemed to hold for him a terrible vital meaning. And he
+knew that all the time he had been living in Constantinople it had been
+to him a horrible city of roaring emptiness, and he knew that now, in a
+moment, it had become the true center of the world. He was amazed and he
+was horrified by the power and intensity of the love within him. In this
+moment he knew it for an undying thing. Nothing could kill it, no act
+of Rosamund's, no act of his. Even lust had not suffocated the purity
+of it, even satiety of the flesh had not lessened the yearning of it, or
+availed to deprive it of its ardent simplicity, of its ideal character.
+In it there was still the child with his wonder, the boy with his
+stirring aspirations towards life, the man with his full-grown passion.
+He had sought to kill it and he had not even touched it. He knew that
+now and was shaken by the knowledge. Where did it dwell then, this thing
+that governed him and that he could not break? He longed to get at it,
+to seize it, hold it to some fierce light, examine it. And then? Would
+he wish to cast it away?
+
+"I can see the Pleiades."
+
+For a moment the peace of Olympia was about him, and he heard the
+voices of Eternity whispering among the pine trees. Then the irreparable
+blotted out that green beauty, that message from the beyond; reality
+rushed upon him. He turned and looked at the building he had just left.
+It towered above him, white, bare, with its rows of windows. He knew
+that he would never go into it again, that he had done forever with the
+woman in there who hated him. Yes, he had done with her insomuch as a
+man can finish with any one who has been closely, intimately, for good
+or for evil, in his life. As he watched her windows for a moment his
+mind reviewed swiftly his connection with her, from the moment when she
+had held his hand indifferently, yet with intention, in Mrs. Chetwinde's
+drawing-room, till the moment, just past, when he had said to her, "You
+are free." And he knew that from the first moment when she had seen him
+she had made up her mind that some day he should be her lover. He hated
+her, and yet he knew now that in some strange and obscure way he almost
+respected her, for her determination, her unscrupulous courage, her will
+to live as she chose to live. She at any rate possessed a kind of evil
+strength. And he----?
+
+Slowly he turned away from that house. He did not know where Rosamund
+was staying, but he thought she was probably at the Hotel de Byzance,
+and he walked almost mechanically towards it. He was burning with
+excitement, and yet there was within him something cold, capable and
+relentless, which considered him almost as a judge considers a
+criminal, which seemed to be probing into the rotten part of his nature,
+determined to know once and for all just how rotten it was. Rosamund
+surely was strong in her goodness as Mrs. Clarke was strong in her
+evil. He had known the cruelty of both those strengths. And why? Surely
+because he himself had never been really strong. Intensity of feeling
+had constantly betrayed him into weakness. And even now was it not
+weakness in him, this inability to leave off loving Rosamund after all
+that had happened? Perhaps the power of feeling intensely was the great
+betrayer of a man.
+
+He descended the Grande Rue, moving in the midst of a press of humanity,
+but strongly conscious only of Rosamund's nearness to him, until at last
+he was in front of the Hotel de Byzance. He stood on the opposite side
+of the way, looking at the lighted windows, at the doorway through which
+people came and went. Was she in there, close to him? Why had she come
+to Constantinople?
+
+She must have come there because of him. There could not surely be any
+other reason for her traveling so far to the city where she knew he was
+living. But then she must have repented of her cruelty after the death
+of Robin, have thought seriously of resuming her married life. It must
+be so. Inexorably Dion's reason led him to that conclusion. Having
+reached it he looked at himself, and again his own weakness confronted
+him like a specter which would not leave him, which dogged him
+relentlessly down all the ways of his life. Prompted, governed by that
+weakness, which he had actually mistaken madly for strength, for an
+assertion of his manhood, he had raised up between Rosamund and himself
+perhaps the only barrier which could never be broken down, the barrier
+of a great betrayal. What she had most cared for in him he had trampled
+into the dirt; he had slain the purity which had drawn her to him.
+
+Mrs. Clarke had said that Rosamund knew of their connexion. He believed
+her. He could not help trusting her horrible capacity to read such a
+truth in another woman's eyes. It must be so. Rosamund surely could only
+have learned in Constantinople the horrible truth which would forever
+divide them. She must have traveled out with the intention of seeing him
+again, of telling him that she repented of what she had done, and then
+in the city which had seen his degradation she must have found out what
+he was.
+
+He saw her outraged, bitterly ashamed of having made the long journey to
+seek a man who had betrayed her; he saw her wounded in the soul. She had
+wounded him in the soul, but at this moment he scarcely thought of that.
+The knowledge that she was near to him seemed to have suddenly renewed
+the pure springs of his youth. When Cynthia Clarke had said, "Now I'm
+ready if you want to go to the rooms," she had received her freedom from
+the Dion who had won Rosamund, not from the withered and embittered man
+upon whom she had perversely seized in his misery and desolation.
+
+That Rosamund should travel to him and then know him for what he was!
+All his intense bitterness against her was swept away by the flood of
+his hatred of himself.
+
+Suddenly the lights of the city seemed to fade before his eyes and the
+voices of the city seemed to lose their chattering gaiety. Darkness
+and horrible mutterings were about him. He heard the last door closing
+against him. He accounted himself from henceforth among the damned.
+Lifting his head he stared for a moment at the Hotel de Byzance. Now he
+felt sure that she was there. He knew that she was there, and he bade
+her an eternal farewell. Not she--as for so long he had thought--but he
+had broken their marriage. She had sinned in the soul. But to-night
+he did not see her sin. He saw only his black sin of the body, the
+irreparable sin he had committed against her shining purity to which he
+had been united.
+
+How could he have committed that sin?
+
+He turned away from the hotel, and went down towards his lodgings in
+Galata; he felt as he walked, like one treading a descent which led down
+into eternal darkness.
+
+How had he come to do what he had done?
+
+Already he saw Cynthia Clarke as something far away, an almost
+meaningless phantom. He wondered why he had felt power in her; he
+wondered what it was that had led him to her, had kept him beside
+her, had bound him to her. She was nothing. She had never really been
+anything to him. And yet she had ruined his life. He saw her pale and
+haggard face, her haunted cheeks and temples, the lovely shape of her
+head with its cloud of unshining hair, her small tenacious hands. He saw
+her distinctly. But she was far away, utterly remote from him. She had
+meant nothing to him, and yet she had ruined him. Let her go. Her work
+was done.
+
+It was near midnight when he went at last to his lodgings, which were in
+a high house not far from the Tophane landing. From his windows he could
+see the Golden Horn, and the minarets and domes of Stamboul. His two
+rooms, though clean, were shabbily furnished and unattractive. He had a
+Greek servant who came in every day to do what was necessary. He never
+received any visitors in these rooms, which he had taken when he gave up
+going into the society of the diplomats and others, to whom he had been
+introduced at Buyukderer.
+
+His feet echoed on the dirty staircase so he mounted slowly up till he
+stood in front of his own door. Slowly, like one making an effort that
+was almost painful to him he searched for his key and drew it out. His
+hand shook as he inserted the key into the keyhole. He tried to steady
+his hand, but he could not control its furtive and perpetual movement.
+When the door was open he struck a match, and lit a candle that stood on
+a chair in the dingy and narrow lobby. Then he turned round wearily
+to shut the door. He was possessed by a great fatigue, and wondered
+whether, if he fell on his bed in the blackness, he would be able to
+sleep. As he turned, he saw, lying on the matting at his feet, a square
+white envelope. It was lying upside down. Some one must have pushed it
+under the door while he was out.
+
+He stood looking at it for a minute. Then he shut the door, bent down,
+picked up the envelope, turned it over and held it near the candle
+flame. He read his name and the handwriting was Rosamund's.
+
+After a long pause he took the candle and carried the letter into his
+sitting-room. He set the candle down on the table on which lay "The
+Kasidah" and a few other books, laid the letter beside it, with
+trembling hands drew up a chair and sat down.
+
+Rosamund had written to him. When? Before she had learnt the truth or
+afterwards?
+
+For a long time he sat there, leaning over the table, staring at the
+address which her hand had written. And he saw her hand, so different
+from Mrs. Clarke's, and he remembered its touch upon his, absolutely
+unlike the touch of any other hand ever felt by him. Something quivered
+in his flesh. The agony of the body rushed upon him and mingled with
+the agony of the soul. He bent down, laid his hot forehead against the
+letter, and shut his eyes.
+
+A clock struck presently. He opened his eyes, lifted his head, took up
+the envelope, quickly tore it, and unfolded the paper within.
+
+
+"HOTEL DE BYZANCE, CONSTANTINOPLE, Wednesday evening
+
+"I am here. I want to see you. Shall I come to you to-morrow? I can come
+at any time, or I can meet you at any place you choose. Only tell me the
+hour and how to go if it is difficult.
+
+"ROSAMUND."
+
+
+Wednesday evening! It was now the night of Wednesday. Then Rosamund
+had written to him after she had been to Santa Sophia and had met Mrs.
+Clarke. She knew, and yet she wrote to him; she asked to see him; she
+even offered to come to his rooms. The thing was incomprehensible.
+
+He read the note again. He pored over every word in it almost like a
+child. Then he held it in his hand, sat back in his chair and wondered.
+
+What did Rosamund mean? Why did she wish to see him? What could she
+intend to do? His intimate knowledge of what Rosamund was companioned
+him at this moment--that knowledge which no separation, which no hatred
+even, could ever destroy. She was fastidiously pure. She could never be
+anything else. He could not conceive of her ever drawing near to, and
+associating herself deliberately with, bodily degradation. He thought of
+her as he had known her, with her relations, her friends, with himself,
+with Robin. Always in every relation of life a radiant purity had been
+about her like an atmosphere; always she had walked in rays of the sun.
+Until Robin had died! And then she had withdrawn into the austere purity
+of the religious life. He felt it to be absolutely impossible that she
+should seek him, even seek but one interview with him, if she knew what
+his life had been during the last few months. And, feeling that, he was
+now forced to the conclusion that Mrs. Clarke's intuition had gone for
+once astray. If Rosamund knew she would never have written that note.
+Again he looked at it, read it. It must have been written in complete
+ignorance. Mrs. Clarke had made a mistake. Perhaps she had been betrayed
+into error by her own knowledge of guilt. And yet such a lapse was
+very uncharacteristic of her. He compared his knowledge of her with his
+knowledge of Rosamund. It was absolutely impossible that Rosamund had
+written that letter to him with full understanding of his situation in
+Constantinople. But she might have heard rumors. She might have resolved
+to clear them up. Having traveled out with the intention of seeking
+a reconciliation she might have thought it due to him to accept
+evil tidings of him only from his own lips. Always, he knew, she had
+absolutely trusted in his loyalty and faithfulness to her. Perhaps then,
+even though she had put him out of her life, she was unable to believe
+that he had tried to forget her in unfaithfulness. Perhaps that was the
+true explanation of her conduct.
+
+Could he then save himself from destruction by a great lie?
+
+He sat pondering that problem, oblivious of time. Could he lie to
+Rosamund? All his long bitterness against her for the moment was gone,
+driven out by his self-condemnation. A great love must forgive. It
+cannot help itself. It carries within it, as a child is carried in the
+womb, the sweet burden of divinity, and shares in the attributes of
+God. So it was with Dion on that night as he sat in his dingy room. And
+presently his soul rejected the lie he had abominably thought of. He
+knew he could not tell Rosamund a life. Then what was he to do?
+
+He drew out of a drawer a piece of letter paper, dipped a pen in ink.
+He had a mind to write the horrible truth which he could surely never
+speak.
+
+"I have received your letter," he wrote, in a blurred and unsteady
+handwriting. Then he stopped. He stared at the paper, pushed it away
+from him, and got up. He could not write the truth. He went to the
+window and looked out into the dark night. Here and there he saw faint
+lights. But Stamboul was almost hidden in the gloom, a city rather
+suggested by its shadow than actually visible. The Golden Horn was a
+tangled mystery. There were some withdrawn stars.
+
+Should he not reply to Rosamund's letter? If she had heard rumors about
+his life would not his silence convey to her the fact that they were
+true? He had perhaps only to do nothing and Rosamund would understand
+and--would leave Constantinople.
+
+The blackness which shrouded Stamboul suddenly seemed to him to become
+more solid, impregnable. He felt that his own life would be drowned in
+blackness if Rosamund went away. And abruptly he knew that he must see
+her. Whatever the cost, whatever the shame and bitterness, he must see
+her at once. He would tell her, or try to tell her, what he had been
+through, what he had suffered, why he had done what he had done.
+Possibly she would be able to understand. If only he could find the
+words that would give her the inner truth perhaps they might reach
+her heart. Something intense told him that he must try to make her
+understand how he had loved her, through all his hideous attempts to
+slay his love of her. Could a woman understand such a thing? Desperately
+he wondered. Might not his terrible sincerity perhaps overwhelm her
+doubts?
+
+He left the window, sat down again at the table, and wrote quickly.
+
+
+"I have your letter. Will you meet me to-morrow at Eyub, in the cemetery
+on the hill? I will be near the Tekkeh of the dancing Dervishes. I will
+be there before noon, and will wait all day.
+
+"DION"
+
+
+When he began to write he knew that he could not make his confession to
+Rosamund within the four walls of his sordid and dingy room. Her power
+to understand would surely be taken from her there. Might it not be
+released under the sky of morning, within sight of those minarets which
+he had sometimes feared, but which he had always secretly, in some
+obscure way, loved even in the most abominable moments of his abominable
+life, as he had always secretly, beneath all the hard bitterness of his
+stricken heart, loved Rosamund? From them came the voice which would not
+be gainsaid, the voice which whispered, "In the East thou shalt find me
+if thou hast not found me in the West." Might not that voice help him
+when he spoke to Rosamund, help her to understand him, help her perhaps
+even to----
+
+But there he stopped. He dared not contemplate the possibility of her
+being able to accept the man he had become as her companion. And yet now
+he felt himself somehow closely akin to the former Dion, flesh of that
+man's flesh, bone of his bone. It was as if his sin fell from him when
+he so utterly repented of it.
+
+Slowly he put the note he had written into an envelope, sealed it and
+wrote the address--"Mrs. Dion Leith, Hotel de Byzance." He blotted it.
+Then he fetched his hat and stick. He meant to take the note himself to
+the Hotel de Byzance. The night might be made for sleep, but he knew he
+could not sleep till he had seen Rosamund. When he was out in the air,
+and was walking uphill towards Pera, he realized that within him, in
+spite of all, something of hope still lingered. Rosamund's letter to
+him had wrought already a wonderful change in his tortured life. The
+knowledge that he would see her again, be with her alone, even if only
+for an hour, even if only that he might tell her what would alienate
+her from him forever, thrilled through him, seemed even to shed a fierce
+strength and alertness through his body. Now that he was going to see
+her once more he knew what the long separation from her had meant to
+him. He had known the living death. Within a few hours he would have
+at least some moments of life. They would be terrible moments,
+shameful--but they would take him back into life. Fiercely,
+passionately, he looked forward to them.
+
+He left his letter at the hotel, giving it into the hands of a weary
+Albanian night porter. Then he returned to his rooms, undressed, washed
+in cold water, and lay down on his bed. And presently he was praying in
+the dark, instinctively almost as a child prays. He was praying for
+the impossible. For he believed that it was absolutely impossible the
+Rosamund could ever forgive him for what he had done, and yet he prayed
+that she might forgive him. And he felt as if he were praying with all
+his body as well as with all his soul.
+
+In the dawn he was tired. But he did not sleep at all.
+
+About ten o'clock he went out to take the boat to Eyub.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+At a few minutes past eleven Dion was in the vast cemetery on the
+hill. It was a gray morning, still and hot. Languor was in the air.
+The grayness, the silence, the oily waters, suggested a brooding
+resignation. The place of the dead was almost deserted. He wandered
+through it, and met only two or three Turks, who returned his glance
+impassively. After the sleepless night he had come out feeling painfully
+excited and scarcely master of himself. In Galata and on the boat he had
+not dared to look into the eyes of those who thronged about him. He had
+felt transparent, as if all his thoughts and his tumultuous feelings
+must be visible to any one who regarded him with attention. But now he
+was encompassed by a sensation of almost dull calmness. He looked at the
+grayness and at the innumerable graves, he was conscious of the
+stagnant heat, he seemed to draw into himself the wide silence, and the
+excitement faded out of him, was replaced by a curious inertia. Both
+his mind and his body felt tired and resigned. The gravestones suggested
+death, the end of the early hopes, aspirations, yearnings and despairs
+of men. A few bones and a headstone--to that he was traveling. And yet
+all through the night he had been on fire with longing, and with a fear
+that had seemed almost red hot. Now he thought he perhaps understood the
+fatalism of the Turk. Whatever must be must be. All was written surely
+from the beginning. It was written that to-day he should be alone in the
+cemetery of Eyub, and it was written that Rosamund should come to him
+there, or not come to him.
+
+If she did not come?
+
+He remembered the exact wording of his letter to her, and he realized
+for the first time that in her letter she had asked him to tell her how
+to go to their meeting-place "if it is difficult," and he had not told
+her what she had to do in order to come to Eyub.
+
+But of course she had a dragoman, and he would bring her. She could not
+possibly come alone.
+
+Perhaps, however, she would not come.
+
+Long ago she had opened and read his letter and had taken her decision.
+If she was coming, probably she was already on the way. He forced
+himself to imagine the whole day passed by him alone in the cemetery,
+the light failing as the evening drew on, the darkness of night
+swallowing up Stamboul, the knowledge forced upon him that Rosamund had
+abandoned the idea of seeing him again. He imagined himself returning to
+Constantinople in the night, going to the Hotel de Byzance and learning
+that she had left by the Orient express of that day for England.
+
+What would he feel?
+
+A handful of bones and a headstone! Whatever happened to-day, and in
+the future, he was on his way to just that. Then, why agonize, why allow
+himself to be riven and tormented by longings and fears that seemed
+born out of something eternal? Perhaps, indeed, there was nothing at
+all after this short life was ended, nothing but the blank grayness of
+eternal unconsciousness. If so, how little even his love for Rosamund
+meant. It must be some bodily attraction, some imperious call to his
+flesh which he had mistaken for a far greater thing. Men, perhaps, are
+merely tricked by those longings of theirs which seem defiant of time,
+by those passionate tendernesses in which eternity seems breathing. All
+that they think they live by may be illusion.
+
+Mechanically, as the minutes drew on towards noon, he walked towards the
+Tekkeh of the Dervishes. Once he had come here to meet Cynthia Clarke,
+and now he had deliberately chosen the same place for the terrible
+interview with his wife. It could only be terrible. He did not know what
+he was going to do and say when she came (if she did come), but he
+did know that somehow he would tell her the whole truth about himself,
+without, of course, mentioning the name of a woman. He would lay bare
+his soul. It was fitting that he should confess his sin in the place
+of its beginnings. He had begun to sin against the woman whom he could
+never unlove here in this wilderness of the dead, when he had spoken
+against her to the woman who had long ago resolved some day to make
+him sin. (He told himself now that he had definitely spoken against
+Rosamund.) In this sad place of disordered peace, under the gray, and
+within sight of the minarets lifted to the Unknown God, he had opened
+the book of evil things; in this place he would close it forever--if
+Rosamund came. He felt now that there was something within him which,
+despite all his perversity, all that he had given himself to in the fury
+of the flesh, was irrevocably dedicated to that which was sane, clean
+and healthy. By this he was resolved to live henceforth, not because
+of any religious feeling, not because of any love of that Unknown God
+who--so he supposed--had flung him into the furnace of suffering as
+refuse may be flung into a fire, but because he now began to understand
+that this dedicated something was really Him, was of the core of his
+being, not to be rooted out. He had left Cynthia Clarke. In a short
+time--before the gray faded over the minarets of Stamboul--Rosamund
+would have done with him forever. He faced complete solitude, the
+wilderness without any human soul, good or bad, to keep him company; but
+he faced it with a sort of hard and final resignation. By nightfall he
+would have done with it all. And then--the living Death? Yes, no doubt
+that would be his portion. He smiled faintly as he thought of his
+furious struggle against just that.
+
+"It was written," he thought. "Everything is written. But we are tricked
+into a semblance of vigorous life and energy by our great delusion that
+we possess free will."
+
+He sat down beneath a cypress and remained quite still, looking downward
+towards the water, downward along the path by which, if Rosamund came,
+she would ascend the hill towards him.
+
+It was nearly noon when he saw below him on this path the figure of a
+woman walking slowly. She was followed by a man.
+
+Dion got up. He could not really see who this woman was, but he knew who
+she was. Instantly he knew. And instantly all the calm, all the fatalism
+of which for a moment he had believed himself possessed, all the
+brooding resignation of the man who says to his soul, "It is written!"
+was swept away. He stood there, bare of his pretenses, and he knew
+himself for what he was, just a man who was the prisoner of a great
+love, a man shaken by the tempest of his feeling, a man who would, who
+must, fight against the living Death which, only a moment before, he had
+been contemplating even with a smile.
+
+She had come, and with her life.
+
+He put one arm against the seamed trunk of the cypress. Mechanically,
+and unaware what he was doing, he had taken off his hat. He held it in
+his hand. All the change which sorrow and excess had wrought upon him
+was exposed for Rosamund to see. She had last seen him plainly as he
+drove away with little Robin from the Green Court of Welsley on that
+morning of fate. Now at last she was to see him again as she had remade
+him.
+
+She came on slowly. Presently she turned to her Greek dragoman.
+
+"Where's the Tekkeh? Is it much farther?"
+
+"No, Madame."
+
+He pointed. As he did so Rosamund saw Dion's figure standing against the
+cypress. She stood still. Her face was white and drawn, but full of
+an almost flaming resolution. The mysticism which at moments Dion had
+detected in her expression, in her eyes, during the years passed with
+her, a mysticism then almost evasive, subtly withdrawn, shone now, like
+a dominating quality which scorned to hide itself, or perhaps could
+not hide itself. She looked like a woman under the influence of a fixed
+purpose, fascinated, drawn onward, almost in ecstasy, and yet somehow,
+somewhere, tormented.
+
+"Please go back to the foot of the hill," she said to the Greek who was
+with her.
+
+"But, Madame, I dare not leave you alone here."
+
+"I shall not be alone."
+
+The Greek looked surprised.
+
+"Some one is waiting for me, up there, by that cypress--a--a friend."
+
+"Oh--I see, Madame."
+
+With a look of intense comprehension he turned to go.
+
+"At the foot of the hill, please!" said Rosamund.
+
+"Certainly, Madame."
+
+The dragoman was smiling as he walked away. Rosamund stood still
+watching him till he was out of sight. Then she turned. The figure of a
+man was still standing motionless under the old cypress tree among the
+graves. She set her lips together and went towards it. Now that she saw
+Dion, even though he was in the distance, she felt again intensely, as
+if in her flesh, the bodily wrong he had done to her. She strove not to
+feel this. She told herself that, after her sin against him, she had no
+right to feel it. In her heart she knew that she was the greater sinner.
+She realized now exactly the meaning of what she had done. She had no
+more illusions about herself, about her conduct. She condemned herself
+utterly. She had come to that place of the dead absolutely resolved to
+ask forgiveness of Dion. And yet now that she saw his body the sense of
+personal outrage woke in her, gripped her. She grew hot, she tingled. A
+fierce jealousy of the flesh tormented her. And suddenly she was afraid
+of herself. Was her body then more powerful than her soul? Was she,
+who had always cared for the things of the soul hopelessly physical? It
+seemed to her that even now she might succumb to what she supposed was
+an overwhelming personal pride, that even now she might be unable to do
+what she had come all the long way from England to do. But she forced
+herself to go onward up the path. She looked down; she would not see
+that body of a man which had belonged to her and to which she had
+belonged; but she made herself go towards it.
+
+Presently she felt that she was drawing near to it; then that she was
+close to it. Then she stopped. Standing still for a moment she prayed.
+She prayed that she might be able in this supreme crisis of her life to
+govern the baser part of herself, that she might be allowed, might be
+helped, to rise to those heights of which Father Robertson had spoken
+to her, that she might at last realize the finest possibilities of her
+nature, that she might be able to do the most difficult thing, to be
+humble, to forget any injury which had been inflicted upon herself, and
+to remember only the tremendous injury she had inflicted upon another.
+When her prayer was finished she did not know whether it had been
+heard, whether, if it had been heard, it had been accepted and would be
+granted. She did not know at all what she would be able to do. But she
+looked up and saw Dion. He was close to her, was standing just in front
+of her, with one arm holding the cypress trunk, trembling slightly and
+gazing at her, gazing at her with eyes that were terrible because they
+revealed so much of agony, of love and of terror. She looked into those
+eyes, she looked at the frightful change written on the face that had
+once been so familiar to her, and suddenly an immense pity inundated
+her. It seemed to her that she endured in that moment all the suffering
+which Dion had endured since the tragedy at Welsley added to her own
+suffering. She stood there for a moment looking at him. Then she said
+only:
+
+"Forgive me, oh, forgive me!"
+
+Tears rushed into her eyes. She had been able to say it. It had not been
+difficult to say. She could not have said anything else. And her soul
+had said it as well as her lips.
+
+"Forgive me! Forgive me!" she repeated.
+
+She went up to Dion, took his poor tortured temples, from which the
+hair, once so thick, had retreated, in her hands, and whispered again in
+the midst of her tears:
+
+"Forgive me!"
+
+"I've been false to you," he said huskily. "I've broken my vow to you.
+I've lived with another woman--for months. I've been a beast. I've
+wallowed. I've gone right down. Everything horrible--I've--I've done
+it. Only last night I meant to--to--I only broke away from it all last
+night. I heard you were here and then I--I----"
+
+"Forgive me!"
+
+She felt as if God were speaking in her, through her. She felt as if
+in that moment God had taken complete possession of her, as if for
+the first time in her life she was just an instrument, formed for the
+carrying out of His tremendous purposes, able to carry them out. Awe
+was upon her. But she felt a strange joy, and even a wonderful sense of
+peace.
+
+"But you don't hear what I tell you. I have been false to you. I have
+sinned against you for months and months."
+
+"Hush! It was my sin."
+
+"Yours? Oh, Rosamund!"
+
+She was still holding his temples. He put his hands on her shoulders.
+
+"Yes, it was my sin. I understand now how you love me. I never
+understood till to-day."
+
+"Yes, I love you."
+
+"Then," she said, very simply. "I know you will be able to forgive me.
+Don't tell me any more ever about what you have done. It's blotted out.
+Just forgive me--and let us begin again."
+
+She took away her hands from his temples. He did not kiss her, but
+he took one of her hands, and they stood side by side looking towards
+Stamboul, towards the City of the Unknown God. His eyes and hers were on
+the minarets, those minarets which seem to say to those who have come to
+them from afar, and whose souls are restless:
+
+"In the East thou shalt find me if thou hast not found me in the West."
+
+After a long silence Rosamund pressed Dion's hand, and it seemed to him
+that never, in the former days of their union--not even in Greece--had
+she pressed it with such tenderness, with such pulse-stirring intimacy
+and trust in him. Then, still with her eyes upon the minarets, she said
+in a low voice:
+
+"I think Robin knows."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+Not many days later, when the green valley of Olympia was wrapped in the
+peace of a sunlit afternoon, and a faint breeze drew from the pine trees
+on the hills of Kronos a murmur as of distant voices whispering the
+message of Eternity, the keeper of the house of the Hermes was disturbed
+in a profound reverie by the sound of slow footfalls not far from his
+dwelling. He stirred, lifted his head and stared vaguely about him. No
+travelers had come of late to the shrine he guarded. Hermes had been
+alone with the child upon his arm, dreaming of its unclouded future with
+the serenity of one who had trodden the paths where the gods walk, and
+who could rise at will above the shadowed ways along which men creep
+in anxiety, dreading false steps and the luring dangers of their fates.
+Hermes had been alone with his happy burden, forgotten surely by the
+world which his delicate majesty ignored without disdain. But now
+pilgrims, perhaps from a distant land, were drawing near to look upon
+him, to spend a little while in the atmosphere of his shining calm,
+perhaps to learn something of the message he had to give to those who
+were capable of receiving it.
+
+A man and a woman, moving slowly side by side, came into the patch of
+strong sunshine which made a glory before the house, paused there and
+stood still.
+
+From the shadow in which he was sitting the guardian examined them with
+the keen eyes of one who had looked upon travelers of many nations. He
+knew at once that the woman was English. As for the man--yes, probably
+he was English too, Dark, lean, wrinkled, he was no doubt an Englishman
+who had been much away from his own country, which the guardian
+conceived of as wrapped in perpetual fogs and washed by everlasting
+rains.
+
+The guardian stared hard at this man, then turned his bright eyes again
+upon the woman. As he looked at her some recollection began to stir in
+his mind.
+
+Not many travelers came twice to the green recesses of Elis. He was
+accustomed to brief acquaintanceships, closed by small gifts of money,
+and succeeded by farewells which troubled his spirit not at all. But
+this woman seemed familiar to him; and even the man----
+
+He got up from his seat and went towards them.
+
+As he came into the sunlight the woman saw him and smiled. And, when she
+smiled, he knew he had seen her before. The deep gravity of her face as
+she approached had nearly tricked his memory, but now he remembered all
+about her. She was the beautiful fair Englishwoman who had camped on
+the hill of Drouva not so many years ago, who had gone out shooting with
+that young rascal, Dirmikis, and who had spent solitary hours wrapt
+in contemplation of the statue whose fame doubtless had brought her to
+Elis.
+
+Not so many years ago! But was this the man the husband who had been
+with her then, and who had evidently been deeply in love with her?
+
+It seemed to the guardian that there was some puzzling change in the
+beautiful woman. As to the man----Still wondering, the guardian took off
+his cap politely and uttered a smiling welcome in Greek. Then the
+man smiled too, faintly, and still preserving the under-look of deep
+gravity, and the guardian knew him. It was indeed the husband, but grown
+to look very much older, and different in some almost mysterious way.
+
+The woman made a gesture towards the museum. The guardian bowed, turned
+and moved to lead the way through the vestibule into the great room of
+the Victory. But the woman spoke behind him and he paused. He did not
+understand what she said, but the sound of her voice seemed to plead
+with him--or to command him. He looked at her and understood.
+
+She was gazing at him steadily, and her eyes told him not to go before
+her, told him to stay where he was.
+
+He nodded his head, slightly pursing his small mouth. She knew the way
+of course. How should she not know it?
+
+Gently she came up to him and just touched his coat sleeve--to thank
+him. Then she went on slowly with her companion, traversed the room of
+the Victory, looking neither to right nor left, crossed the threshold of
+the smaller chamber beyond it and disappeared.
+
+For a moment the guardian stood at gaze. Then he went back to his seat,
+sat down and sighed. A faint sense of awe had come upon him. He did not
+understand it, and he sighed again. Then, pulling himself together, he
+felt for a cigarette, lit it and began to smoke, staring at the patch of
+sunlight outside, and at the olive tree which grew close to the doorway.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Within the chamber of the Hermes for a long time there was silence.
+Rosamund was sitting before the statue. Dion stood near to her, but not
+close to her. The eyes of both of them were fixed upon Hermes and the
+child. Once again they were greeted by the strange and exquisite hush
+which seems, like a divine sentinel, to wait at the threshold of that
+shrine in Elis; once again the silence seemed to come out of the marble
+and to press softly against their two hearts. But they were changed,
+and so the great peace of the Hermes seemed to them subtly changed. They
+knew now the full meaning of torment--torment of the body and of the
+soul. They knew the blackness of rebellion. But they knew also, or
+at least were beginning to know, the true essence of peace. And this
+beginning of knowledge drew them nearer to the Hermes than they had been
+in the bygone years, than they had ever been before the coming of little
+Robin into their lives, and before Robin had left them, obedient to the
+call from beyond.
+
+The olive branch was gone from the doorway. Something beautiful was
+missing from the picture of Elis which had reminded Rosamund of the
+glimpse of distant country in Raphael's "Marriage of the Virgin." And
+they longed to have it there, that little olive branch--ah, how they
+longed! There was pain in their hearts. But there was no longer the
+cruel fierceness of rebellion. They were able to gaze at the child on
+whom Hermes was gazing, if not with his celestial serenity yet with
+a resignation that was even subtly mingled with something akin to
+gratitude.
+
+"Shall we reach that goal and take a child with us?"
+
+Long ago that had been Dion's thought in Elis. And long ago Rosamund had
+broken the silence within that room by the words:
+
+"I'm trying to learn something here, how to bring _him_ up if he ever
+comes."
+
+And now God had given them a child, and God had taken him from them.
+Robin had gone from all that was not intended, but that, for some
+inscrutable reason, had come to be. Robin was in the released world.
+
+As the twilight began to fall another twilight came back flooding with
+its green dimness the memories of them both. And at last Rosamund spoke.
+
+"Dion!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Come a little nearer to me."
+
+He came close to her and stood beside her.
+
+"Do you remember something you said to me here? It was in the
+twilight----"
+
+She paused. Tears had come into her eyes and her voice had trembled.
+
+"It was in the twilight. You said that it seemed to you as if Hermes
+were taking the child away, partly because of us."
+
+Her voice broke.
+
+"I--I disliked your saying that. I told you I couldn't feel that."
+
+"I remember."
+
+"And then you explained exactly what you meant. And we spoke of the
+human fear that comes to those who look at a child they love and think,
+'what is life going to do to the child?' This evening I want to tell
+you that in a strange way I am able to be glad that Robin has gone, glad
+with some part of me that is more mother than anything else in me, I
+think. Robin is--is so safe now."
+
+The tears came thickly and fell upon her face. She put out a hand to
+Dion. He clasped it closely.
+
+"God took him away, and perhaps because of us. I think it may have
+been to teach us, you and me. Perhaps we needed a great sorrow. Perhaps
+nothing else could have taught us something we had to learn."
+
+"It may be so," he almost whispered.
+
+She got up and leaned against his shoulder.
+
+"Whatever happens to me in the future," she said, "I don't think I shall
+ever distrust God again."
+
+He put his arm round her and, for the first time since their reunion, he
+kissed her, and she returned his kiss.
+
+Over Elis the twilight was falling, a green twilight, sylvan and very
+ethereal, tremulous in its delicate beauty. It stole through the green
+doors, and down through the murmuring pine trees. The sheep-bells were
+ringing softly; the flocks were going homeward from pasture; and the
+chime of their little bells mingled with the wide whispering of the
+eternities among the summits of the pine trees. Music of earth mingled
+with the music from a distance that knew what the twilight knew.
+
+Presently the two marble figures in the chamber of the Hermes began to
+fade away gradually, as if deliberately withdrawing themselves from the
+gaze of men. At last only their outlines were visible to Rosamund and to
+Dion. But even these told of the Golden Age, of the age of long peace.
+
+"FAREWELL!"
+
+Some one had said it within that chamber, and a second voice had echoed
+it.
+
+As the guardian of the Hermes watched the two pilgrims walking slowly
+away down the valley he noticed that the man's right arm clasped the
+woman's waist. And, so, they passed from his sight and were taken by the
+green twilight of Elis.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of In the Wilderness, by Robert Hichens
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE WILDERNESS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 4603.txt or 4603.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/6/0/4603/
+
+Produced by Dagny; John Bickers; David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.