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 i