m 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 dest