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;