ing 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