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