e
strength and alertness through his body. Now that he was going to see
her once more he knew what the long separation from her had meant to
him. He had known the living death. Within a few hours he would have
at least some moments of life. They would be terrible moments,
shameful--but they would take him back into life. Fiercely,
passionately, he looked forward to them.

He left his letter at the hotel, giving it into the hands of a weary
Albanian night porter. Then he returned to his rooms, undressed, washed
in cold water, and lay down on his bed. And presently he was praying in
the dark, instinctively almost as a child prays. He was praying for
the impossible. For he believed that it was absolutely impossible the
Rosamund could ever forgive him for what he had done, and yet he prayed
that she might forgive him. And he felt as if he were praying with all
his body as well as with all his soul.

In the dawn he was tired. But he did not sleep at all.

About ten o'clock he went out to take the boat to Eyub.

CHAPTER XVI

At a few minutes past eleven Dion was in the vast cemetery on the
hill. It was a gray morning, still and hot. Languor was in the air.
The grayness, the silence, the oily waters, suggested a brooding
resignation. The place of the dead was almost deserted. He wandered
through it, and met only two or three Turks, who returned his glance
impassively. After the sleepless night he had come out feeling painfully
excited and scarcely master of himself. In Galata and on the boat he had
not dared to look into the eyes of those who thronged about him. He had
felt transparent, as if all his thoughts and his tumultuous feelings
must be visible to any one who regarded him with attention. But now he
was encompassed by a sensation of almost dull calmness. He looked at the
grayness and at the innumerable graves, he was conscious of the
stagnant heat, he seemed to draw into himself the wide silence, and the
excitement faded out of him, was replaced by a curious inertia. Both
his mind and his body felt tired and resigned. The gravestones suggested
death, the end of the early hopes, aspirations, yearnings and despairs
of men. A few bones and a headstone--to that he was traveling. And yet
all through the night he had been on fire with longing, and with a fear
that had seemed almost red hot. Now he thought he perhaps understood the
fatalism of the Turk. Whatever must be must be. All was written surely
from the beginn