ing. It was written that to-day he should be alone in the
cemetery of Eyub, and it was written that Rosamund should come to him
there, or not come to him.

If she did not come?

He remembered the exact wording of his letter to her, and he realized
for the first time that in her letter she had asked him to tell her how
to go to their meeting-place "if it is difficult," and he had not told
her what she had to do in order to come to Eyub.

But of course she had a dragoman, and he would bring her. She could not
possibly come alone.

Perhaps, however, she would not come.

Long ago she had opened and read his letter and had taken her decision.
If she was coming, probably she was already on the way. He forced
himself to imagine the whole day passed by him alone in the cemetery,
the light failing as the evening drew on, the darkness of night
swallowing up Stamboul, the knowledge forced upon him that Rosamund had
abandoned the idea of seeing him again. He imagined himself returning to
Constantinople in the night, going to the Hotel de Byzance and learning
that she had left by the Orient express of that day for England.

What would he feel?

A handful of bones and a headstone! Whatever happened to-day, and in
the future, he was on his way to just that. Then, why agonize, why allow
himself to be riven and tormented by longings and fears that seemed
born out of something eternal? Perhaps, indeed, there was nothing at
all after this short life was ended, nothing but the blank grayness of
eternal unconsciousness. If so, how little even his love for Rosamund
meant. It must be some bodily attraction, some imperious call to his
flesh which he had mistaken for a far greater thing. Men, perhaps, are
merely tricked by those longings of theirs which seem defiant of time,
by those passionate tendernesses in which eternity seems breathing. All
that they think they live by may be illusion.

Mechanically, as the minutes drew on towards noon, he walked towards the
Tekkeh of the Dervishes. Once he had come here to meet Cynthia Clarke,
and now he had deliberately chosen the same place for the terrible
interview with his wife. It could only be terrible. He did not know what
he was going to do and say when she came (if she did come), but he
did know that somehow he would tell her the whole truth about himself,
without, of course, mentioning the name of a woman. He would lay bare
his soul. It was fitting that he should confess his sin in the