place
of its beginnings. He had begun to sin against the woman whom he could
never unlove here in this wilderness of the dead, when he had spoken
against her to the woman who had long ago resolved some day to make
him sin. (He told himself now that he had definitely spoken against
Rosamund.) In this sad place of disordered peace, under the gray, and
within sight of the minarets lifted to the Unknown God, he had opened
the book of evil things; in this place he would close it forever--if
Rosamund came. He felt now that there was something within him which,
despite all his perversity, all that he had given himself to in the fury
of the flesh, was irrevocably dedicated to that which was sane, clean
and healthy. By this he was resolved to live henceforth, not because
of any religious feeling, not because of any love of that Unknown God
who--so he supposed--had flung him into the furnace of suffering as
refuse may be flung into a fire, but because he now began to understand
that this dedicated something was really Him, was of the core of his
being, not to be rooted out. He had left Cynthia Clarke. In a short
time--before the gray faded over the minarets of Stamboul--Rosamund
would have done with him forever. He faced complete solitude, the
wilderness without any human soul, good or bad, to keep him company; but
he faced it with a sort of hard and final resignation. By nightfall he
would have done with it all. And then--the living Death? Yes, no doubt
that would be his portion. He smiled faintly as he thought of his
furious struggle against just that.

"It was written," he thought. "Everything is written. But we are tricked
into a semblance of vigorous life and energy by our great delusion that
we possess free will."

He sat down beneath a cypress and remained quite still, looking downward
towards the water, downward along the path by which, if Rosamund came,
she would ascend the hill towards him.

It was nearly noon when he saw below him on this path the figure of a
woman walking slowly. She was followed by a man.

Dion got up. He could not really see who this woman was, but he knew who
she was. Instantly he knew. And instantly all the calm, all the fatalism
of which for a moment he had believed himself possessed, all the
brooding resignation of the man who says to his soul, "It is written!"
was swept away. He stood there, bare of his pretenses, and he knew
himself for what he was, just a man who was the prisoner of a gr