ve her well.
The defense was evidently going to make much of Mrs. Clarke's passion
for the city on the Bosporus. Daventry had alluded to it more than once,
and Bruce Evelin had said, "Mrs. Clarke has always had an extraordinary
feeling for places. If her husband had accused her of a liaison with
Eyub, or of an unholy fancy for the forest of Belgrad, we might have
been in a serious difficulty. She had, I know, a regular romance once
with the Mosquee Verte at Brusa."
Evidently she was a woman whom ordinary people would be likely to
misunderstand. Dion sat in his arm-chair trying to understand her. The
effort would help him to forget, or to ignore if he couldn't forget,
what was going on upstairs in the little house. He pulled hard at his
pipe, as an aid to his mind; he sat alone for a long while with Mrs.
Clarke. Sometimes he looked across the Golden Horn from a bit of waste
ground in Pera, near to a small cemetery: it was from there, towards
evening, that he had been able to "feel" Stamboul, to feel it as an
unique garden city, held by the sea, wooden and frail, marble and
enduring. And somewhere in the great and mysterious city Mrs. Clarke had
lived and been adored by the husband who, apparently still adoring, was
now trying to get rid of her.
Sometimes Dion heard voices rising from the crowded harbor of the Golden
Horn. They crept up out of the mystery of the evening; voices from the
caiques, and from the boats of the fishermen, and from the big sailing
vessels which ply to the harbors of the East, and from the steamers at
rest near the Galata Bridge, and from the many craft of all descriptions
strung out towards the cypress-crowned hill of Eyub. And Mrs. Clarke,
standing beside him, began to explain to him in a low and hoarse voice
what these strange cries of the evening meant.
Daventry had mentioned that she had a hoarse voice.
At a little after three o'clock Dion sat forward abruptly in his chair
and listened intently. He fancied he had heard a faint cry. He waited,
surrounded by silence, enveloped by silence. There was a low drumming
in his ears. Mrs. Clarke had escaped like a phantom. Stamboul, with its
mosques, its fountains, its pigeons and its plane trees, had faded away.
The voices from the Golden Horn were stilled. The drumming in Dion's
ears grew louder. He stood up. He felt very hot, and a vein in his left
temple was beating--not fluttering, but beating hard.
He heard, this time really heard, a
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