w, at such a time, no
one but an absolutely innocent woman would do in public what Mrs. Clarke
is doing to me." Mrs. Chetwinde, he felt sure, full of all worldly
knowledge, must be thinking the very same thing.

"Yes," he said. "I think I do. But I wonder whether it could hold me
like that."

"I know it could."

"May I ask how you know?"

"Why not? Simply by my observation of you."

Dion remembered the swift grave look of consideration she had given to
him as he came into the room. Something almost combative rose up in him,
and he entered into an argument with her, in the course of which he
was carried away into the revelation of his mental comparison between
Constantinople and Greece, a comparison into which entered a moral
significance. He even spoke of the Christian significance of the
Hermes of Olympia. Mrs. Clarke listened to him with a very still, and
apparently a very deep, attention.

"I've been to Greece," she said simply, when he had finished.

"You didn't feel at all as I did, as I do?"

"You may know Greece, but you don't know Stamboul," she said quietly.

"If you had shown it to me I might feel very differently," Dion said,
with a perhaps slightly banal politeness.

And yet he did not feel entirely banal as he said it.

"Come out again and I will show it to you," she said.

She was almost staring at him, at his chest and shoulders, not at his
face, but her eyes still kept their unself-conscious and almost oddly
impersonal look.

"You are going back there?"

"Of course, when my case is over."

Dion felt very much surprised. He knew that Mrs. Clarke's husband was
accredited to the British Embassy at Constantinople; that the
scandal about her was connected with that city and with its
neighborhood--Therapia, Prinkipo, and other near places, that both the
co-respondents named in the suit lived there. Whichever way the case
went, surely Constantinople must be very disagreeable to Mrs. Clarke
from now onwards. And yet she was going back there, and apparently
intended to take up her life there again. She evidently either saw or
divined his surprise, for she added in the husky voice:

"Guilt may be governed by circumstances. I suppose it is full of alarms.
But I think an innocent woman who allows herself to be driven out of a
place she loves by a false accusation is merely a coward. But all this
is very uninteresting to you. The point is, I shall soon be settled down
again at Constantinople, and