held with long-fingered,
waxen-white hands very near to his narrow dark eyes. His close-growing
thick hair looked more glossy now that there was artificial light in
the court; from the distance its undulations were invisible, and it
resembled a cap of some heavy and handsome material drawn carefully down
over his head. Hadi Bey retained his vivid, alert and martial demeanor.
He was twisting his mustaches with a muscular brown hand, not nervously,
but with a careless and almost a lively air. Many women gazed at him
as if hypnotized; they found the fez very alluring. It carried their
thoughts to the East; it made them feel that the romance of the East was
not very far from them. Some of them wished it very near, and thought of
husbands in silk hats, bowlers, and flat caps of Harris tweed with
the dawning of a dull distaste. The woman just behind Dion was talking
busily to her neighbor. Dion heard her say:

"Some women always manage to have a good time. I wish I was one of them.
Dick is a dear, but still----" She whispered for a minute or two; then
out came her voice with, "There must be great chances for a woman in
the diplomatic world. I knew a girl who married an _attache_ and went
to Bucharest. You can have no idea what the Roumanians----" whisper,
whisper, whisper.

That woman was envying Mrs. Clarke, it seemed, but surely not envying
her innocence. Dion began to be conscious of faint breaths from the
furnace of desire, and suddenly he saw the gaunt and sickly-smiling head
of hypocrisy, like the flat and tremulously moving head of a serpent,
lifted up above the court. Only a little way off Robin, now better, but
still "not quite the thing," was lying in his cozy cot in the nursery of
No. 5 Little Market Street, with Rosamund sitting beside him. The window
to-day, for once, would probably be shut as a concession to Robin's
indisposition. A lamp would be burning perhaps. In fancy, Dion saw
Rosamund's head lit up by a gentle glow, her hair giving out little
gleams of gold, as if fire were caught in its meshes. How was it that
her head always suggested to him purity; and not only her purity but the
purity of all sweet, sane and gloriously vigorous women--those women
who tread firmly, nobly, in the great central paths of life? He did not
know, but he was certain that the head of no impure, of no lascivious
woman could ever look like his Rosamund's. That nursery, holding little
Robin and his mother in the lamplight, was n