ered perfume vials. As he looked at Mrs. Clarke,
the bare and shining vision of Greece, evoked by the song Rosamund had
just been singing, faded; the peculiar almost intellectually delicate
atmosphere of Greece was gone; and he saw for a moment the umber mystery
of Stamboul, lifted under tinted clouds of the evening beyond the waters
of the Golden Horn; the great rounded domes and tapering speary minarets
of the mosques, couchant amid the shadows and the trailing and gauzy
smoke-wreaths, a suggestion of dense masses of cypresses, those trees of
the night which only in the night can be truly themselves, guarding the
innumerable graves of the Turkish cemeteries.

From that moment he connected Mrs. Clarke in his mind with the cypress.
Surely she must have spent very many hours wandering in those enormous
and deserted gardens of the dead, where the very dust is poignant,
and the cries of the sea come faintly up to Allah's children crumbling
beneath the stone flowers and the little fezes of stone. Mrs. Clarke
must love the cypress, for about her there was an atmosphere which
suggested dimness and the gathering shadows of night.

Greece and Stamboul, the land of the early morning and the wonder-city
of twilight; Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke, standing there for a moment, in
the midst of the shifting crowd, Dion traveled, compared, connected and
was alone in the soul's solitude.

Then Mrs. Chetwinde spoke to him, and he saw Bruce Evelin in the
distance going towards Rosamund.

Mrs. Chetwinde told him that Rosamund had made a great advance.

"Now that she's given up singing professionally she's singing better
than ever. That Grecian song is the distilled essence of Greece felt in
our new way. For we've got our new way of feeling things. Rosamund tells
us she repeated the words to Jennie Stileman, and Jennie had them set
by a young Athenian who's over here studying English. He catches the
butterfly, lets it flutter for a moment in his hand and go. He doesn't
jab a pin into it as our composers would. Oh, there's Cynthia! I hope
she heard the last thing."

"Yes, she did."

"Ah?"

"I thought Mrs. Clarke was spending January in Paris."

"She came back to-day, and sent round to ask if she might come."

Mrs. Chetwinde wandered away, insouciant and observant as ever. Even at
her own parties she always had an air of faintly detached indifference,
never bothered about how "it" was "going." If it chose to stop it could,
and her gue