me back."

He bent down to her with the letter.

"Thank you," she said, and she took it without looking at all surprised,
and with her habitual composed gravity. "There are Turkish cigarettes in
that ivory box," she added, looking at a box on a table close by.

"Thank you."

As Dion turned to get a cigarette he heard her tearing Brayfield's
envelope.

"Will you give me one?" said the husky voice.

Without saying anything he handed to her the box, and held a lighted
match to her cigarette when it was between the pale lips. She smoked
gently as she opened and read Brayfield's letter. When she had finished
it--evidently it was not a long letter--she put it back into the
envelope, laid it down on the green divan and said:

"What do you think of this room? It was designed and arranged by
Monsieur de Vaupre, a French friend of mine."

"By a man!" said Dion, irrepressibly.

"Who hasn't been in the South African War. Do you like it?"

"I don't think I do, but I admire it a good deal."

He was looking at the letter lying on the divan, and Brayfield was
before him, tormented and dying. He had always disliked the look of
Brayfield, but he had felt almost a sort of affection for him when he
was dying. Foolishly perhaps, Dion wanted Mrs. Clarke to say something
kind about Brayfield now.

"If you admire it, why don't you like it?" she asked. "A person--I could
understand; but a room!"

He looked at her and hesitated to acknowledge a feeling at which he knew
something in her would smile; then he thought of Rosamund and of Little
Cloisters and spoke out the truth.

"I think it's an unwholesome-looking room. It looks to me as if it
had been thought out and arranged by somebody with a beastly, though
artistic, mind."

"The inner room is worse," she said.

But she did not offer to show it to him, nor did she disagree with his
view. He even had the feeling that his blunt remark had pleased her.

He asked her about Constantinople. She lived there, she told him, all
through the spring and autumn, and spent the hottest months on the
Bosphorus.

"People are getting accustomed to my temerity," she said. "Of course
Esme Darlington is still in despair, and Lady Ermyntrude goes about
spreading scandal. But it doesn't seem to do much harm. She hasn't any
more influence over my husband. He won't hear a word against me. Like a
good dog, I suppose, he loves the hand which has beaten him."

"You've got a will of iron, I believe