a Montenegrin boy with a big round
forehead, to her sitting-room on the second floor. It was large, bare
and clean, with white walls and awnings at the windows. She rang the
bell. A Corsican waiter came and she ordered tea. The roar of the street
noises penetrated into the shadowy room through the open windows,
and came to Dion like heat. He remembered the silence of Claridge's.
Suddenly his head began to swim. It seemed to him that his life, all of
it that he had lived till that moment, was spinning round him, and that,
as it spun, it gave out a deafening noise and glittered. He sat down on
a chair which was close to a small table, laid his arms on the table,
and hid his face against them. Still the deafening noise continued. The
sum of it was surely made up of the uproar of the Grand Rue with the
uproar of his spinning life added to it. He saw yellow balls ringed with
pale blue rapidly receding from his shut eyes.

Mrs. Clarke looked at him for a moment; then she went into the adjoining
bedroom and shut the door behind her. She did not come back till the
waiter knocked and told her that tea was ready. Then she opened the
door. She had taken off her hat and gloves, and looked very white and
cool, and very composed.

Dion was standing near the windows. The waiter, who had enormously thick
mustaches, and who evidently shaved in the evening instead of in the
morning, was going out at the farther door. He shut it rather loudly.

"Every one makes a noise in Pera. It's _de rigueur_," said Mrs. Clarke,
coming to the tea-table.

"Do you know," said Dion, "I used to think _you_ looked punished?"

"Punished--I!"

There was a sudden defiance in her voice which he had never heard in it
before. He came up to the table.

"Yes. In London I used to think you had a punished look and even a
haunted look. Wasn't that ridiculous? I didn't know then what it meant
to be punished, or to be haunted. I hadn't enough imagination to know,
not nearly enough. But some one or something's seen to it that I shall
know all about punishment and haunting. So I shall never be absurd about
you again."

After a pause she said:

"I wonder why you thought that about me?"

"I don't know. It just came into my head."

"Well, sit down and let us have our tea."

Dion sat down mechanically, and Mrs. Clarke poured out the tea.

"I wish it was Buyukderer," she said.

"Oh, I like the uproar."

"No, you don't--you don't. Pera is spurious, and all i