which
resembled no other voice ever heard by Dion. He felt kindness at the
back of her talk, the wish to alleviate his misery if only for a
moment, to do what she could for him. She could do nothing, of course.
Nevertheless he began to feel grateful to her. She was surely unlike
other women, incapable of bearing a grudge. For he had not been very
"nice" to her in the days when he was happy and she was in difficulties.
At this moment he vaguely exaggerated his lack of "niceness," and
perhaps also her pardoning temperament. In truth, he was desperately
in need of a touch from the magic wand of sympathy. Believing, or even
perhaps knowing, that to the incurably wounded man palliatives are of no
lasting avail, he had deliberately fled from them, and gone among those
who had no reason to bother about him. But now he was grateful.

"Go on talking," he said once, when she stopped speaking. And she
continued talking about her life. She said nothing more about Jimmy.

The Corsican waiter came and took away the tea things noisily. Her spell
was broken. For a moment Dion felt dazed.

He got up.

"I ought to go," he said.

"Must you?"

"Must!--Oh no! My time is my own, and always will be, I suppose."

"You have thrown up everything?"

"What else could I do? The man who killed his own son! How could I stay
in London, go among business men who knew me, talk about investments to
clients? Suppose you had killed Jimmy!"

There was a long silence. Then he said:

"I've given up my name. I call myself Mervyn Denton. I saw the name in a
novel I opened on a railway bookstall."

She got up and came near to him quietly.

"This is all wrong," she said.

"What is?"

"All you are doing, the way you are taking it all."

"What other way is there of taking such a thing?"

"Will you come with me to Eyub to-morrow?"

"It was written long ago that I am to go there with you. I'm quite sure
of that."

"I'll tell you what I mean there to-morrow."

She looked towards the window.

"It's like the roar of hell," he said.

And he went away.

That night Mrs. Clarke dined alone downstairs in the restaurant. The
cooking at the Hotel de Paris was famous, and attracted many men from
the Embassies. Presently Cyril Vane, one of the secretaries at the
British Embassy, came in to dine. He had with him a young Turkish
gentleman, who was called away by an agent from the Palace in the middle
of dinner. Vane, thus left alone, presently got up