. Below was the narrowing sea, the shallow north-west arm of the
Golden Horn, which stretches to Kiathareh, where are the sweet waters of
Europe, and to Kiahat Haneh.

"We'll sit here," said Mrs. Clarke presently.

And she sat down, with the folding ease almost of an Oriental, on the
warm earth, and leaned against the fissured trunk of a cypress.

Casually she had seemed to choose the resting-place, but she had chosen
it well. More times than she could count she had come to that exact
place, had leaned against that cypress and looked down the Golden
Horn to the divided city, one-half of which she loved as she loved few
things, one-half of which she endured for the sake of the other.

"From here," she said to Dion, "I can feel Stamboul."

He had lain down near to her sideways and rested his cheek on his hand.
The lower half of his body was in sunshine, but the cypress threw its
shadow over his head and shoulders. As Mrs. Clarke spoke he looked
down the Golden Horn to the Turkish city, and his eyes were held by
the minarets of its mosques. Seldom had he looked at a minaret without
thinking of prayer. He thought of prayer now, and then of his dead
child, of the woman he had called wife, and of the end of his happiness.
The thought came to him:

"I was kept safe in the midst of the dangers of war for a reason; and
that reason was that I might go back to England and kill my son."

And yet every day men went up into these minarets and called upon other
men to bow themselves and pray.

God is great. . . .

In the sunlit silence of the vast cemetery the wheels of Dion's life
seemed for a moment to cease from revolving.

God is great--great in His power to inflict misery upon men. And so pray
to Him! Mount upon the minarets, go up high, till you are taken by the
blue, till, at evening, you are nearer to the stars than other men,
and pray to Him and proclaim His glory. For He is the repository of the
power to cover you with misery as with a garment, and to lay you even
with the dust. Pray then--pray! Unless the garment is upon you, unless
the dust is already about you!

Dion lay on the warm earth and looked at the distant minarets, and
smiled at the self-seeking slave-instinct in men, which men sought to
glorify, to elevate into a virtue.

"Why are you smiling?" said a husky voice above.

He did not look up, but he answered:

"Because I was looking at those towers of prayer."

"The minarets."

She was silent f