ou should
come here."

"Why did you do that?"

"I wanted to see you. I wanted to help you. You don't think I, or any
one, can do that. You think everything is over for you--"

"I know it is," he interrupted, in a voice which sounded cold and dull
and final.

"You think that. Any man like you, in your situation, would think that.
Let us leave it for the moment. I wished you to come here, and willed
you to come here. For some reason you have come. You didn't let me know
you were here, but, by chance as it seems, we met. I don't mean to lose
sight of you. I intend that you shall come either to Buyukderer, or to
some place on the Bosporus not far off that's endurable in the summer,
and that you shall stay there for a time."

"Why?"

"I want to find out if I can be of any good to you."

"You can't. I don't even know why you wish to. But you can't."

"We'll leave that," she said, with inflexible composure. "I don't much
care what you think about it. I shan't be governed, or affected even,
by that. The point is, I mean you to come. How are you to come,
surreptitiously or openly, sneaking in by-ways, your real name
concealed, or treading the highway, your real name known? For your own
sake it must be openly and with your own name, and for my sake too. You
need to face your great tragedy, to stand right up to it. It's your only
chance. A man is always pursued by what he runs away from; he can always
make a friend of what he stands up to."

"A friend?"

His voice broke in with the most piercing and bitter irony through the
many noises in the room--sounds of cries, of carriage wheels, of horses'
hoofs ringing on an uneven pavement, of iron shutters being pulled
violently down over shop fronts, of soldiers marching, of distant bugles
calling, of guitars and mandolins accompanying a Neapolitan song.

"Yes, a friend," said the husky and inflexible, but very feminine voice,
which resembled no other voice of woman that he had ever heard. "So much
for my thought of you. And now for my thought of myself. I am a woman
who has faced a great scandal and come out of it the winner. I
was horribly attacked, and I succeeded in what the papers call
reestablishing my reputation. You and I know very well what that means.
I know by personal experience, you by the behavior of your own wife."

Dion moved abruptly like a man in physical pain, but Mrs. Clarke
continued:

"I don't ask you to forgive me for hurting you. You and I must be