e stream. He
looked till he saw in it the face of night. Broken stars quivered in the
water; among them for a moment he perceived the eyes of a child, of a
child who had been able to love him as a woman had not been able to love
him, and to forgive him as a woman could not forgive him.

When Dion walked back to his hotel the candlelight glimmered over the
dining-table at the Villa Hafiz where Mrs. Clarke sat with her
three guests--the Ambassador, Madame Davroulos, the wife of a Greek
millionaire whose home was at Smyrna, and Ahmed Bey, one of the Sultan's
adjutants.

Hadi Bey had long ago passed out of her life.

That evening the Ambassador got up to go rather early. His caique was
lying against the quay.

"Come out by the garden gate, won't you?" said Mrs. Clarke to him, and
she led the way to the tangled rose garden, where sometimes she sat and
read the poems of Hafiz.

Madame Davroulos was smoking a large cigar in a corner of the
drawing-room and talking volubly to Ahmed Bey, who was listening as
only a Turk can listen, with a smiling and immense serenity, twisting a
string of amber beads in his padded fingers.

"He was there?" said Mrs. Clarke, in her quietest and most impersonal
manner.

"Yes--he was there."

The Ambassador paused by the fountain, and stood with one foot on the
marble edge of the basin, gazing down on the blue lilies whose color
looked dull and almost black in the night.

"He was there. I talked with him for quite half an hour. He seemed glad
to talk; he talked almost fiercely."

Mrs. Clarke's white face looked faintly surprised.

"Eventually I told him who I was, and he told his name to me, watching
me narrowly to see how I should take it. My air of complete serenity
over the revelation seemed to reassure him. I said I knew he was a
friend of yours and that my wife and I would be very glad to see him at
Therapia, and at the Embassy in Pera later on. He said he would come to
Therapia to-morrow."

This time Mrs. Clarke looked almost strongly surprised.

"What did you talk about?" she asked.

"Chiefly about a book he seems to have been reading recently, Richard
Burton's 'Kasidah.' You know it, of course?"

"I remember Omar Khayyam much better."

"He spoke strangely, almost terribly about it. Perhaps you know
how converts to Roman Catholicism talk in the early days of their
conversion, as if they alone understood the true meaning of being safe
in sunlight, cradled and cherished i