her large eyes,
the haunted look about her cheeks and her temples.

As she went into the house she pulled cruelly at a rose bush. A white
rose came away from its stalk in her hand. She crushed its petals and
flung them away on the sill of the window.

While Mrs. Clarke was sitting by the fountain in the garden of the Villa
Hafiz, Dion was sleepless in his bedroom at the Hotel Belgrad. He was
considering whether he should end his life or whether he should change
the way of his life. He was not conscious of struggle. He did not feel
excited. But he did feel determined. The strength he possessed was
asserting itself. It had slumbered within him; it had not died.

Either he would die now or he would genuinely live, would lay a grip on
life somehow.

If he chose to die how would Mrs. Clarke take the news of his death? He
imagined some one going to the Villa Hafiz from the Hotel Belgrad with
a message: "The English gentleman Mr. Vane took the room for has just
killed himself. What is to be done with the body?" What would Mrs.
Clarke say? What would she look like? What would she do? He remembered
the sign of the cross she had made in the flat in Knightsbridge. With
that sign she had dismissed the soul of Brayfield into the eternities.
Would she dismiss the soul of Dion Leith with the sign of the cross?

If she heard of his death, Rosamund would of course be unmoved, or
would, perhaps, feel a sense of relief. And doubtless she would offer
up to God a prayer in which his name would be mentioned. Women who loved
God were always ready with a prayer. If it came too late, never mind! It
was a prayer, and therefore an act acceptable to God.

But Mrs. Clarke? Certainly she would not pray about it. Dion had a
feeling that she would be angry. He had never seen her angry, but he
felt sure she could be enraged in a frozen, still, terrible way. If he
died perhaps a thread would snap, the thread of her design. For she had
some purpose in connexion with him. She had willed him to come to this
place; she was willing him to remain in it. Apparently she wished to
raise him out of the dust. He thought of Eyub, of Mrs. Clarke walking
beside him on the dusty road. She had seemed very much at home in the
dust. But she was not like Rosamund; she was not afraid of a speck of
dust falling upon the robe of her ideals. What was Mrs. Clarke's purpose
in connexion with him? He did not pursue that question, but dismissed
it, incurious still in his mi