hin mystery.

Then Mrs. Clarke came in and they went at once to dinner.

During dinner they talked very little. She spoke when the Greek butler
was in the room, and Dion did his best in reply; nevertheless the
conversation languished. Although Dion had so few words to give to his
hostess he felt abnormally alive. The whole of him was like a quivering
nerve.

When dinner was over Mrs. Clarke said to the butler:

"Osman will make the coffee for us. He knows about it. We shall have it
in the pavilion."

The butler, who, although a Greek, looked at that moment almost
incredibly stolid, moved his rather pouting lips, no doubt in assent,
and was gone. They saw him no more that night.

They walked slowly from terrace to terrace of the climbing garden till
they came to the height on which the pavilion stood guarded by the
two mighty cypresses. There was no moon, and the night was a very dark
purple night, with stars that looked dim and remote, like lost stars in
the wilderness of infinity. From the terraces came the scent of flowers.
In the pavilion one hanging lamp gave a faint light which emphasized the
obscurity. It shone through colored panes and drew thick shadows on
the floor and on sections of the divans. The heaps of cushions were
colorless, and had a strange look of unyielding massiveness, as if
they were blocks of some hard material. Osman stood beside one of the
coffee-tables.

As soon as his mistress appeared he began to make the coffee. Dion
stayed upon the terrace, and Mrs. Clarke went into the pavilion and sat
down.

The cypresses were like dark towers in the night. Dion looked up
at them. Their summits were lost in the brooding purple darkness.
Cypresses! Why had he thought of cypresses in England in connexion with
Mrs. Clarke? Why had he seen her standing among cypresses, seen himself
coming to her and with her in the midst of the immense shadows they
cast? No doubt simply because he knew she lived much in Turkey, the land
of the cypress. That must have been the reason. Nevertheless now he was
oppressed by a weight of mystery somehow connected with those dark and
gigantic trees; and he remembered the theory that the past, the present
and the future are simultaneously in being, and that those who are said
to read the future in reality possess only the power of seeing what
already is on another plane. Had he in England, however vaguely, however
dimly, seen as through a crack some blurred vision of what