that
even to herself. And she never told her secrets to other people, not
even when they were women friends!

The lights on the kiosk on the quay went out. Mrs. Clarke was startled
by the leaping up of the darkness which seemed to come from the sea.
For her ears had been closed against the band, and she had forgotten the
limit she had mentally put to her indecision. Eleven o'clock already!
She got up from her seat. But still she hesitated. She did not know
what she was going to do. She stood for a moment. Then she walked softly
towards the pavilion. When she was near to it she stopped and listened.
She did not hear any sound from within. There was nothing to prevent her
from descending to the villa, from writing a note to Dion Leith asking
him to leave Buyukderer on the morrow, and from going up to her bedroom.
He would find the note in the hall when he came down; he would go away;
she need never see him again. If she did that it would mean a new life
for her, free from complications, a life dedicated to Jimmy, a life
deliberately controlled.

It would mean, too, the futile close of a long pursuit; the crushing of
an old and hitherto frustrated desire; the return, when Jimmy went back
to England after the holidays, to an empty life which she hated,
more than hated, a life of horrible restlessness, a life in which the
imagination preyed, like a vulture, upon the body. It would mean the
wise, instead of the unwise, life.

She stood there. With one hand she felt the little watch which Dumeny
had given her. It was cold to the touch of her dry, hot hand. She felt
the rough emerald set in the back of it. She and Dumeny had found that
in the bazaars together, in those bazaars which Dumeny changed from
Eastern shops into the Arabian Nights. Dion Leith could never do such a
thing for her. But perhaps she could do it for him. The thought of that
lured her. She stood at the street corner; it was very dark and still;
she knew that the strange ways radiated from the place where she stood,
but there was no one to go with her down them. She waited--waited. And
then she saw far off the gleam of the torch from which spring colored
fires. It flitted through the darkness; it hovered. The gleam of it lit
up, like a goblin light, the beginnings of the strange ways. She saw
shadowy forms slipping away stealthily into their narrow and winding
distances; she saw obscure stairways, leaning balconies full of soft
blackness. She divined the r