ooms beyond. And whispering voices came to
her ears.

All the time she was feeling the watch with its rough uncut emerald.

Government came upon her. She felt, as often before, a great hand catch
her in a grip of iron. She ceased to resist.

Still holding the watch, she went to the opening in the pavilion.

The hanging lamp had gone out. For a moment she could only see darkness
in the interior. It looked empty. There was no sound within. Could the
man she had been thinking about, debating about, have slipped away while
she was sitting under the plane tree? She had been thinking so deeply
that she had not heard the noise of the band on the quay; she might not
have heard his footsteps. While she had been considering whether she
should leave him perhaps he had fled from her.

This flashing thought brought her back at once to her true and
irrevocable self, and she was filled instantly with fierce determination
and a cold intense anger. Jimmy was forgotten. He was dead to her at
that moment. She leaned forward, peering into the darkness.

"Dion!" she said. "Dion!"

There was no answer, but she saw something stir within, something low
down. He was there--or something was there, something alive. She went
into the pavilion, and knelt down by it.

"Dion!" she said.

He raised himself on the divan, and turned on his side.

"Why are you kneeling down?" he said. "Don't kneel. I hate to see a
woman kneeling, and I know _you_ never pray. Get up."

He spoke in a voice that was new to her. It seemed to her hot and hard.
She obeyed him at once and got up from her knees.

"What did you mean just now when you asked me whether I couldn't mingle
my life with an unhappy life? Sit here beside me."

She sat down on the edge of the divan very near to him.

"What do you suppose I meant?"

"Do you mean to say you like me in that way?"

"Yes."

"That you care about me?"

"Yes."

"You said you willed me to come out to Constantinople. Was it for that
reason?"

She hesitated. She had an instinctive understanding of men, but she knew
that, in one way, Dion was not an ordinary man; and even if he had been,
the catastrophe in his life might well have put him for the time beyond
the limits of her experience, wide though they were.

"No," she said, at last. "I didn't like you in that way till I met you
in the street, and saw what she had done to you."

"Then it was only pity?"

"Was it? I knew your value in England."

She p