rm, after a quick glance round to make sure that no eyes
were watching her. She pushed her hand down gently and held his wrist.

"Do you realize how badly you sometimes treat me?" she said.

"Yes."

She pulled his soft cuff with her little fingers.

"I do realize it, but I can't help it. I have to do it."

"If I didn't know that I should mind it much more," she said.

"I never thought I had it in me to treat a woman as I sometimes treat
you. I used--to be so different."

"You were too much the other way. But yours is a nature of extremes.
That's partly why I----"

She did not finish the sentence.

"Then you don't resent my beastliness to you?" he asked.

"Not permanently. Sometimes you are nice to me. But if you were ever
to treat me badly when Jimmy was with me, I don't think I could ever
forgive you."

"I dread his coming," said Dion. "I had much better go. If you don't let
me go, you may regret it."

In saying that he acknowledged the power she had already obtained over
him, a power from which he did not feel sure that he could break away,
although he was acutely aware of it and sometimes almost bitterly
resented it. Mrs. Clarke knew very well that most men can only be held
when they do not know that they are held, but Dion, in his present
condition, was not like any other man she had known. More than once in
the earliest stages of their intimacy she had had really to fight to
keep him near her, and so he knew how arbitrary she could be when her
nature was roused.

Sometimes he hated her with intensity, for she had set herself to
destroy the fabric of his spirit, which not even Rosamund had been able
entirely to destroy by her desertion of him. Sometimes he felt a sort of
ugly love of her, because she was the agent through whom he was learning
to get rid of all that Rosamund had most prized in him. It was as if he
called out to her, "Help me to pull down, to tear down, all that I built
up in the long years till not one stone is left upon another. What I
built up was despised and rejected. I won't look upon it any more. I'll
raze it to the ground. But I can't do that alone. Come, you, and help
me." And she came and she helped in the work of destruction, and in an
ugly, horrible way he loved her for it sometimes, as a criminal might
love an assistant in his crime.

But from such a type of love there are terrible reactions. During these
reactions Dion had treated Cynthia Clarke abominably sometimes, sho