l down. He had a sort
of demented desire for ruins and dust. But he longed for action, on
the grand scale. Small secrecies, trickeries, tiptoeing through the
maze--all these things revolted that part of his nature which was,
perhaps, unchangeable. They seemed to him unmanly. In his present
condition he could quite easily have lain down in the sink of Pera's
iniquity, careless whether any one knew; but it was horribly difficult
to him to dine with the Ingletons and Vane at the Villa Hafiz, to say
"Good night" to Mrs. Clarke before them, to go away, leaving them in
the villa, and then, very late, to sneak back, with a key, to the garden
gate, when all the servants were in bed, and to creep up, like a thief,
to the pavilion. Some men would have enjoyed all the small deceptions,
would have thought them good fun, would have found that they added a
sharp zest to the pursuit of a woman. Dion loathed them.

And now he was confronted with something he was going to loathe far
more, something which would call for more sustained and elaborate
deception than any he had practised yet. He feared the eyes of an
English boy more than he feared the eyes of the diplomats and the
cosmopolitans of varying types who were gathered on the Bosporus during
the months of heat. He detested the idea of playing a part to a boy. How
could a mother lay plots to deceive her son? And yet Mrs. Clarke adored
Jimmy.

Rosamund and Robin started up in his mind. He saw them before him as he
had seen them one night in Westminster when Rosamund had been singing
to Robin. Ah, she had been a cruel, a terribly cruel, wife, but she had
been an ideal mother! He saw her head bent over her child, the curve of
her arm round his little body. A sensation of sickness came upon him, of
soul-nausea; and again he thought, "I must get away."

The night before the day on which Jimmy was due to arrive, Mrs. Clarke
was in Constantinople. She had gone there to meet Jimmy, and had started
early in the morning, leaving Dion at Buyukderer. When she was gone he
took the Albanian's boat and went out on the Bosporus for a row. The man
and he were both at the oars, and pulled out from the bay. When they had
gone some distance--they had been rowing for perhaps ten minutes--the
man asked:

"Ou allons-nous, Signore?"

"Vers Constantinople," replied Dion.

"Bene!" replied the man.

That night Mrs. Clarke had just finished dinner when a waiter tapped at
her sitting-room door.

"Wh