upon them both since the coming of
her son.

In a hideous way Dion wanted to see her, and yet he shrank from going
back to her secretly. The coming of Jimmy, his relations with the boy,
the boy's hearty affection for him and admiration for him, had roused
into intense activity that part of his nature which had always loved,
which he supposed always must love, the straight life; the life with
morning face and clear, unfaltering eyes; the life which the Hermes
suggested, immune from the fret and fever of secret vices and passions,
lifted by winged sandals into a region where soul and body were in
perfect accord, and where, because of that, there was peace; not a peace
of stagnation, but a peace living and intense. But that part of his
nature had led him even now instinctively back to the feet of Rosamund.
And he revolted against such a pilgrimage.

"The pavilion to-night eleven; you've got the key."

Her face had not changed as she whispered the words, and immediately
afterwards she had told a lie to her boy, or had implied a lie. She had
made Jimmy believe the thing that was not. Loving Jimmy, she did not
scruple to play a part to him.

Dion ate no dinner that night. After returning to his rooms and getting
out of his riding things into a loose serge suit he went out again and
walked along the quay by the water. He paced up and down, ignoring the
many passers-by, the boatmen and watermen who now knew him so well.

He was considering whether he should go to the pavilion at the appointed
hour or whether he should leave Buyukderer altogether and not return to
it. This evening he was in the mood to be drastic. He might go down to
Constantinople and finally cast his burden away there, never to take it
up again--the burden of an old love whose chains still hung about him;
he might plunge into the lowest depths, into depths where perhaps the
remembrance of Rosamund and the early morning would fade away from him,
where even Mrs. Clarke would not care to seek for him, although her will
was persistent.

He fully realized now her extraordinary persistence, the fierce firmness
of character that was concealed by her quiet and generally impersonal
manner. Certainly she had the temperament of a ruler. He remembered--it
seemed to him with a bizarre abruptness--the smile on Dumeny's lips in
the Divorce Court when the great case had ended in Mrs. Clarke's favor.

Did he really know Cynthia Clarke even now?

He walked faster. Now