So now Dion sat with a pale, thin, unconventional woman, and she told him about the life at Stamboul.  She knew, of course, that he had hated Constantinople.  He allowed her to know that.  And she pointed out to him that he knew nothing of the wonderful city, upon which Russia breathes from the north, and which catches, too, strange airs and scents and murmurs of voices from distant places of Asia.  What does the passing tourist of a Pera hotel know about the great city of the Turks?  Nothing worth knowing.  The roar of the voices of the Levant deafens his ears; the glitter of the shop windows in the Grande Rue blinds his eyes.  He knows not the exquisite and melancholy charm, full of nuances and of the most fragile and evanescent subtleties, which Constantinople holds for those who know her and love her well.

The defense was evidently going to make much of Mrs. Clarke’s passion for the city on the Bosporus.  Daventry had alluded to it more than once, and Bruce Evelin had said, “Mrs. Clarke has always had an extraordinary feeling for places.  If her husband had accused her of a liaison with Eyub, or of an unholy fancy for the forest of Belgrad, we might have been in a serious difficulty.  She had, I know, a regular romance once with the Mosquee Verte at Brusa.”

Evidently she was a woman whom ordinary people would be likely to misunderstand.  Dion sat in his arm-chair trying to understand her.  The effort would help him to forget, or to ignore if he couldn’t forget, what was going on upstairs in the little house.  He pulled hard at his pipe, as an aid to his mind; he sat alone for a long while with Mrs. Clarke.  Sometimes he looked across the Golden Horn from a bit of waste ground in Pera, near to a small cemetery:  it was from there, towards evening, that he had been able to “feel” Stamboul, to feel it as an unique garden city, held by the sea, wooden and frail, marble and enduring.  And somewhere in the great and mysterious city Mrs. Clarke had lived and been adored by the husband who, apparently still adoring, was now trying to get rid of her.

Sometimes Dion heard voices rising from the crowded harbor of the Golden Horn.  They crept up out of the mystery of the evening; voices from the caiques, and from the boats of the fishermen, and from the big sailing vessels which ply to the harbors of the East, and from the steamers at rest near the Galata Bridge, and from the many craft of all descriptions strung out towards the cypress-crowned hill of Eyub.  And Mrs. Clarke, standing beside him, began to explain to him in a low and hoarse voice what these strange cries of the evening meant.

Daventry had mentioned that she had a hoarse voice.

At a little after three o’clock Dion sat forward abruptly in his chair and listened intently.  He fancied he had heard a faint cry.  He waited, surrounded by silence, enveloped by silence.  There was a low drumming in his ears.  Mrs. Clarke had escaped like a phantom.  Stamboul, with its mosques, its fountains, its pigeons and its plane trees, had faded away.  The voices from the Golden Horn were stilled.  The drumming in Dion’s ears grew louder.  He stood up.  He felt very hot, and a vein in his left temple was beating—­not fluttering, but beating hard.