“Yes, I am,” replied Mrs. Clarke.  “Stamboul holds me very fast in its curiously inert grip.  It’s a grip like this.”

She held out her small right hand, and he put his rather large and sinewy brown hand into it.  The small hand folded itself upon his in a curious way—­feeble and fierce at the same time, it seemed—­and held him.  The hand was warm, almost hot, and soft, and dry as a fire is dry—­so dry that it hisses angrily if water is thrown on it.

“Now, you are trying to get away,” she said.  “And of course you can, but——­”

Dion made a movement as if to pull away his hand, but Mrs. Clarke retained it.  How was that?  He scarcely knew; in fact he did not know.  She did not seem to be doing anything definite to keep him, did not squeeze or grip his hand, or cling to it; but his hand remained in hers nevertheless.

“There,” she said, letting his hand go.  “That is how Stamboul holds.  Do you understand?”

Mrs. Chetwinde’s vague eyes had been on them during this little episode.  Dion had had time to see that, and to think, “Now, at such a time, no one but an absolutely innocent woman would do in public what Mrs. Clarke is doing to me.”  Mrs. Chetwinde, he felt sure, full of all worldly knowledge, must be thinking the very same thing.

“Yes,” he said.  “I think I do.  But I wonder whether it could hold me like that.”

“I know it could.”

“May I ask how you know?”

“Why not?  Simply by my observation of you.”

Dion remembered the swift grave look of consideration she had given to him as he came into the room.  Something almost combative rose up in him, and he entered into an argument with her, in the course of which he was carried away into the revelation of his mental comparison between Constantinople and Greece, a comparison into which entered a moral significance.  He even spoke of the Christian significance of the Hermes of Olympia.  Mrs. Clarke listened to him with a very still, and apparently a very deep, attention.

“I’ve been to Greece,” she said simply, when he had finished.

“You didn’t feel at all as I did, as I do?”

“You may know Greece, but you don’t know Stamboul,” she said quietly.

“If you had shown it to me I might feel very differently,” Dion said, with a perhaps slightly banal politeness.

And yet he did not feel entirely banal as he said it.

“Come out again and I will show it to you,” she said.

She was almost staring at him, at his chest and shoulders, not at his face, but her eyes still kept their unself-conscious and almost oddly impersonal look.

“You are going back there?”

“Of course, when my case is over.”

Dion felt very much surprised.  He knew that Mrs. Clarke’s husband was accredited to the British Embassy at Constantinople; that the scandal about her was connected with that city and with its neighborhood—­Therapia, Prinkipo, and other near places, that both the co-respondents named in the suit lived there.  Whichever way the case went, surely Constantinople must be very disagreeable to Mrs. Clarke from now onwards.  And yet she was going back there, and apparently intended to take up her life there again.  She evidently either saw or divined his surprise, for she added in the husky voice: