The fair young man spoke to her, bending and looking at her eagerly.  She turned her head slowly, and as if reluctantly towards him, and was evidently listening to what he said, listening with that apparent intentness which was characteristic of her.  She was dressed in black and violet, and wore a large knot of violets in her corsage.  Round her throat was clasped an antique necklace of dull, unshining gold, and dim purple stones, which looked beautiful, but almost weary with age.  Perhaps they had lain for years in some dim bazaar of Stamboul, forgotten under heaps of old stuffs.  Dion thought of them as slumbering, made drowsy and finally unconscious by the fumes of incense and the exhalations from diapered perfume vials.  As he looked at Mrs. Clarke, the bare and shining vision of Greece, evoked by the song Rosamund had just been singing, faded; the peculiar almost intellectually delicate atmosphere of Greece was gone; and he saw for a moment the umber mystery of Stamboul, lifted under tinted clouds of the evening beyond the waters of the Golden Horn; the great rounded domes and tapering speary minarets of the mosques, couchant amid the shadows and the trailing and gauzy smoke-wreaths, a suggestion of dense masses of cypresses, those trees of the night which only in the night can be truly themselves, guarding the innumerable graves of the Turkish cemeteries.

From that moment he connected Mrs. Clarke in his mind with the cypress.  Surely she must have spent very many hours wandering in those enormous and deserted gardens of the dead, where the very dust is poignant, and the cries of the sea come faintly up to Allah’s children crumbling beneath the stone flowers and the little fezes of stone.  Mrs. Clarke must love the cypress, for about her there was an atmosphere which suggested dimness and the gathering shadows of night.

Greece and Stamboul, the land of the early morning and the wonder-city of twilight; Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke, standing there for a moment, in the midst of the shifting crowd, Dion traveled, compared, connected and was alone in the soul’s solitude.

Then Mrs. Chetwinde spoke to him, and he saw Bruce Evelin in the distance going towards Rosamund.

Mrs. Chetwinde told him that Rosamund had made a great advance.

“Now that she’s given up singing professionally she’s singing better than ever.  That Grecian song is the distilled essence of Greece felt in our new way.  For we’ve got our new way of feeling things.  Rosamund tells us she repeated the words to Jennie Stileman, and Jennie had them set by a young Athenian who’s over here studying English.  He catches the butterfly, lets it flutter for a moment in his hand and go.  He doesn’t jab a pin into it as our composers would.  Oh, there’s Cynthia!  I hope she heard the last thing.”

“Yes, she did.”

“Ah?”

“I thought Mrs. Clarke was spending January in Paris.”

“She came back to-day, and sent round to ask if she might come.”