“How is Jimmy?” he asked.

“Brilliantly well.  He’s been at Eton for a long time, doing dreadfully at work—­he’s a born dunce—­and splendidly at play.  How he would appreciate you as you are now!”

She spoke with a gravity that was both careless and intense.  He sat down near her.  In his letter asking to see her he had not told her that he had a special object in writing to visit her.  By her glance at Brayfield’s letter he knew that she had gathered it.

They talked of Jimmy for a few minutes; then Dion said: 

“My regiment was brigaded with Lord Brayfield’s for a time in South Africa.  I was in the action in which he was shot, poor chap.  He saw me and remembered that I was a—­a friend of yours.  When he was dying he wanted to see me.  I was sent for, and he gave me this letter for you.  He asked me to give it to you myself if I came back.”

He bent down to her with the letter.

“Thank you,” she said, and she took it without looking at all surprised, and with her habitual composed gravity.  “There are Turkish cigarettes in that ivory box,” she added, looking at a box on a table close by.

“Thank you.”

As Dion turned to get a cigarette he heard her tearing Brayfield’s envelope.

“Will you give me one?” said the husky voice.

Without saying anything he handed to her the box, and held a lighted match to her cigarette when it was between the pale lips.  She smoked gently as she opened and read Brayfield’s letter.  When she had finished it—­evidently it was not a long letter—­she put it back into the envelope, laid it down on the green divan and said: 

“What do you think of this room?  It was designed and arranged by Monsieur de Vaupre, a French friend of mine.”

“By a man!” said Dion, irrepressibly.

“Who hasn’t been in the South African War.  Do you like it?”

“I don’t think I do, but I admire it a good deal.”

He was looking at the letter lying on the divan, and Brayfield was before him, tormented and dying.  He had always disliked the look of Brayfield, but he had felt almost a sort of affection for him when he was dying.  Foolishly perhaps, Dion wanted Mrs. Clarke to say something kind about Brayfield now.

“If you admire it, why don’t you like it?” she asked.  “A person—­I could understand; but a room!”

He looked at her and hesitated to acknowledge a feeling at which he knew something in her would smile; then he thought of Rosamund and of Little Cloisters and spoke out the truth.

“I think it’s an unwholesome-looking room.  It looks to me as if it had been thought out and arranged by somebody with a beastly, though artistic, mind.”

“The inner room is worse,” she said.

But she did not offer to show it to him, nor did she disagree with his view.  He even had the feeling that his blunt remark had pleased her.

He asked her about Constantinople.  She lived there, she told him, all through the spring and autumn, and spent the hottest months on the Bosphorus.