“Where are you staying?”

“At Hughes’s Hotel.”

“I never heard of it.”

“It’s in Brusa Street.  It’s cheap.”

“And horrible,” she thought.

But she did not say so.

“I have only been here three days,” Dion added.

“Do you remember that I once said to you I knew you would come back to Constantinople?”

For a moment his face was distorted.  When she saw that she looked away gravely, at the glittering shops and at the Perotes who were passing by with the slow and lounging walk which they affect in the Grande Rue.  Presently she heard him say: 

“You were right.  It was all arranged.  It was all planned out.  Even then I believe I knew it would be so, that I should come back here.”

“Why have you come?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, and his voice, which had been hard and fierce, became suddenly dull.

“He really believes that,” she thought.

“Here is the hotel,” she said.  “I’m all alone.  Jimmy has been out, but has had to go back to Eton.  I wish you had seen him.”

“Oh no!” said Dion, almost passionately.

They went up in a lift, worked by a Montenegrin boy with a big round forehead, to her sitting-room on the second floor.  It was large, bare and clean, with white walls and awnings at the windows.  She rang the bell.  A Corsican waiter came and she ordered tea.  The roar of the street noises penetrated into the shadowy room through the open windows, and came to Dion like heat.  He remembered the silence of Claridge’s.  Suddenly his head began to swim.  It seemed to him that his life, all of it that he had lived till that moment, was spinning round him, and that, as it spun, it gave out a deafening noise and glittered.  He sat down on a chair which was close to a small table, laid his arms on the table, and hid his face against them.  Still the deafening noise continued.  The sum of it was surely made up of the uproar of the Grand Rue with the uproar of his spinning life added to it.  He saw yellow balls ringed with pale blue rapidly receding from his shut eyes.

Mrs. Clarke looked at him for a moment; then she went into the adjoining bedroom and shut the door behind her.  She did not come back till the waiter knocked and told her that tea was ready.  Then she opened the door.  She had taken off her hat and gloves, and looked very white and cool, and very composed.

Dion was standing near the windows.  The waiter, who had enormously thick mustaches, and who evidently shaved in the evening instead of in the morning, was going out at the farther door.  He shut it rather loudly.

“Every one makes a noise in Pera.  It’s de rigueur,” said Mrs. Clarke, coming to the tea-table.

“Do you know,” said Dion, “I used to think you looked punished?”

“Punished—­I!”

There was a sudden defiance in her voice which he had never heard in it before.  He came up to the table.