trimmed with a broad riband of old gold.  Dion remembered that he had thought of her once as a vision seen in water.  Now he was with her in the staring definite clearness of a land dried by the heats of summer and giving to them its dust.  And she was at home in this aridity.  In the dust he was aware of the definiteness of her.  Since the blackness had overtaken him people had meant to him less than shadows gliding on a wall mean to a joyous man.  Often he had observed them, even sharply and with a sort of obstinate persistence; he had been trying to force them to become real to him.  Invariably he had failed in his effort.  Mrs. Clarke was real to him as she walked in silence beside him, between the handsome railed-in mausoleums which line the empty roads from the water’s edge almost to the mosque of the Conqueror.  A banal phrase came to his lips, “You are in your element here.”  But he held it back, remembering that they walked in the midst of dust.

Leaving the mosque they ascended the hill and passed the Tekkeh of the dancing dervishes.  All around them were the Turkish graves with their leaning headstones, or their headstones fallen and lying prone in the light flaky earth above the smoldering corpses of the dead.  Here and there tight bunches of flowers were placed upon the graves.  Gaunt shadows from old cypresses fell over some of them, defining the sunlight.  Below was the narrowing sea, the shallow north-west arm of the Golden Horn, which stretches to Kiathareh, where are the sweet waters of Europe, and to Kiahat Haneh.

“We’ll sit here,” said Mrs. Clarke presently.

And she sat down, with the folding ease almost of an Oriental, on the warm earth, and leaned against the fissured trunk of a cypress.

Casually she had seemed to choose the resting-place, but she had chosen it well.  More times than she could count she had come to that exact place, had leaned against that cypress and looked down the Golden Horn to the divided city, one-half of which she loved as she loved few things, one-half of which she endured for the sake of the other.

“From here,” she said to Dion, “I can feel Stamboul.”

He had lain down near to her sideways and rested his cheek on his hand.  The lower half of his body was in sunshine, but the cypress threw its shadow over his head and shoulders.  As Mrs. Clarke spoke he looked down the Golden Horn to the Turkish city, and his eyes were held by the minarets of its mosques.  Seldom had he looked at a minaret without thinking of prayer.  He thought of prayer now, and then of his dead child, of the woman he had called wife, and of the end of his happiness.  The thought came to him: 

“I was kept safe in the midst of the dangers of war for a reason; and that reason was that I might go back to England and kill my son.”

And yet every day men went up into these minarets and called upon other men to bow themselves and pray.

God is great. . . .