Again he looked at the distant minarets lifted towards the blue near the way of the sea.  But he said nothing.  She shut her sun umbrella, laid it on the ground beside her, pulled off her gloves and spread them out on her knees slowly.  She seemed to be hesitating; for she looked down and for a moment she knitted her brows.  Then she said;

“Tell me why you came to Constantinople.”

“I couldn’t.”

“If I hadn’t met you in the street by chance, would you have come to see me?”

“I don’t think I should.”

“And yet it was I who willed you to come here.”

Dion did not seem surprised.  There was something remote in him which perhaps could not draw near to such a simple commonplace feeling in that moment.  He had gone out a long way, a very long way, from the simple ordinary emotions which come upon, or beset, normal men living normal lives.

“Did you?” he asked.  “Why?”

“I thought I could do something for you.  I began last night.”

“What?”

“Doing something for you.  I told an acquaintance of mine called Vane, who is attached to the British Embassy, that you were here.”

A fierce flush came into Dion’s face.

“I said you would probably come out to Buyukderer,” she continued, “and that I wanted to bring you to the summer Embassy and to introduce you to the Ambassador and Lady Ingleton.”

Dion sat up and pressed his hands palm downwards on the ground.

“I shall not go.  How could you say that I was here?  You know I had dropped my own name.”

“I gave it back to you deliberately.”

“I think that was very brutal of you,” he said, in a low voice, tense with anger.

“You wanted to be very kind to me when I was in great difficulties.  Circumstances got rather in the way.  That doesn’t matter.  The intention was there, though you were too chivalrous to go very far in action.”

“Chivalrous to whom?”

“To her.”

His face went pale under its sunburn.

“What are you doing?” he said, in a low voice that was almost terrible.  “Where are you taking me?”

“Into the way you must walk in.  Dion—­“—­even in calling him by his Christian name for the first time her voice sounded quite impersonal—­“you’ve done nothing wrong.  You have nothing, absolutely nothing, to be ashamed of.  Kismet!  We have to yield to fate.  If you slink through the rest of your years on earth, if you get rid of your name and hide yourself away, you will be just a coward.  But you aren’t a coward, and you are not going to act like one.  You must accept your fate.  You must take it right into your heart bravely and proudly, or, if you can’t do that, stoically.  I should.”

“If you had killed Jimmy?”

She was silent.

“If you had killed Jimmy?” he repeated, in a hard voice.

“I should never hide myself.  I should always face things.”