“I shall stay another night at the hotel,” she said to Dion.  “Will you drive up with me?”

He assented.  When they reached the hotel he said: 

“May I come in for a few minutes?”

“Of course.”

When they were in the dim, rather bare room with the white walls, between which the fierce noises from the Grande Rue found a home, he said: 

“I feel before I leave I must speak about what you did last night, the message you gave to Vane of our Embassy.  I dare say you are right and that I ought to face things.  But no one can judge for a man in my situation, a man who’s had everything cut from under him.  I haven’t ended it.  That proves I’ve got a remnant of something—­you needn’t call it strength—­left in me.  Since you’ve told my name, I’ll take it back.  Perhaps it was cowardly to give it up.  I believe it was.  Robin might think so, if he knew.  And he may know things.  But I can’t meet casual people.”

“I’m afraid I did what I did partly for myself,” she said, taking off her little hat and laying it, with her gloves, on a table.

“For yourself?  Why?”

“I’ll explain to-morrow.  I shall see you before I go.  Come for me at ten, will you, and we’ll drive to Stamboul.  I’ll tell you there.”

“Please tell me now, if you’re not tired after being out all day.”

“I’m never tired.”

“Once Mrs. Chetwinde told me that you were made of iron.”

Mrs. Clarke sent him a curious keen glance of intense and almost lambent inquiry, but he did not notice it.  The strong interest that notices things was absent from him.  Would it ever be in him again?

“I suppose I have a great deal of stamina,” she said casually.  “Well, sit down, and I’ll try to explain.”

She lit a cigarette and sat on a divan in the far corner of the large room, between one of the windows and the door which led into the bedroom.  Dion sat down, facing her and the noise from the Grande Rue.  He wondered for a moment why she had chosen a place so close to the window.

“I had a double reason for doing what I did,” she said.  “One part unselfish, the other not.  I’ll be very frank.  I willed that you should come here.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I wanted to see you.  I wanted to help you.  You don’t think I, or any one, can do that.  You think everything is over for you—­”

“I know it is,” he interrupted, in a voice which sounded cold and dull and final.

“You think that.  Any man like you, in your situation, would think that.  Let us leave it for the moment.  I wished you to come here, and willed you to come here.  For some reason you have come.  You didn’t let me know you were here, but, by chance as it seems, we met.  I don’t mean to lose sight of you.  I intend that you shall come either to Buyukderer, or to some place on the Bosporus not far off that’s endurable in the summer, and that you shall stay there for a time.”