“Humanity!” he repeated, looking down.  “Ah!” He sighed deeply.

He raised his head.

“And if some one you loved killed your Jimmy?”

“As you——?”

“Yes—­yes?”

“I should love him all the more because of the misery added to him,” she said firmly.  “There’s only one thing a really great love can’t forgive.”

“What is it?”

“The deliberate desire and intention to hurt it and degrade it.”

“I never had that.”

“No.”

“Then—­then you think she never loved me at all?”

But Mrs. Clarke did not answer that question.

The daylight was rapidly failing.  She seemed almost to be fading away in the dimness and in the noises of evening which rose from the Grande Rue.  Yet something of her remained and was very definite, so definite that even Dion, broken on the wheel and indifferent to casual influences as few men are ever indifferent, felt it almost powerfully—­the concentration of her will, the unyielding determination of her mind, active and intense behind the pale mask of her physical body.

He turned away and went to the window farthest from her.  He leaned out to the Grande Rue.  Above his head was the sloping awning.  It seemed to him to serve as a sounding-board to the fierce noises of the mongrel city.

“Start again!”

Surely among the voices of the city now filling his ears there was a husky voice which had said that.

Had Mrs. Clarke spoken?

“Start again.”

But not on the familiar road!  To do that would be impossible.  If there were indeed any new life for him it must be an utterly different life from any he had known.

He had tried the straight life of unselfishness, purity, fidelity and devotion—­devotion to a woman and also to a manly ideal.  That life had convulsively rejected him.  Had he still within him sufficient energy of any kind to lay hold on a new life?

For a moment he saw before him under the awning Robin’s eyes as they had been when his little son was dying in his arms.

He drew back from the street.  The sitting-room was empty, but the door between it and the bedroom was open.  No doubt Mrs. Clarke had gone in there to put away her hat.  As he looked at the door the Russian maid, whom he had seen at Park Side, Knightsbridge, came from the inner room.

“Madame hopes Monsieur will call to see her to-morrow before she starts to Buyukderer,” she said, with her strong foreign accent.

“Thank you,” said Dion.

As he went out the maid shut the bedroom door.

CHAPTER III

Two days later Mrs. Clarke sat with the British Ambassadress in the British Palace at Therapia, a building of wood with balconies looking over the Bosporus.  She was alone with Lady Ingleton in the latter’s sitting-room, which was filled with curious Oriental things, with flowers, and with little dogs of the Pekinese breed, who lay about in various attitudes of contentment, looking serenely imbecile, and as if they were in danger of water on the brain.