As the steamer on which he traveled voyaged towards the Black Sea, Dion paced up and down the deck and looked always at the shore of Asia.  That line of hills represented to him the unknown.  If he could only lose himself in Asia and forget!  But there was nothing passionate in his longing.  It was only a gray desire born in a broken mind and a broken nature.

Once during the voyage he thought of Robin.  Did Robin know where he was, whither he was going?  Since Rosamund had utterly rejected him, strangely his dead boy and he had at moments seemed to Dion to be near to each other encompassed by the same thick darkness.  Even once he had seemed to see Robin groping, like one lost and vainly seeking after light.  His vagueness was broken upon sometimes by fantastic visions.  But to-day he had no consciousness at all of Robin.  The veil of death which hung between him and the child he had slain seemed to be of stone, absolutely impenetrable.  And all his visions had left him.

Palaces and villas came into sight and vanished; Yildiz upon its hill scattered among the trees of its immense park; Dolmabaghcheh stretched out along the water’s edges, with its rose-beds before it; and its gravely staring sentinels; Beylerbey Serai on the Asian shore, with its marble quay and its terraced gardens, not far from Kandili and the sweet waters of Asia.  Presently the Giant’s Mountain appeared staring across the water at Buyukderer.  The prow of the steamer was headed for the European shore.  Dion saw the bay opening to receive them under its wooded hills which are pierced by the great valley.  It stretched its arms as if in welcome, and very calm was the water between them.  Here the wind failed.  Along the shore were villas, and gardens rising in terraces, where roses, lemon trees, laurels grew in almost rank abundance.  Across the water came the soft sound of music, a song of Greece lifted above the thrumming of guitars.  And something in the aspect of this Turkish haven, sheltered from the winds of that Black Sea which had come into sight off Kirech Burnu, something in the song which floated over the water, struck deep into Dion’s heart.  Abruptly he was released from his frozen detachment; tears sprang into his eyes, memories surged up in his mind—­memories of a land not very far from this land; of the maidens of the Porch; of the hill of Drouva kept by the stars and the sleeping winds; of Zante dreaming of the sunset; of Hermes keeping watch over the child in the green recesses of Elis.

“Why do I come here?  What have I to do here, or in any place dedicated to beauty and to peace?”

His brown face twitched, and the wrinkles which sprayed out from his eyelids over his thin cheeks worked till the network of them seemed to hold an independent and furious life.

“If I were a happy traveler as I once was!”

The thought pierced him, and was followed immediately by the remembrance of some words spoken by Mrs. Clarke: