Dion had thought of the cantering horse which he had heard in the lane as he sat beside the stream.  He felt sure it was Selim he had heard.  Mrs. Clarke did not ask the reason for his questions.  She seemed to him a totally incurious woman.  Presently they descended to the house, and he wished her good-by.  She did not ask him to stay any longer, did not propose any expedition, or any day or hour for another meeting.  She just let him go with a grave, and almost abstracted good-by.

When he was alone he realized something; she had assumed that he was going to make a long stay in Buyukderer.  Once, in speaking of the foliage, she had said, “You will notice in September——­” Why was she so certain he would stay on?  There was nothing to prevent him from going away by the steamer on the morrow.  She did nothing to curb his freedom; she seemed almost indifferent to the fact of his presence there; yet she had told him he would come, and was evidently certain that he would stay.

He wondered a little, but only a little, about her will.  Then his mind returned to an old haunt in which continually it wandered, obsessed by a horror that seemed already ancient, the walled garden at Welsley in which he had searched in the dark for a fleeing woman.  Perpetually he heard the movement of that woman’s dress as she disappeared into the darkness, and the sound of a door, the door of his own home, being locked against him to give her time to escape from him.  That sound had cut his life in two.  He saw, as he had seen many times in the past, the falling downwards of edges that bled, the edges of his severed life.

And he forgot the garden of the Villa Hafiz, the pavilion which stood on the hill looking over the sea to Asia, the grave woman who had told him, indifferently, that he could go to it when he would.

Nevertheless on the following day he found himself at the garden gate; he rang the bell; he was admitted by Osman, the placidly smiling gardener, and he ascended to the pavilion.  No one was there.  He stayed for three hours, and nobody came to interrupt him.  Down below the wooden villa held closely the secret of its life.  Once, as he gazed down on it, he wondered for a moment about Mrs. Clarke, how she passed her hours without a companion, which she was doing just then.  The siren of a steamer sounded in the bay.  He went into the pavilion.  On one of the coffee-tables he found lying a small thin book bound in white vellum.  He took it up and read the name in gold letters:  “The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi.”  It was the book he had found Beattie reading on the night when Robin was born, on the night when Bruce Evelin and Guy had discussed Mrs. Clarke’s divorce case and Mrs. Clarke.  He shuddered in the warmth of the pavilion.  Then resolutely he picked the book up.  At the beginning, after some blank pages, there was a portrait of Sir Richard Burton.  Dion looked at the strong, tragic face, with its burning expression, for a long time.  Then he stretched himself on one of the divans and began to read the book.