While Mrs. Clarke was sitting by the fountain in the garden of the Villa Hafiz, Dion was sleepless in his bedroom at the Hotel Belgrad.  He was considering whether he should end his life or whether he should change the way of his life.  He was not conscious of struggle.  He did not feel excited.  But he did feel determined.  The strength he possessed was asserting itself.  It had slumbered within him; it had not died.

Either he would die now or he would genuinely live, would lay a grip on life somehow.

If he chose to die how would Mrs. Clarke take the news of his death?  He imagined some one going to the Villa Hafiz from the Hotel Belgrad with a message:  “The English gentleman Mr. Vane took the room for has just killed himself.  What is to be done with the body?” What would Mrs. Clarke say?  What would she look like?  What would she do?  He remembered the sign of the cross she had made in the flat in Knightsbridge.  With that sign she had dismissed the soul of Brayfield into the eternities.  Would she dismiss the soul of Dion Leith with the sign of the cross?

If she heard of his death, Rosamund would of course be unmoved, or would, perhaps, feel a sense of relief.  And doubtless she would offer up to God a prayer in which his name would be mentioned.  Women who loved God were always ready with a prayer.  If it came too late, never mind!  It was a prayer, and therefore an act acceptable to God.

But Mrs. Clarke?  Certainly she would not pray about it.  Dion had a feeling that she would be angry.  He had never seen her angry, but he felt sure she could be enraged in a frozen, still, terrible way.  If he died perhaps a thread would snap, the thread of her design.  For she had some purpose in connexion with him.  She had willed him to come to this place; she was willing him to remain in it.  Apparently she wished to raise him out of the dust.  He thought of Eyub, of Mrs. Clarke walking beside him on the dusty road.  She had seemed very much at home in the dust.  But she was not like Rosamund; she was not afraid of a speck of dust falling upon the robe of her ideals.  What was Mrs. Clarke’s purpose in connexion with him?  He did not pursue that question, but dismissed it, incurious still in his misery, which had become more active since his strength had stirred out of sleep.  If he did not die how was he going to live?  He had lived by the affections.  Could he live by the lusts?  He had no personal ambitions; he had no avarice to prompt him to energy; he was not in love with himself.  Suddenly he realized the value of egoism to the egoist, and that he was very poor because he was really not an egoist by nature.  If he had been, if he were, perhaps things would have gone better for him in the past, would be more endurable now.  But he had lived not to himself but to another.

He told himself that to do that was the rankest folly.  At any rate he would never do that again.  But the unselfishness of love had become a habit with him.  Even in his extreme youth he had instinctively saved up, moved, no doubt, by an inherent desire to have as large a gift as possible ready when the moment for giving came.