The wind died away.  It had only been a capricious gust, a wandering guest of the morning.  Down below in the Bay of Buyukderer the waters were quiet; the row boats lay still at the edge of the quay; the small yachts, with their sails furled, slept at their moorings.  The wind had been like a summons, a sudden tug at him as of a hand saying, with its bones, its muscles, its nerves, its sinews, “Come with me!”

Once before he had felt something like that in a London Divorce Court, but it had been fainter, subtler and perhaps warmer.  The memory of his curiosity about the unwise life returned to him, somehow linked with the wandering wind.  In his months of the living death he had often looked on at it in the cities through which he had drifted, but he had never taken part in it.  He had been emptied of the force to do that by his misery.  Now he was conscious of force though his misery was not lessened, seemed to him even to have increased.  He had often been dulled by grief; now he felt cruelly alive.

He went down to the sea, found the Albanian boatman with whom he had rowed on his first day at Buyukderer, took his boat out and bathed from it.  The current beyond the bay was strong.  He had a longing to let it take him whither it would.  If only he could find an influence to which he could give himself, an influence which would sweep him away!

If only he could get rid of his long fidelity!

When he climbed dripping, and with his hair plastered down on his forehead, into the boat, the Albanian stared at him as if in surprise.

“What’s the matter?” said Dion in French, when he was dry and getting into his clothes.

But the man only replied: 

“Monsieur tres fort molto forte, moi aussi tres fort.  Monsieur venez sempre con moi!”

And he smiled with the evident intention of being agreeable to a valuable client.  Dion did not badger him with any more questions.  As the boat touched the quay he told the man to be ready to start for Therapia that day at any time after three o’clock.

When he reached the summer villa of the Ambassador he was informed by a tall English footman that Lady Ingleton was at home.  She received Dion in the midst of the little dogs, but after he had been with her for a very few minutes she rang for a servant and banished them.  Secretly she was deeply interested in this man who had killed his son, but she gave Dion no reason to suppose that she was concentrating on him.  Her lazy, indifferent manner was perfectly natural, but perhaps now and then she was more definitely kind than usual; and she managed somehow to show Dion that she was ready to be his friend.

“If you stay long we must take you over one day on the yacht to Brusa,” she said presently.  “Cynthia loves Brusa, and so does my husband.  We went over there once with Pierre Loti.  Cynthia and poor Beadon Clarke were of the party, I remember.  We had a delightful time.”