The leaves of the plane tree rustled above her head, and she sighed.  As she sat there in the purple darkness she looked like a victim; and for a moment she thought of herself as a victim.

Even that man in the pavilion who was agonizing had said to her that she looked “punished.”  She had been surprised, almost startled, by his flash of discernment.  But she was sure he thought that matter only a question of coloring, of emaciation, of the shapes of features, and of the way eyes were set in the head.

When would the lights far below go out?  She hated her indecision.  It was new to her, and she felt it to be a weakness.  Whatever she had been till now, she had certainly never been a weak woman, except perhaps from the absurd point of view of the Exeter Hall moralist.  Scruples had been strangers to her, a baggage she had not burdened herself with on her journey.

Jimmy!  That night Dion Leith had told her that he had seen the eyes of his boy in the stream that flowed through the Kesstane Dereh.  She looked out into the purple night, and somewhere in the dim vastness full of mysteries and of half revelations she saw the frank and merciless eyes of a young Eton boy.

Should she be governed by them?  Could she submit to the ignorant domination of a child who knew nothing of the complications of human life, nothing of the ways in which human beings are driven by imperious desires, or needs, which have perhaps been sown in ground of flesh and blood by dead parents, or by ancestors laid even with the dust?  Could she immolate herself before the altar of the curious love which grew within her as Jimmy grew?

She was by nature perverse, and it was partly her love for Jimmy which pushed her towards the man who killed his son.  But she had not told that even to herself.  And she never told her secrets to other people, not even when they were women friends!

The lights on the kiosk on the quay went out.  Mrs. Clarke was startled by the leaping up of the darkness which seemed to come from the sea.  For her ears had been closed against the band, and she had forgotten the limit she had mentally put to her indecision.  Eleven o’clock already!  She got up from her seat.  But still she hesitated.  She did not know what she was going to do.  She stood for a moment.  Then she walked softly towards the pavilion.  When she was near to it she stopped and listened.  She did not hear any sound from within.  There was nothing to prevent her from descending to the villa, from writing a note to Dion Leith asking him to leave Buyukderer on the morrow, and from going up to her bedroom.  He would find the note in the hall when he came down; he would go away; she need never see him again.  If she did that it would mean a new life for her, free from complications, a life dedicated to Jimmy, a life deliberately controlled.

It would mean, too, the futile close of a long pursuit; the crushing of an old and hitherto frustrated desire; the return, when Jimmy went back to England after the holidays, to an empty life which she hated, more than hated, a life of horrible restlessness, a life in which the imagination preyed, like a vulture, upon the body.  It would mean the wise, instead of the unwise, life.