She stood there.  With one hand she felt the little watch which Dumeny had given her.  It was cold to the touch of her dry, hot hand.  She felt the rough emerald set in the back of it.  She and Dumeny had found that in the bazaars together, in those bazaars which Dumeny changed from Eastern shops into the Arabian Nights.  Dion Leith could never do such a thing for her.  But perhaps she could do it for him.  The thought of that lured her.  She stood at the street corner; it was very dark and still; she knew that the strange ways radiated from the place where she stood, but there was no one to go with her down them.  She waited—­waited.  And then she saw far off the gleam of the torch from which spring colored fires.  It flitted through the darkness; it hovered.  The gleam of it lit up, like a goblin light, the beginnings of the strange ways.  She saw shadowy forms slipping away stealthily into their narrow and winding distances; she saw obscure stairways, leaning balconies full of soft blackness.  She divined the rooms beyond.  And whispering voices came to her ears.

All the time she was feeling the watch with its rough uncut emerald.

Government came upon her.  She felt, as often before, a great hand catch her in a grip of iron.  She ceased to resist.

Still holding the watch, she went to the opening in the pavilion.

The hanging lamp had gone out.  For a moment she could only see darkness in the interior.  It looked empty.  There was no sound within.  Could the man she had been thinking about, debating about, have slipped away while she was sitting under the plane tree?  She had been thinking so deeply that she had not heard the noise of the band on the quay; she might not have heard his footsteps.  While she had been considering whether she should leave him perhaps he had fled from her.

This flashing thought brought her back at once to her true and irrevocable self, and she was filled instantly with fierce determination and a cold intense anger.  Jimmy was forgotten.  He was dead to her at that moment.  She leaned forward, peering into the darkness.

“Dion!” she said.  “Dion!”

There was no answer, but she saw something stir within, something low down.  He was there—­or something was there, something alive.  She went into the pavilion, and knelt down by it.

“Dion!” she said.

He raised himself on the divan, and turned on his side.

“Why are you kneeling down?” he said.  “Don’t kneel.  I hate to see a woman kneeling, and I know you never pray.  Get up.”

He spoke in a voice that was new to her.  It seemed to her hot and hard.  She obeyed him at once and got up from her knees.

“What did you mean just now when you asked me whether I couldn’t mingle my life with an unhappy life?  Sit here beside me.”

She sat down on the edge of the divan very near to him.

“What do you suppose I meant?”