“And you know it too,” she said.

“I may go, nevertheless.  Who is to prevent me?”

She got up, went to the other side of the fountain, and put her hand behind his arm, after a quick glance round to make sure that no eyes were watching her.  She pushed her hand down gently and held his wrist.

“Do you realize how badly you sometimes treat me?” she said.

“Yes.”

She pulled his soft cuff with her little fingers.

“I do realize it, but I can’t help it.  I have to do it.”

“If I didn’t know that I should mind it much more,” she said.

“I never thought I had it in me to treat a woman as I sometimes treat you.  I used—­to be so different.”

“You were too much the other way.  But yours is a nature of extremes.  That’s partly why I——­”

She did not finish the sentence.

“Then you don’t resent my beastliness to you?” he asked.

“Not permanently.  Sometimes you are nice to me.  But if you were ever to treat me badly when Jimmy was with me, I don’t think I could ever forgive you.”

“I dread his coming,” said Dion.  “I had much better go.  If you don’t let me go, you may regret it.”

In saying that he acknowledged the power she had already obtained over him, a power from which he did not feel sure that he could break away, although he was acutely aware of it and sometimes almost bitterly resented it.  Mrs. Clarke knew very well that most men can only be held when they do not know that they are held, but Dion, in his present condition, was not like any other man she had known.  More than once in the earliest stages of their intimacy she had had really to fight to keep him near her, and so he knew how arbitrary she could be when her nature was roused.

Sometimes he hated her with intensity, for she had set herself to destroy the fabric of his spirit, which not even Rosamund had been able entirely to destroy by her desertion of him.  Sometimes he felt a sort of ugly love of her, because she was the agent through whom he was learning to get rid of all that Rosamund had most prized in him.  It was as if he called out to her, “Help me to pull down, to tear down, all that I built up in the long years till not one stone is left upon another.  What I built up was despised and rejected.  I won’t look upon it any more.  I’ll raze it to the ground.  But I can’t do that alone.  Come, you, and help me.”  And she came and she helped in the work of destruction, and in an ugly, horrible way he loved her for it sometimes, as a criminal might love an assistant in his crime.