Not once, since Jimmy’s arrival, had she shown to Dion even a trace of the passionate and perverse woman he now knew her to be under her pale mask of self-controlled and very mental composure.  At the hotel in Constantinople she had said to Dion, “All the time Jimmy’s at Buyukderer we’ll just be friends.”  Now she seemed utterly to have forgotten that they had ever been what the world calls lovers, that they had been involved in scenes of passion, and brutality, and exhaustion, that they had torn aside the veil of reticence behind which women and men hide from each other normally the naked truth of what they can be.  She treated Dion casually, though very kindly, as a friend, and never, even by the swift glance or a lingering touch of her fingers, reminded him of the fires that burned within her.  Even when she was alone with him, when Jimmy ran off, perhaps, unexpectedly in the wake of a passing caprice, she never departed from her role of the friend who was before all things a mother.

So perfect was her hypocrisy, so absolutely natural in its manifestation, that sometimes, looking at her, Dion could scarcely forbear from thinking that she had forgotten all about their illicit connexion; that she had put it behind her forever; that she was one of those happy people who possess the power of slaying the past and blotting the murder out of their memories.

That scene between them in Constantinople on the eve of Jimmy’s arrival—­had it ever taken place?  Had she really ever tried to strike him on the mouth?  Had he caught her wrist in a grip of iron?  It seemed incredible.

And if he was involved in a great hypocrisy since the boy’s arrival he was released from innumerable lesser hypocrisies.  His life at present was what it seemed to be to the little world on the Bosporus.

Just at first he did not realize that though Mrs. Clarke genuinely loved her son she was not too scrupulous to press his unconscious services in aid of her hypocrisy.

The holiday tutor whom she ought to have got out from England to improve the shining hour on Jimmy’s behalf was replaced by Dion in the eyes of Mrs. Clarke’s world.

One day she said to Dion: 

“Will you do me a good turn?”

“Yes, if I can.”

“It may bore you.”

“What is it?”

“Read a little bit with Jimmy sometimes, will you?  He’s abominably ignorant, and will never be a scholar, but I should like him just to keep up his end at school.”

“But I haven’t got any school-books.”

“I have.  He’s specially behindhand with his Greek.  His report tells me that.  If you’ll do a little Greek grammar and construing with him in the mornings now and them, I shall be tremendously grateful.  You see, owing to my miserable domestic circumstances, Jimmy is practically fatherless.”

“And you ask me to take his father’s place!” was in Dion’s mind.

But she met his eyes so earnestly and with such sincerity that he only said: