“Of course I’ll read with him in the mornings.”

Despite the ardent protests to Jimmy Dion kept his promise.  Soon Mrs. Clarke’s numerous acquaintances knew of the morning hours of study.  She had happened to tell Sir Carey Ingleton about Jimmy’s backwardness in book-learning and Mr. Leith’s kind efforts to “get him on during the holidays.”  Sir Carey had spoken of it to Cyril Vane.  The thing “got about.”  The name of Dion Leith began to be connected rather with Jimmy Clarke than with Mrs. Clarke.  Continually Dion and Jimmy were seen about together.  Mrs. Clarke, meanwhile, often went among her friends alone, and when they asked about Jimmy she would say: 

“Oh, he’s gone off somewhere with Mr. Leith.  I don’t know where.  Mr. Leith’s a regular boy’s man and was a great chum of Jimmy’s in London; used to show him how to box and that sort of thing.  It’s partly for Jimmy that he came to Buyukderer.  They read together in the mornings.  Mr. Leith’s getting Jimmy on in Greek.”

Sometimes she would add: 

“Mr. Leith loves boys, and since his own child died so sadly I think he’s taken to Jimmy more than ever.”

Soon people began to talk of Dion Leith as “Jimmy Clarke’s holiday tutor.”  Once, when this was said in Lady Ingleton’s drawing-room at Therapia, she murmured: 

“I don’t think it quite amounts to that.  Mr. Leith has never been a schoolmaster.”

And there she left it, with a faint smile in which there was just the hint of an almost cynical sadness.

Since the trip to Brusa on the “Leyla” she had thought a great deal about Dion Leith, and she was very sorry for him in a rather unusual way.  Out of her happiness with her husband she seemed to draw an instinctive knowledge of what such a nature as Dion Leith’s wanted and of the extent of his loss.  Once she said to Sir Carey, with a sort of intensity such as she seldom showed: 

“Good women do terrible things sometimes.”

“Such as——?” said Sir Carey, looking at her almost with surprise in his eyes.

“I think Mrs. Leith has done a terrible thing to her husband.”

“Perhaps she loved the child too much.”

“Even love can be almost abominable,” said Lady Ingleton.  “If we had a child, and you had done what poor Dion Leith has done, do you think I should have cast you out of my life?”

“But—­are you a good woman?” he asked her, smiling.

“No, or you should never have bothered about me.”

He touched her hand.

“When you do that,” Lady Ingleton said, “I could almost cry over poor Dion Leith.”

Sir Carey bent down and kissed her with a very tender gallantry.

“You and I are secretly sentimentalists, Delia,” he said.  “That is why we are so happy together.”

“Why doesn’t Dion Leith go to England?” she exclaimed, almost angrily.

“Perhaps England seems full of his misery.  Besides, his wife is there.”