“Defetgamm!  What does that mean?”

“Dispeller of care.”

He stood looking at her for a moment; then, without another word, he turned quickly away and disappeared among the trees.

Jimmy slept with his face hidden, and Mrs. Clarke, with wide-open eyes, sat motionless staring into the forest.

When they reached the Villa Hafiz late in the afternoon Dion helped Mrs. Clarke to dismount.  As she slid down lightly from the saddle she whispered, scarcely moving her lips: 

“The pavilion to-night eleven.  You’ve got the key.”

She patted Selim’s glossy black neck.

“Come, Jimmy!” she said.  “Say good night to Mr. Leith.  I’m sure he’s tired and has had more than enough of us for to-day.  We’ll give him a rest from us till to-morrow.”

And Jimmy bade Dion good-by without any protest.

As Dion rode off Mrs. Clarke did not turn to look after him.  She had not troubled even to question him with her eyes.  She had assumed that he would do what she wanted.  Would he do that?

At first he believed that he would not go.  He had been away in the forest with his misery for nearly two hours, struggling among the shadows of the trees.  Jimmy had seen in the pavilion that morning that his “holiday tutor” was strangely ill at ease, and had discussed the matter with his mater, and asked her why on earth the sight of a page of Greek grammar should make a fellow stand staring as if he were confronted by a ghost.  But Jimmy had no conception of what Dion had been through in the forest, where happy Greeks and Armenians were lazily enjoying the empty hours of summer, forgetting yesterday, and serenely careless of to-morrow.

In the forest Dion had fought with an old love of which he began to be angrily ashamed, with a love which was now his greatest enemy, a thing contemptible, inexplicable.  In the pavilion that morning it had suddenly risen up before him strong, intense, passionate.  It seemed irresistible.  But he was almost furiously resolved not merely to resist it, but to crush it down, to break it in pieces, or to drive it finally out of his life.

And he had fought with it alone in the forest which the Armenians call Defetgamm.  And in the forest something—­some adherent, it seemed—­had whispered to him, “To kill your enemy you must fill your armory with weapons.  The woman who came to you when you were neither in one world nor in the other is a weapon.  Why have you ceased to use her?”

And now, as if she had heard the voice of that adherent, and had known of the struggle in the forest, the woman herself had suddenly broken through the reserve she had imposed upon them both since the coming of her son.