In a hideous way Dion wanted to see her, and yet he shrank from going back to her secretly.  The coming of Jimmy, his relations with the boy, the boy’s hearty affection for him and admiration for him, had roused into intense activity that part of his nature which had always loved, which he supposed always must love, the straight life; the life with morning face and clear, unfaltering eyes; the life which the Hermes suggested, immune from the fret and fever of secret vices and passions, lifted by winged sandals into a region where soul and body were in perfect accord, and where, because of that, there was peace; not a peace of stagnation, but a peace living and intense.  But that part of his nature had led him even now instinctively back to the feet of Rosamund.  And he revolted against such a pilgrimage.

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

Her face had not changed as she whispered the words, and immediately afterwards she had told a lie to her boy, or had implied a lie.  She had made Jimmy believe the thing that was not.  Loving Jimmy, she did not scruple to play a part to him.

Dion ate no dinner that night.  After returning to his rooms and getting out of his riding things into a loose serge suit he went out again and walked along the quay by the water.  He paced up and down, ignoring the many passers-by, the boatmen and watermen who now knew him so well.

He was considering whether he should go to the pavilion at the appointed hour or whether he should leave Buyukderer altogether and not return to it.  This evening he was in the mood to be drastic.  He might go down to Constantinople and finally cast his burden away there, never to take it up again—­the burden of an old love whose chains still hung about him; he might plunge into the lowest depths, into depths where perhaps the remembrance of Rosamund and the early morning would fade away from him, where even Mrs. Clarke would not care to seek for him, although her will was persistent.

He fully realized now her extraordinary persistence, the fierce firmness of character that was concealed by her quiet and generally impersonal manner.  Certainly she had the temperament of a ruler.  He remembered—­it seemed to him with a bizarre abruptness—­the smile on Dumeny’s lips in the Divorce Court when the great case had ended in Mrs. Clarke’s favor.

Did he really know Cynthia Clarke even now?

He walked faster.  Now he saw Hadi Bey before him, self-possessed, firm, with that curiously vivid look which had attracted the many women in Court.

And Jimmy believed in his mother.  Perhaps, until Dion’s arrival in Buyukderer, the boy had had reason in his belief—­perhaps not.  Dion was very uncertain to-night.

A sort of cold curiosity was born in him.  Until now he had accepted Mrs. Clarke’s presentment of herself to the world, which included himself, as a genuine portrait; now he began to recall the long speech of Beadon Clarke’s counsel.  But the man had only been speaking according to his brief, had been only putting forth all the ingenuity and talent which enabled him to command immense fees for his services.  And Mrs. Clarke had beaten him.  The jury had said that she was not what he had asserted her to be.