“Did you come under the influence of Defetgamm?”

“It’s impossible that you see me!” he said.

“I see you plainly with some part of me, not my eyes.”

He got up from the divan where he had been sitting in the dark and went to the opening of the pavilion.

“Did you come under the influence of Defetgamm?” she repeated.

“You know I didn’t.”

He paused, then added: 

“I nearly didn’t come to-night.”

“And I nearly went down, after I had come up here, without seeing you.  And yet—­we are together again.”

“Why do you want to see me here?  We agreed—­”

“Yes, we agreed; but after to-day in the forest that agreement had to be broken.  When you left me under the trees you looked like a man who was thinking of starting on a very long journey.”

She spoke with a peculiar significance which at once conveyed her full meaning to him.

“No, I shall never do that,” he said.  “If I had been capable of it, I should have done it long ago.”

“Yes?  Let me in.”

He moved.  She slipped into the pavilion and sat down.

“How can you move without making any sound?” he asked somberly.

There had been in her movement a sort of perfection of surreptitiousness that was animal.  He noticed it, and thought that she must surely be accustomed to moving with precaution lest she should be seen or heard.  Rosamund could not move like that.  A life story seemed to him to be faintly traced in Mrs. Clarke’s manner of entering the pavilion and of sitting down on the divan.

He stood beside her in the dark.  She returned no answer to his question.

“You spoke of a journey,” he said.  “The only journey I have thought of making is short enough—­to Constantinople.  I nearly started on it to-night.”

“Why do you want to go to Constantinople?”

He was silent.

“What would you do there?”

“Ugly things, perhaps.”

“Why didn’t you go?  What kept you?”

“I felt that I must ask you something.”

He sat down beside her and took both her hands roughly.  They were dry and burning as if with fever.

“You trick Jimmy,” he said.  “You trick the Ingletons, Vane, all the people here—­”

“Trick!” she interrupted coldly, almost disdainfully.  “What do you mean?”

“That you deceive them, take them in.”

“What about?”

“You know quite well.”

After a pause, which was perhaps—­he could not tell—­a pause of astonishment, she said: 

“Do you really expect me to go about telling every one that I, a lonely woman, separated from my husband, unable to marry again, have met a man whom I care for, and that I’ve been weak enough—­or wicked enough, if you like—­to let him know it?”

Dion felt his cheeks burn in the darkness.  Nevertheless, something drove him on, forced him to push his way hardily through a sort of quickset hedge of reluctance and shame.