“No, I don’t expect absurdities.  I am not such a fool.  But—­but you do it so well!”

“Do what well?”

“Everything connected with deception.  You are such a mistress of it.”

“Well?”

“Isn’t that rather strange?”

“Do you expect a woman like me, a woman who can’t pretend to stupidity, and who has lived for years in the diplomatic world, to blunder in what she undertakes?”

“No, I don’t.  But you are too competent.”

He spoke with hard determination, but his cheeks were still burning.

“It’s impossible to be too competent.  If I make up my mind that a thing must be done I resolve to do it thoroughly and to do it well.  I despise blunderers and women who are afraid of what they do.  I despise those who give themselves and others away.  I cared for you.  I saw you needed me and I gave myself to you.  I am not sorry I did it, not a bit sorry.  I had counted the cost before I did it.”

“Counted the cost?  But what cost is there?  Neither of us loses anything.”

“I risk losing almost everything a woman cares for.  I don’t want to dwell upon it.  I detest women who indulge in reproaches, or who try to make men value them by pointing out how much they stand to lose by giving themselves.  But you are so strange to-night.  You have attacked me.  I don’t know why.”

“I’ve been walking on the quay and thinking.”

“What about?”

“You!”

“Go on.”

“I’ve been thinking that, as you take in Jimmy and all the people here so easily, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be taking me in too.”

In the dark a feeling was steadily growing within him that his companion was playing with him as he knew she had played with others.

“I’m forced to deceive the people here and my boy.  My relation with you obliges me to do that.  But nothing forces me to deceive you.  I have been sincere with you.  Ever since I met you in the street in Pera I’ve been sincere, even blunt.  I should think you must have noticed it.”

“I have.  In some ways you are blunt, but in many you aren’t.”

“What is it exactly that you wish to know?”

For a moment Dion was silent.  In the darkness of the pavilion he saw Dumeny’s lips smiling faintly, Hadi Bey’s vivid, self-possessed eyes, the weak mouth of Brayfield and his own double.  Was he a member of an ugly brotherhood, or did he stand alone?  He wanted to know, yet he felt that he could not put such a hideous question to his companion.

“Tell me exactly what it is,” she said.  “Don’t be afraid.  I wish to be quite sincere with you, though you think I don’t.  It is no pleasure to me to deceive people.  What I do in the way of deception I do in self-defense.  Circumstances often push us into doing what we don’t enjoy doing.  But you and I ought to be frank with one another.”

Her hands tightened on his.