“Nor look it.  But you do.  Well, I suppose I haven’t many scruples except about myself.  And I have been trained in the let-other-people-alone tradition.  Besides, Cynthia Clarke never told me anything.  No one has told me.  Being a not stupid woman, I just know what she is.  I’ll put it brutally, Mr. Robertson.  She is a huntress of men.  That is what she lives for.  But she deceives people into believing that she is a purely mental woman.  All the men whom she doesn’t hunt believe in her.  Even women believe in her.  She has good friends among women.  They stick to her.  Why?  Because she intends them to.  She has a conquering will.  And she never tells a secret—­especially if it is her own.  In her last sin—­for it is a sin—­I have been a sort of accomplice.  She meant me to be one and”—­Lady Ingleton slightly shrugged her shoulders—­“I yielded to her will.  I don’t know why.  I never know why I do what Cynthia Clarke wishes.  There are people like that; they just get what they want, because they want it with force, I suppose.  Most of us are rather weak, I think.  Cynthia Clarke hunted Dion Leith in his misery, and I helped her.  Being an ambassadress I have social influence on the Bosporus, and I used it for Cynthia.  I knew from the very first what she was about, what she meant to do.  Directly she mentioned Dion Leith to me and asked me to invite him to the Embassy and be kind to him I understood.  But I didn’t know Dion Leith then.  If I had thoroughly known him I should never have been a willing cat’s-paw in a very ugly game.  But once I had begun—­I took them both for a yachting trip—­I did not know how to get out of it all.  On that yachting trip—­I realized how that man was suffering and what he was.  I have never before known a man capable of suffering so intensely as Dion Leith suffers.  Does his wife know how he loves her?  Can she know it?  Can she ever have known it?”

Father Robertson was silent.  As she looked at his eyelids—­his eyes no longer met hers with their luminous glowing sincerity—­Lady Ingleton realized that he was the Confessor.

“Sometimes I have been on the verge of saying to him, ’Go back to England, go to your wife.  Tell her, show her what she has done.  Put up a big fight for the life of your soul.’  But I have never been able to do it.  A grief like that is holy ground, isn’t it?  One simply can’t set foot upon it.  Besides, I scarcely ever see Dion Leith now.  He’s gone down, I think, gone down very far.”

“Where is he?”

“In Constantinople.  I saw him by chance in Stamboul, near Santa Sophia, just before I left for England.  Oh, how he has changed!  Cynthia Clarke is destroying him.  I know it.  Once she told me he had been an athlete with ideals.  But now—­now!”

Again the tears started into her eyes.  Father Robertson looked up and saw them.

“Poor, poor fellow!” she said.  “I can’t bear to see him destroyed.  Some men—­well, they seem almost entirely body.  But he’s so different!”