“Your husband—­I was alone with him during his first visit—­made an extraordinary impression upon me.  I scarcely know how to describe it.”  She paused for a moment.  “There was something intensely bitter in his personality.  Bitterness is an active principle.  And yet somehow he conveyed to me an impression of emptiness too.  I remember he said to me, ’I don’t quite know what I am going to do.  I’m a free agent.  I have no ties.’  I shall never forget his look when he said those words.  I never knew anything about loneliness—­anything really—­till that moment.  And after that moment I knew everything.  I asked him to come on the yacht to Brusa, or rather to Mudania; from there one goes to Brusa.  He came.  You may think, perhaps, that he was eager for society, for pleasure, distraction.  It wasn’t that.  He was making a tremendous, a terrible effort to lay hold on life again, to interest himself in things.  He was pushed to it.”

“Pushed to it!” said Rosamund, still in the hard level voice.  “Who pushed him?”

“I can only tell you it was as I say,” said Lady Ingleton, quickly and with embarrassment.  “We were very few on the yacht.  Of course I saw a good deal of your husband.  He was absolutely reserved with me.  He always has been.  You mustn’t think he has ever given me the least bit of confidence.  He never has.  I am quite sure he never would.  We are only acquaintances.  But I want to be a friend to him now.  He hasn’t a friend, not one, out there.  My husband, I think, feels rather as I do about him, in so far as a man can feel in our sort of way.  He would gladly be more intimate with your husband.  But your husband doesn’t make friends.  He’s beyond anything of that kind.  He tried, on the yacht and at Brusa.  He did his utmost.  But he was held back by his misery.  I must tell you (it’s very uninteresting)”—­her voice softened here, and her face slightly changed, became gentler, more intensely feminine—­“that my husband and I are very happy together.  We always have been; we always shall be; we can’t help it.  Being with us your husband had to—­to contemplate our happiness.  It—­I suppose it reminded him——­”

She stopped; she could not bring herself to say it.  Again her eyes rested upon “Wedded,” and, in spite of her long conviction of its essential banality—­she classed it with “The Soul’s Awakening,” “Harmony,” and all the things she was farthest away from—­she felt what it stood for painfully, almost mysteriously.

“One day,” she resumed, speaking more slowly, and trying to banish emotion from her voice, “I went out from the hotel where we stayed at Brusa, quite alone.  There’s a mosque at Brusa called Jeshil Jami, the Green Mosque.  It stands above the valley.  It is one of the most beautiful things I know, and quite the most beautiful Osmanli building.  I like to go there alone.  Very often there is no one in the mosque.  Well, I went there that day.  When I went in—­the guardian was on the terrace; he knows me and that