of his life had accentuated his individuality.  In sorrow, in deterioration, he had broken loose from restraint.  She had helped to make him what he had now become, the most difficult man she had ever had to deal with.  When he had crossed the river to her he had burnt all the boats behind him.  If he had sometimes been weak in goodness, in those former days long past, in what he considered as evil—­Mrs. Clarke did not see things in white and black—­he had developed a peculiar persistence and determination which were very like strength.

Looking back, Mrs. Clarke realized that the definite change in Dion, which marked the beginning of a new development, dated from the night in the garden at Buyukderer when Jimmy had so nearly learnt the truth.  On that night she had forced Dion to save her reputation with her child by lying and playing the hypocrite to a boy who looked up to him and trusted in him.  Dion had not forgotten his obedience.  Perhaps he hated her because of it in some secret place of his soul.  She was sure that he intended to make her pay for it.  He had obeyed her in what she considered as a very trifling matter. (For of course Jimmy had to be deceived.) But since then he had often shown a bitter, even sometimes a brutal, disposition to make her obey him.  She could not fully understand the measure of his resentment because she had none of his sense of honor and did not share his instinctive love of truth.  But she knew he had suffered acutely in tricking and lying to Jimmy.

On that night, then, he had burnt his boats.  She herself had told him to do it when she had said to him, “Give yourself wholly to me.”  She was beginning to regret that she had ever said that.

At first, in her perversity, she had curiously enjoyed Dion’s misery.  It had wrapped him in a garment that was novel.  It had thrown about him a certain romance.  But now she was becoming weary of it.  She had had enough of it and enough of him.  That horrible process, which she knew so well, had repeated itself once more:  she had wanted a thing; she had striven for it; she had obtained it; she had enjoyed it (for she knew well how to enjoy and never thought that the game was not worth the candle).  And then, by slow, almost imperceptible degrees, her power of enjoyment had begun to lessen.  Day by day it had lost in strength.  She had tried to stimulate it, to deceive herself about its decay, but the time had come, as it had come to her many times in the past, when she had been forced to acknowledge to herself that it was no longer living but a corpse.  Dion Leith had played his part in her life.  She wished now to put him outside of her door.  She had made sacrifices for him; for him she had run risks.  All that was very well so long as he had had the power to reward her.  But now she was beginning to brood over those risks, those sacrifices, with resentment, to magnify them in her mind; she was beginning to be angry as she dwelt upon that which distortedly she thought of as her unselfishness.