After that horrible night when Jimmy had waked up she had succeeded in making Dion believe that he was deeply loved by her.  She had really had an ugly passion for him, and she had contrived easily enough to dress it up and present it as love.  And he clung to that semblance of love, because it was all that he had, because it was a weapon in his hand, and because he had made for it a sacrifice.  He had sacrificed the truth that was in him, and he had received in part payment the mysterious dislike of the boy who had formerly looked up to him.

Jimmy had never been friendly with Dion since the night of their search for his mother in the garden.

His manner towards his mother had changed but little.  He was slightly more reserved with her than he had been.  Her faint air of sarcasm when, in Sonia’s room, he had shown her his boyish agitation, had made a considerable impression upon him.  He was unable to forget it.  And he was a little more formal with his mother; showed her, perhaps, more respect than before.  But the change was trifling.  His respect for Dion, however, was obviously dead.  Indeed he had begun to show a scarcely veiled hostility towards Dion in the summer holidays, and in the recent Easter holidays, spent by him in Pera, he had avoided Dion as much as possible.

“That fellow still here!” he had said, with boyish gruffness, when his mother had first mentioned Dion’s name immediately after his arrival.  And when he had seen Dion he had said straight out to his mother that he couldn’t “stand Leith at any price now.”  She had asked him why, fixing her eyes upon him, but the only reply she had succeeded in getting had been that he didn’t trust the fellow, that he hadn’t trusted Leith for a long time.

“Since when?” she had said.

“Can’t remember,” had been the non-committal answer.

It seemed as if Jimmy had seen through Dion’s insincerity in the garden at Buyukderer.  Yet there was nothing to show that he had not accepted his mother’s insincerity in Sonia’s room at its face value.  Even Mrs. Clarke had not been able to understand exactly what was in her boy’s mind.  But Jimmy’s hostility to Dion had troubled her obscurely, and had added to her growing weariness of this intrigue something more vital.  Her intelligence divined, rather than actually perceived, the coming into her life of a definite menace to her happiness, if happiness it could be called.  She felt as if Jimmy were on the track of her secret, and she was certain that Dion was the cause of the boy’s unpleasant new alertness.  In the past she had taken risks for Dion.  But she had had the great reason of what she chose to call passion.  That reason was gone now.  She was resolved not to take the greatest of all risks for a man whom she wanted to get rid of.

She was resolved; but she encountered now in Dion a resolve which she had not suspected he was capable of, and which began to render her seriously uneasy.