“There is no need—­”

“There is need to make you see clearly why I have every right to take a stand now against—­against——­”

“Against what?”

“I feel you’re changing.  I don’t trust you.  You are not to be trusted.  Since Jimmy has been here again I feel that you are different.”

“I am obliged to be specially careful now the boy is beginning to grow up.  He notices things now he wouldn’t have noticed a year or two ago.  And it will get worse from year to year.  That isn’t my fault.”

His sunken eyes looked fixedly at her from the midst of the network of wrinkles which disfigured his face.

“Now what are you trying to lead up to?” he said.

“It’s very foolish of you to be always suspicious.  Only stupid people are always suspecting others of sharp practise.”

“I’m stupid compared with you, but I’m not so stupid that I haven’t learnt to know you better than other people know you, better, probably, than any one else on earth knows you.  It is entirely through you that Jimmy has got to hate me.  I’m not going to let you use his hatred of me as a weapon against me.  I’ve been wanting to tell you this, but I thought I’d wait till he had gone.”

“Why should I want to use a weapon against you?”

“I don’t know.  It isn’t always easy to know why you want things.  You’re such an inveterate liar, and so tricky that you’d puzzle the devil himself.”

“Do you realize that all you are saying to-day implies something?  It implies that in your opinion I am not a free agent, that you consider you have a right to govern my actions.  But I deny that.”

She spoke firmly, but without any heat.

“Do you mean to say that what we are to each other gives me no more rights over you than mere acquaintances have?”

“It gives you no more rights over me than mere acquaintances have.”

He sat looking at her for a minute.  Then he said: 

“Cynthia, come and sit here, please, beside me.”

“Why should I?”

“Please come.”

“Very well.”

She got up, came to the sofa with a sort of listless decision, and sat down beside him.  He took her uninjured hand.  His hand was burning with heat.  He closed and unclosed his fingers as he went on speaking.

“What is there in such a relation as ours if it carries no rights?  You have altered my whole life.  Is that nothing?  I live out here only because of you.  I have nothing out here but you.  All these months, ever since we left Buyukderer, I’ve lived just as you wished.  I went into society at Buyukderer because you wished me to.  When you didn’t care any more about my doing that I lived in the shade in Galata.  I’ve fallen in with every deception you thought necessary, I’ve told every lie you wished me to tell.  Ever since you made me lie to Jimmy I haven’t cared much.  But you’ll never know, because you can’t understand such things, what the loss of Jimmy’s confidence and respect has meant to me.  However, that’s all past.  I’m as much of a hypocrite as you are; I’m as false as you are; I’m as rotten as you are—­with other people.  But don’t, for God’s sake, let’s be rotten with each other.  That would be too foul, like thieves falling out.”