“I’ve always been perfectly straight with you,” she said coldly.  “I have nothing to reproach myself with.”

The closing of his fingers on her hand, and their unclosing, irritated her whole body.  To-day she disliked his touch intensely, so intensely that she could scarcely believe she had ever liked it, longed for it, schemed for it.

“Please keep your hand still!” she said.

“What?”

“It makes me nervous your doing that.  Either hold my hand or don’t hold it.”

“I don’t understand.  What was I doing?”

“Oh, never mind.  I’ve always been straight with you.  I don’t know why you are attacking me.”

“I feel you are changing towards me.  So I thought I’d tell you that I don’t intend to be driven out a second time by a child.  It’s better you should know that.  Then you won’t attempt the impossible.”

She looked into his sunken eyes.

“Jimmy has got to dislike you,” she said.  “It’s unfortunate, but it can’t be helped.  I don’t know exactly why it is so.  It may be because he’s older, just at the age when boys begin to understand about men and women.  You’re not always quite so careful before him as you might be.  I don’t mean in what you say, but in your manner.  I think Jimmy fancies you like me in a certain way.  I think he probably took it into his head that you were hanging about the garden that night because perhaps you hoped to meet me there.  A very little more and he might begin to suspect me.  You have been frank with me to-day.  I’ll be frank with you.  I want you to understand that if there ever was a question of my losing Jimmy’s love and respect I should fight to keep them, sacrifice anything to keep them.  Jimmy comes first with me, and always will.  It couldn’t be otherwise.  I prefer that you should know it.”

He shot a glance at her that was almost cunning.  She had been prepared for a perhaps violent outburst, but he only said: 

“Jimmy won’t be here again for some time, so we needn’t bother about him.”

She was genuinely surprised, but she did not show it.

“It was you who brought up the question,” she said.

“Never mind.  Don’t worry about it.  If Jimmy comes out for the summer holidays——­”

“He will, of course.”

“Then I can go away from Buyukderer just for those few weeks.”

“I——­” She paused; then went on:  “I must tell you that you mustn’t come to Buyukderer again this summer.”

“Then you won’t go there?”

“Of course I must go.  I have the villa.  I am going there next week.”

“If you go, then I shall go.  But I’ll leave when Jimmy comes, as you are so fussed about him.”

She could scarcely believe that it was Dion who was speaking to her.  Often she had heard him speak violently, irritably, even cruelly and rudely.  But there was a sort of ghastly softness in his voice.  His hand still held hers, but its grasp had relaxed.  In his touch, as in his voice, there was a softness which disquieted her.