“I’m sorry, but I can’t let you come to Buyukderer this summer,” she said.  “Once did not matter.  But if you came again my reputation would suffer.”

“Then I’ll stay at some other place on the Bosporus and come over.”

“That would be just as bad.”

“Do you seriously mean that we are to be entirely separated during the whole of this summer?”

“I must be careful of my reputation now Jimmy’s growing up.  The Bosporus is the home of malicious gossip.”

“Do answer my question.  Do you mean that we are to be separated during the summer?”

“I don’t see how it can be helped.”

“It can be helped very easily.  Don’t go to Buyukderer.”

“I must.  I have the villa.”

“Let it.”

“I couldn’t possibly stand Constantinople in the summer.”

“There’s no need to do that.  There are other places besides Constantinople and Buyukderer.  You might go to one of them.  Or you might travel.”

She sat down for a moment looking down.

“Do you mean that I might travel with you?” she said, at last.

“Not with me.  But I could happen to be where you are.”

“That’s not possible.  Some one would get to know of it.”

“How absurdly ingenue you have become all of a sudden!” he said, with soft, but scathing, irony.

And he laughed, let out a long, low, and apparently spontaneous laugh, as if he were genuinely amused.

“Really one would hardly imagine that you were the heroine of the famous divorce case which interested all London not so very long ago.  When I remember the life you acknowledged you had lived, the life you were quite defiant about, I can’t help being amused by this sudden access of conventional Puritanism.  You declared then that you didn’t choose to live a dull, orthodox life.  One would suppose that the leopard could change his spots after all.”

While he was speaking she lifted her head and looked fixedly at him.

“It’s just that very divorce case which has made me alter my way of living,” she said.  “Any one who knew anything of the world, any one but a fool, could see that.”

“Ah, but I am a fool,” he returned doggedly.  “I was a fool when I ran straight, and it seems I’m a fool when I run crooked.  You’ve got to make the best of me as I am.  Take your choice.  Go to Buyukderer if you like.  If you do I shall stay on the Bosporus.  Or travel if you like, and I’ll happen to be where you are.  It’s quite easy.  It’s done every day.  But you know that as well as I do.  I can’t give you points in the game of throwing dust in the eyes of the public.”

“It’s too late now to let the villa, even if I cared to.  And I can’t afford to shut it up and leave it standing empty while I wander about in hotels.  I shall go to Buyukderer next week.”

“All right.  I’ll go back to the rooms I had last year, and we can live as we did then.  Give me the key of the garden gate and I can use the pavilion as my sitting-room again.  It’s all quite simple.”