She ought to have defied him that night, to have risked a violent scene, to have risked everything.  Instead, she had come back to the drawing-room, had gone out into the night with him, had even gone to the rooms near the Persian Khan.  She had put off, had said to herself “To-morrow”; she had tried to believe that Dion’s desperate mood would pass, that he needed gentle handling for the moment, and that, if treated with supreme tact, he would eventually be “managed” into letting her have her will.

But now she had no illusions.  Her distressed eyes saw quite clearly, and she knew that she had made a fatal mistake in being obedient to Dion that night.  She felt like one at the beginning of an inclined plane that was slippery as ice.  She had stepped upon it, and she could not step back.  She could only go forward and downward.

Dion was reckless.  Appeals to reason, to chivalry, to pity, had no effect upon him.  He only laughed at them, took them as part of her game of hypocrisy.  In her genuine and growing fear and distress she had become almost horribly sincere, but he would not believe in, or heed, her sincerity.  She knew her increasing hatred of him was matched by his secret detestation of her.  Yes, he detested her with all that was most characteristic in him, with all those inherent qualities of which, do what he would he was unable to rid himself.  And yet there was a link which bound them together—­the link of a common degradation of body.  She longed to smash that link which she had so carefully and sedulously labored to forge.  But he wished to make it stronger.  By her violent will she had turned him to perversity, and now he was actually more perverse than she was.  She saw herself outdistanced on the course towards the ultimate blackness, saw herself forced to follow where he led.

She dared not got to Buyukderer.  She could not, she knew, keep him away from there.  He would follow her from Constantinople, would resume his life of last summer, would perhaps deliberately accentuate his intimacy with her instead of being careful to throw over it a veil.  In his hatred and recklessness he might be capable even of that, the last outrage which a man can inflict upon a woman, to whose safety and happiness his chivalrous secrecy is essential.  His clinging to her in hatred was terrible to her.  She began to think that perhaps he had in his mind abominable plans for the destruction of her happiness.

One day he told her that if she went to Buyukderer he would not only follow her there, but he would remain there when Jimmy came out for the summer holidays.

“Jimmy must learn to like me again,” he said.  “That is necessary.”

She shuddered when she realized the tendency of Dion’s mind.  Fear made her clairvoyant.  There were moments when she seemed to look into that mind as into a room through an open window, to see the thoughts as living things going about their business.  There was something appalling in this man’s brooding desire to strike her in the heart combined with his determination to continue to be her lover.  It affected her as she had never been affected before.  By torturing her imagination it made havoc of her will-power.  Her situation rendered her almost desperate, and she could not find an outlet from it.