He cracked his whip and drove furiously on to Stamboul.  In less than a quarter of an hour he pulled up his horses before the vast Church of Santa Sophia.

Mrs. Clarke sat still in the carriage for a moment looking up at the ugly towering walls, covered with red and white stripes.  Her face was haggard in the sunshine, and her pale lips were set together in a hard line.  A beggar with twisted stumps instead of arms whined a petition to her, but she neither saw him nor heard him.  As she stared at the walls on which the sun blazed she was wondering about her future.  The love of life was desperately strong within her that day.  The longing for new experiences tormented her physically.  She felt as if she could not wait, could not be patient any more.  If Dion to-night refused again to give her her freedom she must do something desperate.  She must get away secretly and hide herself from him, take a boat to Greece or Rumania, or slip into the Orient express and vanish over the tracks of Europe.

But first she must go into the church and pray to the Unknown God.

She got out of the carriage.  The beggar thrust one of his diseased stumps in front of her face.  She turned on him with a malignant look, and the whining petition died on his lips.  Then she made her way to the Porta Basilica and passed into the church.  But as its great spaces opened out before her a thought, childishly superstitious, came to her, and she turned abruptly, went out, made her way to the beggar who had worried her, gave him a coin and said something kind to him.  His almost soprano voice, raised in clamorous benediction, followed her as she returned to the church, moving slowly with horrible loose slippers protecting its floor from her Christian feet.  She always laughed in her mind when she wore those slippers and thought of what she was.  This sanctuary of the unknown God must, it seemed, be protected from her because she was a Christian!

There were a good many people in the church, but it looked almost empty because of its immense size.  She knew it very well, better perhaps than she knew any other sacred building, and she cared for it very much.  She was fond of mosques, delighting in their airy simplicity, in their casual holiness which seemed to say to her, “Worship in me if you will.  If you will not, never mind; dream in me with open eyes, or, if you prefer it, go to sleep in a corner of me.  When you wake you can mutter a prayer, or not, just as you please.”

Santa Sophia did not, perhaps, say that, though it had now for long years been in use as a mosque, and always seemed to Mrs. Clarke more like a mosque than like a church.  It was richly adorned, and something of Christianity still lingered within it.  In it there seemed, even to Mrs. Clarke, to be something impelling which asked of each one who entered it more than mere dreams, more than those long meditations which are like prayers of the mind separated from the prayers of the heart and soul.  But it possessed the air of freedom which is characteristic of mosques, did not seize those who entered it in a clutch of tenacious sanctity; but seemed to let them alone, and to influence them by just being wonderful, beautiful, unself-consciously sacred.