As she drove away towards the Golden Horn she passed the Bedouin striding along in the sun.

She looked at him, but he took no notice of her; the indifference of the desert was about him.

CHAPTER XIV

Mrs. Clarke was in her bedroom with the door open that evening when she heard a bell sound in the flat.  She had fixed eight for the dinner hour.  It was now only half-past six.  Nevertheless she felt sure that it was Dion who had just rung.  She went swiftly across the room and shut the bedroom door.  Two or three minutes later Sonia came in.

“Mr. Leith has come already, Madame,” she said, looking straight at her mistress.

“I expected him early, Sonia.  You can tell him I will come almost directly.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“Sonia, wait a minute!  How am I looking this evening?”

“How?” said Sonia, with rather heavy emphasis.

“Yes.  I feel—­feel as if I were looking unlike my usual self.”

Sonia stared hard at Mrs. Clarke.  Then she said: 

“So you are, Madame.”

“In what way?”

“You look almost excited and younger than usual.”

“Younger!”

“Yes, as if you were expecting something, almost as a girl expects.  I never saw you just like this before.”

Mrs. Clarke looked at herself in a mirror earnestly, and for a long time.

“That’s all, Sonia,” she said, turning round.  “You can tell Mr. Leith.”

Sonia went out.

Mrs. Clarke followed her ten minutes later.  When she came into the little hall she saw lying on a table beside Dion’s hat several letters.  She stopped by the table and looked down at them.  They lay there in a pile held together by an elastic band, and she could only see the writing on the envelope which was at the top.  It was addressed to Dion and had been through the post.  She wondered whether among those letters there was one from Rosamund.  Had she written to the husband whom she had cast out to tell him of the great change which had led her to give up the religious life, to come out to the land of the cypress?

Mrs. Clarke glanced round; then she bent down noiselessly, picked up the packet, slipped off the elastic band and examined the letters one by one.  She had never chanced to see Rosamund’s handwriting, but she felt sure she would know at once if she held in her hand the letter which might mean her own release.  She did not find it; but on two envelopes she saw Beatrice’s delicate handwriting, which she knew very well.  She longed to know what Beatrice had written.  With a sigh she slipped the elastic band back into its place, put the packet down and went into the drawing-room.

Directly she saw Dion she was certain that he knew nothing of the change in Rosamund’s life.  There was no excitement in his thin and wrinkled brown face; no expectation lit up his sunken eyes making them youthful.  He looked hard, wretched and strangely old, but ruthless and forceful in a kind of shuttered and ravaged way.  She thought of a ruined house with a cold strong light in the window.  He was sitting when she came in, leaning forward, with his hands hanging down between his knees.  When he saw her he got up slowly.