“How dare you tell me such a lie?”

He bent and gazed into her eyes.

“Liar!  Liar!”

But though his lips made the assertion, his eyes, in agony, seemed to be asking a question.  He seized her other wrist.

“What’s your object in telling me such a lie?  What are you trying to gain by it?  Do you think you’ll get rid of me for to-night, and that to-morrow, by some trick, you’ll escape from me forever?  D’you think that?”

“I met your wife to-day just outside Santa Sophia,” she said steadily.  “When she saw me she stopped.  We looked at each other for a minute.  Neither of us spoke a word.  But she told me something.”

“Told you . . . ?”

“With her eyes.  She knows about you and me.”

His hands fell from her wrists.  By the look in his eyes she saw that he was beginning to believe her.

“She knows,” Mrs. Clarke repeated.  “And yet she had come here.  What does that mean?”

“What does that mean?” he repeated, in a muttering voice.

“Do you believe what I say?”

“Yes; she is here.”

A fierce wave of red went over his face.  For a moment his eyes shone.  Then a look of despair and horror made him frightful, and stirred even in her a sensation of pity.

He began to tremble.

“Don’t!  Don’t!” she said, putting out her hands and moving away.

“She can’t know!” he said, trembling more violently.

“She does know.”

“She wouldn’t have come.  She doesn’t know.  She doesn’t know.”

“She does know.  Now I’m ready, if you want to go to the rooms.”

Dion went white to the lips.  He came towards her.  His eyes were so menacing that she felt sure he was going to do her some dreadful injury; but when he was close to her he controlled himself and stood still.  For what seemed to her a very long time he stood there, looking at her as a man looks at the heap of his sins when the sword has cloven a way into the depths of his spirit.  Then he said: 

“You’re free.”

He went out of the room, leaving the door open.  A moment later Mrs. Clarke heard the front door shut, and his footsteps on the stone stairs outside.  They died away.

Then she began to sob.  She felt shaken and frightened almost like a child.  But presently her sobs ceased.  She took off her hat and wrap and her gloves, lay down on the sofa, put her hands behind her small head, and, motionless, gazed at the pale gray wall of the room.  It seemed to fade away after she had gazed at it for two or three minutes; a world opened out before her, and she saw a barrier, like a long deep trench, stretching into a far distance.  On one side of this trench stood a boy with densely thick hair and large hands and frank, observant eyes; on the other stood a Bedouin of the desert.

Then she shuddered.  Dion had told her she was free.  But was she free? 
Could she ever be free now?