Suddenly she broke into a passion of tears.  She was inundated with self-pity.  She had prayed to the Unknown God.  He had answered her prayer, but nevertheless, he had surely cursed her.  For love and lust were at merciless war within her.  She was tormented.

That night she knew she had run up a debt which she would be forced to pay; she knew that her punishment was beginning.

CHAPTER XV

When Dion came out into the street he stood still on the pavement.  It was between ten and eleven o’clock.  Stamboul, the mysterious city, was plunged in darkness, but Pera was lit and astir, was full of blatant and furtive activities.  He listened to its voices as he stood under the stars, and presently from them the voice of a woman detached itself, and said clearly and with a sort of beautifully wondering slowness, “I can see the Pleiades.”

Tears started into his eyes.  He was afraid of that voice and yet his whole being longed desperately to hear it again.  The knowledge that Rosamund was here in Constantinople, very near to him—­how it had changed the whole city for him!  Every light that gleamed, every sound that rose up, seemed to hold for him a terrible vital meaning.  And he knew that all the time he had been living in Constantinople it had been to him a horrible city of roaring emptiness, and he knew that now, in a moment, it had become the true center of the world.  He was amazed and he was horrified by the power and intensity of the love within him.  In this moment he knew it for an undying thing.  Nothing could kill it, no act of Rosamund’s, no act of his.  Even lust had not suffocated the purity of it, even satiety of the flesh had not lessened the yearning of it, or availed to deprive it of its ardent simplicity, of its ideal character.  In it there was still the child with his wonder, the boy with his stirring aspirations towards life, the man with his full-grown passion.  He had sought to kill it and he had not even touched it.  He knew that now and was shaken by the knowledge.  Where did it dwell then, this thing that governed him and that he could not break?  He longed to get at it, to seize it, hold it to some fierce light, examine it.  And then?  Would he wish to cast it away?

“I can see the Pleiades.”

For a moment the peace of Olympia was about him, and he heard the voices of Eternity whispering among the pine trees.  Then the irreparable blotted out that green beauty, that message from the beyond; reality rushed upon him.  He turned and looked at the building he had just left.  It towered above him, white, bare, with its rows of windows.  He knew that he would never go into it again, that he had done forever with the woman in there who hated him.  Yes, he had done with her insomuch as a man can finish with any one who has been closely, intimately, for good or for evil, in his life.  As he watched her windows for a moment his mind reviewed swiftly his connection