He saw her outraged, bitterly ashamed of having made the long journey to seek a man who had betrayed her; he saw her wounded in the soul.  She had wounded him in the soul, but at this moment he scarcely thought of that.  The knowledge that she was near to him seemed to have suddenly renewed the pure springs of his youth.  When Cynthia Clarke had said, “Now I’m ready if you want to go to the rooms,” she had received her freedom from the Dion who had won Rosamund, not from the withered and embittered man upon whom she had perversely seized in his misery and desolation.

That Rosamund should travel to him and then know him for what he was!  All his intense bitterness against her was swept away by the flood of his hatred of himself.

Suddenly the lights of the city seemed to fade before his eyes and the voices of the city seemed to lose their chattering gaiety.  Darkness and horrible mutterings were about him.  He heard the last door closing against him.  He accounted himself from henceforth among the damned.  Lifting his head he stared for a moment at the Hotel de Byzance.  Now he felt sure that she was there.  He knew that she was there, and he bade her an eternal farewell.  Not she—­as for so long he had thought—­but he had broken their marriage.  She had sinned in the soul.  But to-night he did not see her sin.  He saw only his black sin of the body, the irreparable sin he had committed against her shining purity to which he had been united.

How could he have committed that sin?

He turned away from the hotel, and went down towards his lodgings in Galata; he felt as he walked, like one treading a descent which led down into eternal darkness.

How had he come to do what he had done?

Already he saw Cynthia Clarke as something far away, an almost meaningless phantom.  He wondered why he had felt power in her; he wondered what it was that had led him to her, had kept him beside her, had bound him to her.  She was nothing.  She had never really been anything to him.  And yet she had ruined his life.  He saw her pale and haggard face, her haunted cheeks and temples, the lovely shape of her head with its cloud of unshining hair, her small tenacious hands.  He saw her distinctly.  But she was far away, utterly remote from him.  She had meant nothing to him, and yet she had ruined him.  Let her go.  Her work was done.

It was near midnight when he went at last to his lodgings, which were in a high house not far from the Tophane landing.  From his windows he could see the Golden Horn, and the minarets and domes of Stamboul.  His two rooms, though clean, were shabbily furnished and unattractive.  He had a Greek servant who came in every day to do what was necessary.  He never received any visitors in these rooms, which he had taken when he gave up going into the society of the diplomats and others, to whom he had been introduced at Buyukderer.