What did Rosamund mean?  Why did she wish to see him?  What could she intend to do?  His intimate knowledge of what Rosamund was companioned him at this moment—­that knowledge which no separation, which no hatred even, could ever destroy.  She was fastidiously pure.  She could never be anything else.  He could not conceive of her ever drawing near to, and associating herself deliberately with, bodily degradation.  He thought of her as he had known her, with her relations, her friends, with himself, with Robin.  Always in every relation of life a radiant purity had been about her like an atmosphere; always she had walked in rays of the sun.  Until Robin had died!  And then she had withdrawn into the austere purity of the religious life.  He felt it to be absolutely impossible that she should seek him, even seek but one interview with him, if she knew what his life had been during the last few months.  And, feeling that, he was now forced to the conclusion that Mrs. Clarke’s intuition had gone for once astray.  If Rosamund knew she would never have written that note.  Again he looked at it, read it.  It must have been written in complete ignorance.  Mrs. Clarke had made a mistake.  Perhaps she had been betrayed into error by her own knowledge of guilt.  And yet such a lapse was very uncharacteristic of her.  He compared his knowledge of her with his knowledge of Rosamund.  It was absolutely impossible that Rosamund had written that letter to him with full understanding of his situation in Constantinople.  But she might have heard rumors.  She might have resolved to clear them up.  Having traveled out with the intention of seeking a reconciliation she might have thought it due to him to accept evil tidings of him only from his own lips.  Always, he knew, she had absolutely trusted in his loyalty and faithfulness to her.  Perhaps then, even though she had put him out of her life, she was unable to believe that he had tried to forget her in unfaithfulness.  Perhaps that was the true explanation of her conduct.

Could he then save himself from destruction by a great lie?

He sat pondering that problem, oblivious of time.  Could he lie to Rosamund?  All his long bitterness against her for the moment was gone, driven out by his self-condemnation.  A great love must forgive.  It cannot help itself.  It carries within it, as a child is carried in the womb, the sweet burden of divinity, and shares in the attributes of God.  So it was with Dion on that night as he sat in his dingy room.  And presently his soul rejected the lie he had abominably thought of.  He knew he could not tell Rosamund a life.  Then what was he to do?

He drew out of a drawer a piece of letter paper, dipped a pen in ink.  He had a mind to write the horrible truth which he could surely never speak.

“I have received your letter,” he wrote, in a blurred and unsteady handwriting.  Then he stopped.  He stared at the paper, pushed it away from him, and got up.  He could not write the truth.  He went to the window and looked out into the dark night.  Here and there he saw faint lights.  But Stamboul was almost hidden in the gloom, a city rather suggested by its shadow than actually visible.  The Golden Horn was a tangled mystery.  There were some withdrawn stars.