something of hope still lingered.  Rosamund’s letter to him had wrought already a wonderful change in his tortured life.  The knowledge that he would see her again, be with her alone, even if only for an hour, even if only that he might tell her what would alienate her from him forever, thrilled through him, seemed even to shed a fierce strength and alertness through his body.  Now that he was going to see her once more he knew what the long separation from her had meant to him.  He had known the living death.  Within a few hours he would have at least some moments of life.  They would be terrible moments, shameful—­but they would take him back into life.  Fiercely, passionately, he looked forward to them.

He left his letter at the hotel, giving it into the hands of a weary Albanian night porter.  Then he returned to his rooms, undressed, washed in cold water, and lay down on his bed.  And presently he was praying in the dark, instinctively almost as a child prays.  He was praying for the impossible.  For he believed that it was absolutely impossible the Rosamund could ever forgive him for what he had done, and yet he prayed that she might forgive him.  And he felt as if he were praying with all his body as well as with all his soul.

In the dawn he was tired.  But he did not sleep at all.

About ten o’clock he went out to take the boat to Eyub.

CHAPTER XVI

At a few minutes past eleven Dion was in the vast cemetery on the hill.  It was a gray morning, still and hot.  Languor was in the air.  The grayness, the silence, the oily waters, suggested a brooding resignation.  The place of the dead was almost deserted.  He wandered through it, and met only two or three Turks, who returned his glance impassively.  After the sleepless night he had come out feeling painfully excited and scarcely master of himself.  In Galata and on the boat he had not dared to look into the eyes of those who thronged about him.  He had felt transparent, as if all his thoughts and his tumultuous feelings must be visible to any one who regarded him with attention.  But now he was encompassed by a sensation of almost dull calmness.  He looked at the grayness and at the innumerable graves, he was conscious of the stagnant heat, he seemed to draw into himself the wide silence, and the excitement faded out of him, was replaced by a curious inertia.  Both his mind and his body felt tired and resigned.  The gravestones suggested death, the end of the early hopes, aspirations, yearnings and despairs of men.  A few bones and a headstone—­to that he was traveling.  And yet all through the night he had been on fire with longing, and with a fear that had seemed almost red hot.  Now he thought he perhaps understood the fatalism of the Turk.  Whatever must be must be.  All was written surely from the beginning.  It was written that to-day he should be alone in the cemetery of Eyub, and it was written that Rosamund should come to him there, or not come to him.