If she did not come?

He remembered the exact wording of his letter to her, and he realized for the first time that in her letter she had asked him to tell her how to go to their meeting-place “if it is difficult,” and he had not told her what she had to do in order to come to Eyub.

But of course she had a dragoman, and he would bring her.  She could not possibly come alone.

Perhaps, however, she would not come.

Long ago she had opened and read his letter and had taken her decision.  If she was coming, probably she was already on the way.  He forced himself to imagine the whole day passed by him alone in the cemetery, the light failing as the evening drew on, the darkness of night swallowing up Stamboul, the knowledge forced upon him that Rosamund had abandoned the idea of seeing him again.  He imagined himself returning to Constantinople in the night, going to the Hotel de Byzance and learning that she had left by the Orient express of that day for England.

What would he feel?

A handful of bones and a headstone!  Whatever happened to-day, and in the future, he was on his way to just that.  Then, why agonize, why allow himself to be riven and tormented by longings and fears that seemed born out of something eternal?  Perhaps, indeed, there was nothing at all after this short life was ended, nothing but the blank grayness of eternal unconsciousness.  If so, how little even his love for Rosamund meant.  It must be some bodily attraction, some imperious call to his flesh which he had mistaken for a far greater thing.  Men, perhaps, are merely tricked by those longings of theirs which seem defiant of time, by those passionate tendernesses in which eternity seems breathing.  All that they think they live by may be illusion.

Mechanically, as the minutes drew on towards noon, he walked towards the Tekkeh of the Dervishes.  Once he had come here to meet Cynthia Clarke, and now he had deliberately chosen the same place for the terrible interview with his wife.  It could only be terrible.  He did not know what he was going to do and say when she came (if she did come), but he did know that somehow he would tell her the whole truth about himself, without, of course, mentioning the name of a woman.  He would lay bare his soul.  It was fitting that he should confess his sin in the place of its beginnings.  He had begun to sin against the woman whom he could never unlove here in this wilderness of the dead, when he had spoken against her to the woman who had long ago resolved some day to make him sin. (He told himself now that he had definitely spoken against Rosamund.) In this sad place of disordered peace, under the gray, and within sight of the minarets lifted to the Unknown God, he had opened the book of evil things; in this place he would close it forever—­if Rosamund came.  He felt now that there was something within him which, despite all his perversity, all that he had given himself to in the fury of the flesh, was