irrevocably dedicated to that which was sane, clean and healthy.  By this he was resolved to live henceforth, not because of any religious feeling, not because of any love of that Unknown God who—­so he supposed—­had flung him into the furnace of suffering as refuse may be flung into a fire, but because he now began to understand that this dedicated something was really Him, was of the core of his being, not to be rooted out.  He had left Cynthia Clarke.  In a short time—­before the gray faded over the minarets of Stamboul—­Rosamund would have done with him forever.  He faced complete solitude, the wilderness without any human soul, good or bad, to keep him company; but he faced it with a sort of hard and final resignation.  By nightfall he would have done with it all.  And then—­the living Death?  Yes, no doubt that would be his portion.  He smiled faintly as he thought of his furious struggle against just that.

“It was written,” he thought.  “Everything is written.  But we are tricked into a semblance of vigorous life and energy by our great delusion that we possess free will.”

He sat down beneath a cypress and remained quite still, looking downward towards the water, downward along the path by which, if Rosamund came, she would ascend the hill towards him.

It was nearly noon when he saw below him on this path the figure of a woman walking slowly.  She was followed by a man.

Dion got up.  He could not really see who this woman was, but he knew who she was.  Instantly he knew.  And instantly all the calm, all the fatalism of which for a moment he had believed himself possessed, all the brooding resignation of the man who says to his soul, “It is written!” was swept away.  He stood there, bare of his pretenses, and he knew himself for what he was, just a man who was the prisoner of a great love, a man shaken by the tempest of his feeling, a man who would, who must, fight against the living Death which, only a moment before, he had been contemplating even with a smile.

She had come, and with her life.

He put one arm against the seamed trunk of the cypress.  Mechanically, and unaware what he was doing, he had taken off his hat.  He held it in his hand.  All the change which sorrow and excess had wrought upon him was exposed for Rosamund to see.  She had last seen him plainly as he drove away with little Robin from the Green Court of Welsley on that morning of fate.  Now at last she was to see him again as she had remade him.

She came on slowly.  Presently she turned to her Greek dragoman.

“Where’s the Tekkeh?  Is it much farther?”

“No, Madame.”

He pointed.  As he did so Rosamund saw Dion’s figure standing against the cypress.  She stood still.  Her face was white and drawn, but full of an almost flaming resolution.  The mysticism which at moments Dion had detected in her expression, in her eyes, during the years passed with her, a mysticism then almost evasive, subtly withdrawn, shone now, like a dominating quality which scorned to hide itself, or perhaps could not hide itself.  She looked like a woman under the influence of a fixed purpose, fascinated, drawn onward, almost in ecstasy, and yet somehow, somewhere, tormented.