arm holding the cypress trunk, trembling slightly and gazing at her, gazing at her with eyes that were terrible because they revealed so much of agony, of love and of terror.  She looked into those eyes, she looked at the frightful change written on the face that had once been so familiar to her, and suddenly an immense pity inundated her.  It seemed to her that she endured in that moment all the suffering which Dion had endured since the tragedy at Welsley added to her own suffering.  She stood there for a moment looking at him.  Then she said only: 

“Forgive me, oh, forgive me!”

Tears rushed into her eyes.  She had been able to say it.  It had not been difficult to say.  She could not have said anything else.  And her soul had said it as well as her lips.

“Forgive me!  Forgive me!” she repeated.

She went up to Dion, took his poor tortured temples, from which the hair, once so thick, had retreated, in her hands, and whispered again in the midst of her tears: 

“Forgive me!”

“I’ve been false to you,” he said huskily.  “I’ve broken my vow to you.  I’ve lived with another woman—­for months.  I’ve been a beast.  I’ve wallowed.  I’ve gone right down.  Everything horrible—­I’ve—­I’ve done it.  Only last night I meant to—­to—­I only broke away from it all last night.  I heard you were here and then I—­I——­”

“Forgive me!”

She felt as if God were speaking in her, through her.  She felt as if in that moment God had taken complete possession of her, as if for the first time in her life she was just an instrument, formed for the carrying out of His tremendous purposes, able to carry them out.  Awe was upon her.  But she felt a strange joy, and even a wonderful sense of peace.

“But you don’t hear what I tell you.  I have been false to you.  I have sinned against you for months and months.”

“Hush!  It was my sin.”

“Yours?  Oh, Rosamund!”

She was still holding his temples.  He put his hands on her shoulders.

“Yes, it was my sin.  I understand now how you love me.  I never understood till to-day.”

“Yes, I love you.”

“Then,” she said, very simply.  “I know you will be able to forgive me.  Don’t tell me any more ever about what you have done.  It’s blotted out.  Just forgive me—­and let us begin again.”

She took away her hands from his temples.  He did not kiss her, but he took one of her hands, and they stood side by side looking towards Stamboul, towards the City of the Unknown God.  His eyes and hers were on the minarets, those minarets which seem to say to those who have come to them from afar, and whose souls are restless: 

“In the East thou shalt find me if thou hast not found me in the West.”

After a long silence Rosamund pressed Dion’s hand, and it seemed to him that never, in the former days of their union—­not even in Greece—­had she pressed it with such tenderness, with such pulse-stirring intimacy and trust in him.  Then, still with her eyes upon the minarets, she said in a low voice: