alleviate his misery if only for a moment, to do what she could for him.  She could do nothing, of course.  Nevertheless he began to feel grateful to her.  She was surely unlike other women, incapable of bearing a grudge.  For he had not been very “nice” to her in the days when he was happy and she was in difficulties.  At this moment he vaguely exaggerated his lack of “niceness,” and perhaps also her pardoning temperament.  In truth, he was desperately in need of a touch from the magic wand of sympathy.  Believing, or even perhaps knowing, that to the incurably wounded man palliatives are of no lasting avail, he had deliberately fled from them, and gone among those who had no reason to bother about him.  But now he was grateful.

“Go on talking,” he said once, when she stopped speaking.  And she continued talking about her life.  She said nothing more about Jimmy.

The Corsican waiter came and took away the tea things noisily.  Her spell was broken.  For a moment Dion felt dazed.

He got up.

“I ought to go,” he said.

“Must you?”

“Must!—­Oh no!  My time is my own, and always will be, I suppose.”

“You have thrown up everything?”

“What else could I do?  The man who killed his own son!  How could I stay in London, go among business men who knew me, talk about investments to clients?  Suppose you had killed Jimmy!”

There was a long silence.  Then he said: 

“I’ve given up my name.  I call myself Mervyn Denton.  I saw the name in a novel I opened on a railway bookstall.”

She got up and came near to him quietly.

“This is all wrong,” she said.

“What is?”

“All you are doing, the way you are taking it all.”

“What other way is there of taking such a thing?”

“Will you come with me to Eyub to-morrow?”

“It was written long ago that I am to go there with you.  I’m quite sure of that.”

“I’ll tell you what I mean there to-morrow.”

She looked towards the window.

“It’s like the roar of hell,” he said.

And he went away.

That night Mrs. Clarke dined alone downstairs in the restaurant.  The cooking at the Hotel de Paris was famous, and attracted many men from the Embassies.  Presently Cyril Vane, one of the secretaries at the British Embassy, came in to dine.  He had with him a young Turkish gentleman, who was called away by an agent from the Palace in the middle of dinner.  Vane, thus left alone, presently got up and came to Mrs. Clarke’s table.

“May I sit down and talk to you for a little?” he said, with a manner that testified to their intimacy.  “My guest has deserted me.”

“Yes, do.  Tell the waiter to bring the rest of your dinner here.”

“But I have finished.”

“Light your cigar then.”

“If you don’t mind.”

They talked for a few minutes about the things of every day and the little world they both lived in on the Bosporus; then Mrs. Clarke said: