with her, from the moment when she had held his hand indifferently, yet with intention, in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room, till the moment, just past, when he had said to her, “You are free.”  And he knew that from the first moment when she had seen him she had made up her mind that some day he should be her lover.  He hated her, and yet he knew now that in some strange and obscure way he almost respected her, for her determination, her unscrupulous courage, her will to live as she chose to live.  She at any rate possessed a kind of evil strength.  And he——?

Slowly he turned away from that house.  He did not know where Rosamund was staying, but he thought she was probably at the Hotel de Byzance, and he walked almost mechanically towards it.  He was burning with excitement, and yet there was within him something cold, capable and relentless, which considered him almost as a judge considers a criminal, which seemed to be probing into the rotten part of his nature, determined to know once and for all just how rotten it was.  Rosamund surely was strong in her goodness as Mrs. Clarke was strong in her evil.  He had known the cruelty of both those strengths.  And why?  Surely because he himself had never been really strong.  Intensity of feeling had constantly betrayed him into weakness.  And even now was it not weakness in him, this inability to leave off loving Rosamund after all that had happened?  Perhaps the power of feeling intensely was the great betrayer of a man.

He descended the Grande Rue, moving in the midst of a press of humanity, but strongly conscious only of Rosamund’s nearness to him, until at last he was in front of the Hotel de Byzance.  He stood on the opposite side of the way, looking at the lighted windows, at the doorway through which people came and went.  Was she in there, close to him?  Why had she come to Constantinople?

She must have come there because of him.  There could not surely be any other reason for her traveling so far to the city where she knew he was living.  But then she must have repented of her cruelty after the death of Robin, have thought seriously of resuming her married life.  It must be so.  Inexorably Dion’s reason led him to that conclusion.  Having reached it he looked at himself, and again his own weakness confronted him like a specter which would not leave him, which dogged him relentlessly down all the ways of his life.  Prompted, governed by that weakness, which he had actually mistaken madly for strength, for an assertion of his manhood, he had raised up between Rosamund and himself perhaps the only barrier which could never be broken down, the barrier of a great betrayal.  What she had most cared for in him he had trampled into the dirt; he had slain the purity which had drawn her to him.

Mrs. Clarke had said that Rosamund knew of their connexion.  He believed her.  He could not help trusting her horrible capacity to read such a truth in another woman’s eyes.  It must be so.  Rosamund surely could only have learned in Constantinople the horrible truth which would forever divide them.  She must have traveled out with the intention of seeing him again, of telling him that she repented of what she had done, and then in the city which had seen his degradation she must have found out what he was.