Three days had slipped by. Dion had been accepted as one of the big Welsley family, had been made free of the Precincts. During those three days he had forgotten London, business, everything outside of Welsley. It had seemed to him that he had the right to forget, and he had exercised it. Robin had played a great part in those three days. His new adoration of his father was obvious to every one who saw them together. The soldier appealed to the little imagination. Robin’s ardor was concentrated for the moment in his pride of possession. He owned a father who—his own nurse had told him so—was not as other fathers, not as ordinary fathers such as stumped daily about the narrow streets of Welsley, rubicund and, many of them, protuberant in the region of the watch-chain. They were all very well; Robin had nothing against them; many of them were clergymen and commanded his respect by virtue of their office, their gaiters, the rosettes and cords that decorated their wide-winged hats. But they were not like “Fa.” They had not become lean, and muscular, and dark, and quick-limbed, and keen-eyed, and spry, in the severe service of their country. They had not—even the Archdeacon, Robin’s rather special pal, had not—ever killed any wicked men who did not like England, or gone into places where wicked men who did not like England might have killed them. Some of them did not know much about guns, did not seem to take any interest in guns. It was rather pitiable. Since his father had come back Robin had had an opportunity of sounding the Archdeacon on the subject of an advance in open order. The result had not been satisfactory. The Archdeacon, Robin thought, had taken the matter with a lightness, almost a levity, which one could not have looked for from a man in his position, and when questioned as to his methods of taking over had frankly said that he had none.

“I like him,” Robin said ruefully. “But he’ll never be a good scout, will he, Fa?”

To which Dion replied with discretion.

“There are plenty of good scouts, old boy, who would never make good archdeacons.”

“Is there?” said Robin. “Why not? I know what scouts does, but what does archdeacons does?”

And with that he had his father stumped. Dion had not been long enough at Welsley to dive into all its mysteries.

On the evening of the third day Dion told Rosamund that he must go to London on the following morning.

“I’ve got something I must do and I want to tell you about it,” he said. “You remember Mrs. Clarke?”

“Yes,” said Rosamund.

“It must be more than two years since I’ve seen her. She lives a great deal in Constantinople, you know. But she sometimes comes to London in the winter. It’s abominably cold in Constantinople in winter. There are perpetual winds from the Black Sea.”

“Yes, I know there are. Esme Darlington has told me about them.”

“Mrs. Clarke’s in London now.”

“Did you see her when you passed through?”

“No, but I want to see her to-morrow. Rose, I’m going to tell you something which nobody else must know. I was asked to keep it entirely to myself, but I refused. I was resolved to tell you, because I don’t believe in secrets between husband and wife—about their doings, I mean.” (Just then he had happened to think of Mrs. Clarke’s farewell telegram to him when he had sailed for South Africa.)

“I know how frank and sincere you always are, Dion,” she said gently.

“I try to be. You remember that party at Mrs. Chetwinde’s where you sang? You met Mrs. Clarke that night.”

“Of course I remember. We had quite an interesting talk.”

“She’s clever. Lord Brayfield was there, too, that night, a fair man.

“I saw him. He wasn’t introduced to me.”

“Brayfield was shot in the war. Did you know it?”

“No. I thought I had read everything. But I didn’t happen to see it.”

“And I didn’t mention it when I wrote. I thought I’d tell you if I came home. Brayfield, poor fellow, didn’t die immediately. He suffered a great deal, but he was able to write two or three letters—last messages—home. One of these messages was written to Mrs. Clarke. He gave it to me and made me promise to convey it to her personally, not to put it in the post.”

“Was Lord Brayfield in the C.I.V.?” asked Rosamund.

“Oh no. He was a captain in the 5th Lancers. We were brigaded with them for a bit and under fire at the same time. Brayfield happened to see me. He knew I was an acquaintance of Mrs. Clarke’s, and when he was shot he asked that I should be allowed to come to him. Permission was given. I went, and he asked me if I’d give Mrs. Clarke a letter from him when I got home. It seems none of his brother officers happened to know her. He might have given the letter to one of them. It would have been more natural. But”—Dion hesitated—“well, he wanted to say a word or two to some one who knew her, I suppose.”

Rosamund quite understood there were things Dion did not care to tell even to her. She did not want to hear them. She was not at all a curious woman.

“I’m glad you are able to take the letter,” she said.

And then she began to talk about something else. Mr. Thrush’s prospects with the Dean, which were even yet not quite decided.

By the quick train at nine o’clock Dion left Welsley next morning; he was in London by half-past ten. He had of course written to Mrs. Clarke asking if he could see her. She had given him an appointment for three o’clock at the flat she had taken for a few months in Park Side, Knightsbridge. Dion went first to the City, and after doing some business there, and lunching with his uncle at the Cheshire Cheese, got into a cab and drove to Knightsbridge.

Mrs. Clarke’s flat was on the first floor of a building which faced the street on one side and Hyde Park on the other. Dion rang at a large, very solid oak door. In two or three minutes the door was opened by an elderly maid, with high cheek-bones and long and narrow light gray eyes, who said, with a foreign accent, that Mrs. Clarke was at home. Afterwards Dion knew that this woman was a Russian and Mrs. Clarke’s own maid.

She showed Dion into a long curving hall in which a fire was burning. Here he left his hat and coat. While he was taking the coat off he had time to think, “What an original hall this is!” From it he got an impression of warmth and of a pleasant dimness. He had really no time to look carefully about, but a quick glance told him that there were interesting things in this hall, or at any rate interestingly combined. He was conscious of the stamp of originality.

The Russian maid showed him into a drawing-room and went away to tell “Madame.” She did not go out by the hall, but walked the whole length of the long narrow drawing-room, and passed through a small doorway at its farther end. Through this doorway there filtered into the drawing-room a curious blue light. All the windows of the drawing-room looked into Hyde Park, on to the damp grass, the leafless trees, the untenanted spaces of autumn.

Dion went to the fireplace, which faced the far doorway. There was not a sound in the room; not a sound came to it just then from without. He could scarcely believe he was in Knightsbridge. Not even a clock was ticking on the mantelpiece above the fire, in which ship logs were burning. The flames which came from them were of various shades of blue, like magical flames conjured up by a magician. He looked round. He had never seen a room like this before. It was a room to live in, to hear strange music in; it was not a reception-room. Not crowded with furniture it was not at all bare. Its “note” was not austere but quite the contrary. It was a room which quietly enticed. Dion was not one of those men who know all about women’s dresses, and combinations of color, and china, and furniture, but he was observant; as a rule he noticed what he saw. Fresh from South Africa, from a very hard life out of doors, he looked at this room and was almost startled by it. The refinement of it was excessive in his eyes and reminded him of something overbred, of certain Italian greyhounds, for instance. Strange blues and greens were dexterously combined through the room, in the carpet, the curtains, the blinds, the stuffs which covered the chairs, sofas, divans, cushions—blues and greens innumerable. He had never before seen so many differing shades of the two colors; he had not known that so many shades existed. In the china these colors were repeated. The door by which he had come in was of thick glass in a frame of deep blue wood and, by means of a mysterious light in the hall, was made mistily blue. All along the windows, lilies were growing, or seemed to be growing, in earth closely covered with green moss. There were dwarf trees, like minute yew trees, in green and blue china pots.

And always the ship logs in the fire gave out the magical blue flames.

Certainly the general effect of the room was not only luxuriously comfortable, but also strangely beautiful, though there was nothing in it which a lover of antiques would have given his eyes for. To Dion, fresh from South Africa, the room looked too comfortable, too ingeniously beautiful. It struck him as ultra modern, ahead of anything he had ever yet seen, and almost as evil. But certainly it enticed.

He heard the distant sound of a woman’s dress and saw Mrs. Clarke coming slowly in from the room beyond (another blue and green room perhaps), and he thought of Brayfield dying. He thrust a hand into the breast-pocket of his coat and brought out the dead man’s letter.

Mrs. Clarke came up to the fire and greeted him. She did not look a moment older than when he had seen her last at Claridge’s, or indeed than when he had first seen her standing under the statue of Echo in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room. The same feverish refinement still was with her, belonged to her; she looked as before, wasted as if by some obscure disease, haunted, almost distressed, and yet absolutely self-controlled, mistress of herself and unconscious of critical observation. Not even for a moment, seeing her thus again after a long interval of time, did Dion hesitate about her beauty. Undoubtedly she had beauty. The shape of her head was lovely, and her profile was like a delicate vision seen in water. The husky sound of her voice in her first words to him took him back to the Divorce Court.

“You haven’t changed,” she said, staring intently at him in her oddly impersonal way, which appraised and yet held something of inwardness.

“But people say I have changed very much.”

“People?”

“Well—my people.”

“I don’t call natural development change. I saw in you very plainly when we first met what you are now. You have got there. That’s all.”

Her lips were very pale. How strangely unshining her hair was.

“Yes, she looked punished!” he thought. “It’s that look of punishment which sets her quite apart from all other women.”

She glanced at the letter he was holding and sat down on a very broad green divan. There were many cushions upon it; she did not heap them behind her, but sat quite upright. She did not ask him to sit down. He would do as he liked. Absurd formalities of any kind did not enter into her scheme of life.

“How is Jimmy?” he asked.

“Brilliantly well. He’s been at Eton for a long time, doing dreadfully at work—he’s a born dunce—and splendidly at play. How he would appreciate you as you are now!”

She spoke with a gravity that was both careless and intense. He sat down near her. In his letter asking to see her he had not told her that he had a special object in writing to visit her. By her glance at Brayfield’s letter he knew that she had gathered it.

They talked of Jimmy for a few minutes; then Dion said:

“My regiment was brigaded with Lord Brayfield’s for a time in South Africa. I was in the action in which he was shot, poor chap. He saw me and remembered that I was a—a friend of yours. When he was dying he wanted to see me. I was sent for, and he gave me this letter for you. He asked me to give it to you myself if I came back.”

He bent down to her with the letter.

“Thank you,” she said, and she took it without looking at all surprised, and with her habitual composed gravity. “There are Turkish cigarettes in that ivory box,” she added, looking at a box on a table close by.

“Thank you.”

As Dion turned to get a cigarette he heard her tearing Brayfield’s envelope.

“Will you give me one?” said the husky voice.

Without saying anything he handed to her the box, and held a lighted match to her cigarette when it was between the pale lips. She smoked gently as she opened and read Brayfield’s letter. When she had finished it—evidently it was not a long letter—she put it back into the envelope, laid it down on the green divan and said:

“What do you think of this room? It was designed and arranged by Monsieur de Vaupre, a French friend of mine.”

“By a man!” said Dion, irrepressibly.

“Who hasn’t been in the South African War. Do you like it?”

“I don’t think I do, but I admire it a good deal.”

He was looking at the letter lying on the divan, and Brayfield was before him, tormented and dying. He had always disliked the look of Brayfield, but he had felt almost a sort of affection for him when he was dying. Foolishly perhaps, Dion wanted Mrs. Clarke to say something kind about Brayfield now.

“If you admire it, why don’t you like it?” she asked. “A person—I could understand; but a room!”

He looked at her and hesitated to acknowledge a feeling at which he knew something in her would smile; then he thought of Rosamund and of Little Cloisters and spoke out the truth.

“I think it’s an unwholesome-looking room. It looks to me as if it had been thought out and arranged by somebody with a beastly, though artistic, mind.”

“The inner room is worse,” she said.

But she did not offer to show it to him, nor did she disagree with his view. He even had the feeling that his blunt remark had pleased her.

He asked her about Constantinople. She lived there, she told him, all through the spring and autumn, and spent the hottest months on the Bosphorus.

“People are getting accustomed to my temerity,” she said. “Of course Esme Darlington is still in despair, and Lady Ermyntrude goes about spreading scandal. But it doesn’t seem to do much harm. She hasn’t any more influence over my husband. He won’t hear a word against me. Like a good dog, I suppose, he loves the hand which has beaten him.”

“You’ve got a will of iron, I believe,” said Dion.

She changed the subject.

“I don’t ask you to tell me about South Africa,” she said. “Because you told me the whole story as soon as I came into the room. But what are you going to do now? Settle down in the Church’s bosom at Welsley?”

There was no sarcasm in her voice.

“Oh—I’m going back to business in a few days.”

“You’ll run up and down, I suppose.”

“It’s too far, an hour and a half each way. I shall have to be in London.”

He spoke rather indecisively.

“I’m taking a fortnight’s holiday, and then we shall settle down.”

“I’ve been in Welsley,” said Mrs. Clarke. “It’s beautiful but, to me, stifling. It has an atmosphere which would soon dry up my mind. All the petals would curl up and go brown at the edges. I’m glad you’re not going to live there. But after South Africa you couldn’t.”

“I don’t know. I find it very attractive,” he said, instinctively on the defensive because of Rosamund, who had not been attacked. “The coziness and the peace of it are very delightful after all the—well, of course, it was a pretty stiff life in South Africa.”

Again he looked at Brayfield’s letter. He wanted to tell Mrs. Clarke about Brayfield, but it seemed she had no interest in the dead man. While he was thinking this she quietly put out her hand, took the letter, got up and dropped it into the fire among the blue flames from the ship logs.

“I seldom keep letters,” she said, “unless I have to answer them.”

She turned round.

“I’ve kept yours,” she said.

“The one I—it was awfully good of you to send me that telegram.”

“So Allah had you in His hand.”

“I don’t know why when so many much better fellows——” He broke off, and then he plunged into the matter of Brayfield. He could not go without telling her, though hearing, perhaps, would not interest her.

All the time he was speaking she remained standing by the fire, with her lovely little head slightly bending forward and her profile turned towards him. The emaciation of her figure almost startled him. She wore a black dress. It seemed to him a very simple dress. She could have told him that such simplicity only comes from a few very good dressmakers, and is only fully appreciated by a very few women.

Brayfield, though he was dying, had been very careful in what he had said to Dion. In his pain he had shown that he had good blood in him. He had not hinted even at any claim on Mrs. Clarke. But he had spoken of a friendship which had meant very much to him, and had asked Dion, if he ever had the opportunity, to tell Mrs. Clarke that when he was dying she was the woman he was thinking about. He had not spoken interestingly; he was not an interesting man; but he had spoken with sincerity, with genuine feeling.

“She’s a woman in a thousand,” he had said. “Tell her I thought so till the last. Tell her if she had been free I should have begged her to marry me.”

And he had added, after a pause:

“Not that she’d ever have done it. I’m pretty sure of that.”

When Dion had finished, still standing by the fire, Mrs. Clarke said:

“Thank you for remembering it all. It shows your good heart.”

“Oh—please!”

Why didn’t she think about Brayfield?

She turned round and fixed her distressed eyes on him.

“Which is best, to be charitable or to be truthful?” she said, without any vibration of excitement. “De Mortuis—it’s a kindly saying. A true Turk, one of the old Osmanlis, might have said it. If you hadn’t brought me that letter and the message I should probably never have mentioned Brayfield to you again. But as it is I am going to be truthful. I can say honestly peace to Brayfield’s ashes. His death was worthy. Courage he evidently had. But you mustn’t think that because he liked me I ever liked him. Don’t make a mistake. I’m not a nervous suspicious fool of a woman anxiously defending, or trying to defend, her honor—not attacked, by the way. If Lord Brayfield had ever been anything to me I should just be quiet, say nothing. But I didn’t like him. If I had liked him I shouldn’t have burnt his letter. And now”—to Dion’s great astonishment she made slowly the sign of the Cross—“requiescat in pace.”

After a long pause she added:

“Now come and see the other room. I’ll give you Turkish coffee there.”