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.

He saw her outraged, bitterly ashamed of having made the long journey to
seek a man who had betrayed her; he saw her wounded in the soul. She had
wounded him in the soul, but at this moment he scarcely thought of that.
The knowledge that she was near to him seemed to have suddenly renewed
the pure springs of his youth. When Cynthia Clarke had said, "Now I'm
ready if you want to go to the rooms," she had received her freedom from
the Dion who had won Rosamund, not from the withered and embittered man
upon whom she had perversely seized in his misery and desolation.

That Rosamund should travel to him and then know him for what he was!
All his intense bitterness against her was swept away by the flood of
his hatred of himself.

Suddenly the lights of the city seemed to fade before his eyes and the
voices of the city seemed to lose their chattering gaiety. Darkness
and horrible mutterings were about him. He heard the last door closing
against him. He accounted himself from henceforth among the damned.
Lifting his head he stared for a moment at the Hotel de Byzance. Now he
felt sure that she was there. He knew that she was there, and he bade
her an eternal farewell. Not she--as for so long he had thought--but he
had broken their marriage. She had sinned in the soul. But to-night
he did not see her sin. He saw only his black sin of the body, the
irreparable sin he had committed against her shining purity to which he
had been united.

How could he have committed that sin?

He turned away from the hotel, and went down towards his lodgings in
Galata; he felt as he walked, like one treading a descent which led down
into eternal darkness.

How had he come to do what he had done?

Already he saw Cynthia Clarke as something far away, an almost
meaningless phantom. He wondered why he had felt power in her; he
wondered what it was that had led him to her, had kept him beside
her, had bound him to her. She was nothing. She had never really been
anything to him. And yet she had ruined his life. He saw her pale and
haggard face, her haunted cheeks and temples, the lovely shape of her
head w