“You may know Greece, but you don’t know Stamboul,” she said quietly.
“If you had shown it to me I might feel very differently,” Dion said, with a perhaps slightly banal politeness.
And yet he did not feel entirely banal as he said it.
“Come out again and I will show it to you,” she said.
She was almost staring at him, at his chest and shoulders, not at his face, but her eyes still kept their unself-conscious and almost oddly impersonal look.
“You are going back there?”
“Of course, when my case is over.”
Dion felt very much surprised. He knew that Mrs. Clarke’s husband was accredited to the British Embassy at Constantinople; that the scandal about her was connected with that city and with its neighborhood—Therapia, Prinkipo, and other near places, that both the co-respondents named in the suit lived there. Whichever way the case went, surely Constantinople must be very disagreeable to Mrs. Clarke from now onwards. And yet she was going back there, and apparently intended to take up her life there again. She evidently either saw or divined his surprise, for she added in the husky voice:
“Guilt may be governed by circumstances. I suppose it is full of alarms. But I think an innocent woman who allows herself to be driven out of a place she loves by a false accusation is merely a coward. But all this is very uninteresting to you. The point is, I shall soon be settled down again at Constantinople, and ready to make you see it as it really is, if you ever return there.”
She had spoken without hardness or any pugnacity; there was no defiance in her manner, which was perfectly simple and straightforward.