Dion sat down mechanically, and Mrs. Clarke poured out the tea.
“I wish it was Buyukderer,” she said.
“Oh, I like the uproar.”
“No, you don’t—you don’t. Pera is spurious, and all its voices are spurious voices. To-morrow morning, before I go back, you and I will go to Eyub.”
“To the dust and the silence and the cypresses—O God!” said Dion.
He got up from his chair. He was beginning to tremble. Was it coming upon him at last then, the utter breakdown which through all these months he had—somehow—kept at a distance? Determined not to shake, he exerted his will violently, till he felt as if he were with dreadful difficulty holding, keeping together, a multitude of living, struggling things, which were trying to get away out of his grasp. And these living things were the multitudinous parts of the whole which was himself.
All that now was had been foreshadowed. There had been writing on the wall.
“I am grateful to you for several things. I’m not going to give you the list now. Some day, perhaps, I shall tell you what they are . . . among the cypresses of Eyub.”
She had said that to him in London, and her voice had been fatalistic as she spoke; and in the street that same day, on his way home, the voice of the boy crying the last horror had sounded to him like a voice from the sea, a strange and sad cry lifted up between Europe and Asia. And now——
“How did you know?” he said. “How did you know that we should be here together some day?”