“Come up here whenever you like,” Mrs. Clarke said to Dion. “You can ring at the side gate of the garden, and come up without entering the house or letting me know you are here. I have my own sitting-room on the first floor of the villa next to my bedroom, the little blue-and-green room I showed you just now. The books I’m reading at present are there. No one will bother you, and you won’t bother any one.”
He thanked her, not very warmly, perhaps, but with a genuine attempt at real gratitude, and said he would come. They walked up and down the terrace for a little while, in silence for the most part. Before they went down he mentioned that he had been out rowing.
“I ride for exercise,” said Mrs. Clarke. “You can easily hire a good horse here, but I have one of my own, Selim. Nearly every afternoon I ride.”
“Were you riding the day before yesterday?” Dion asked.
“Yes, in the Kesstane Dereh, or Valley of Roses, as many people call it.”
“Were you alone?”
“Yes.”
Dion had thought of the cantering horse which he had heard in the lane as he sat beside the stream. He felt sure it was Selim he had heard. Mrs. Clarke did not ask the reason for his questions. She seemed to him a totally incurious woman. Presently they descended to the house, and he wished her good-by. She did not ask him to stay any longer, did not propose any expedition, or any day or hour for another meeting. She just let him go with a grave, and almost abstracted good-by.
When he was alone he realized something; she had assumed that he was going to make a long stay in Buyukderer. Once, in speaking of the foliage, she had said, “You will notice in September——” Why was she so certain he would stay on? There was nothing to prevent him from going away by the steamer on the morrow. She did nothing to curb his freedom; she seemed almost indifferent to the fact of his presence there; yet she had told him he would come, and was evidently certain that he would stay.
He wondered a little, but only a little, about her will. Then his mind returned to an old haunt in which continually it wandered, obsessed by a horror that seemed already ancient, the walled garden at Welsley in which he had searched in the dark for a fleeing woman. Perpetually he heard the movement of that woman’s dress as she disappeared into the darkness, and the sound of a door, the door of his own home, being locked against him to give her time to escape from him. That sound had cut his life in two. He saw, as he had seen many times in the past, the falling downwards of edges that bled, the edges of his severed life.