He dismounted and gave the reins to the Turkish youth.
Sitting very erect on her black Arab horse, Mrs. Clarke watched him disappear down the lane in which Dion had heard the cantering feet of a horse as he sat alone beside the stream.
Then she rode back to Buyukderer.
CHAPTER IV
Whether Mrs. Clarke had put “The Kasidah” in a conspicuous place in the pavilion with a definite object, or whether she had been reading it and by chance had laid it down, Dion could not tell. He believed, however, that she had intended that this book should be read by him at this crisis in his life. She had frankly acknowledged that she wished to rouse him out of his inertia; she was a very mental woman; a book was a weapon that such a woman would be likely to employ.
At any rate, Dion felt her influence in “The Kasidah.”
The book took possession of him; it burnt him like a flame; even it made him for a short time forget. That was incredible, yet it was the fact.
It was an antichristian book. A woman’s love of God had made Dion in his bitterness antichristian. It was an enormously vital book, and called to the vitality which misery had not killed within him. There were passages in it which seemed to have been written specially for him—passages that went into him like a sword and drew blood from out of the very depths of him.
“Better the worm of Izrail than Death that walks in form of life”—that was for him. He had substituted for death, swift, easy, a mere nothing, the long, slow terrific something. Death that walks in form of life. Deliberately he had chosen that.