“No,” said Mrs. Clarke, almost with the hint of a sudden irritation. “I am never feverish.”
Sir Carey went away to his caique.
When he had gone Mrs. Clarke stood alone by the fountain for a moment, frowning, and with her thin lips closely compressed, almost, indeed, pinched together. She gazed down at her hands. They were lovely hands, small, sensitive, refined; they looked clever, too, not like tapering fools. She knew very well how lovely they were, yet now she looked at them with a certain distaste. Betraying hands! Abruptly she extended them towards the fountain, and let the cool silver of the water spray over them. And as she watched the spray she thought of the wrinkles about Dion’s eyes.
“Ah, ma chere, qu’est que vous faites la toute seule? Vous prenez un bain?”
The powerful contralto of Madame Davroulos flowed out from the drawing-room, and her alluring mustache appeared at the lighted French windows.
Mrs. Clarke dried her hands with a minute handkerchief, and, without troubling about an explanation, turned away from the rose garden. But when her two guests were gone she told her Greek butler to bring out an arm-chair and a foot-stool, and the Russian maid, whom Dion had seen, to bring her a silk wrap. Then she sent them both to bed, lit a cigarette and sat down by the fountain, smoking cigarette after cigarette quickly. Not till the freshness of dawn was in the air, and a curious living grayness made the tangled rose bushes look artificial and the fountain strangely cold, did she get up to go to bed.
She looked very tired; but she always looked tired, although she scarcely knew what physical fatigue was. The gray of dawn grew about her and emphasized her peculiar pallor, the shadows beneath her large eyes, the haunted look about her cheeks and her temples.
As she went into the house she pulled cruelly at a rose bush. A white rose came away from its stalk in her hand. She crushed its petals and flung them away on the sill of the window.
While Mrs. Clarke was sitting by the fountain in the garden of the Villa Hafiz, Dion was sleepless in his bedroom at the Hotel Belgrad. He was considering whether he should end his life or whether he should change the way of his life. He was not conscious of struggle. He did not feel excited. But he did feel determined. The strength he possessed was asserting itself. It had slumbered within him; it had not died.
Either he would die now or he would genuinely live, would lay a grip on life somehow.