In the tramcar on the way I felt a sort of disappointment--Hélène Radolin was a Roman Catholic, Frank Weymouth an English gentleman. The two facts put a stopper on what I wanted stopped. Yet we all have a sneaking love for the romantic, or--shall we say?--dramatic. Well! The Radolins were gone. They had started that morning for Constantinople. In the Oriental hall where all this had begun I sat, browsing over my Turkish coffee, seeing again my friend Weymouth, languid and inert; his little wife’s flirtatious liveliness; Radolin so debonair; Hélène Radolin, silent, her ice-green eyes slightly reddened in the lids as if she had been crying. The white-garbed Berberines slipped by; Greek gentlemen entertained their dubious ladies; Germans raised a guttural racket; the orchestra twanged out the latest tango. Nothing was changed but those figures of my vision. And suddenly Weymouth materialised--standing as if lost, just where the lobby opened into the hall. From his face it was clear to me that he knew the Radolins were gone; before I could join him he went out hastily. I am sorry now that I did not follow. That evening at Mena House I was just beginning to undress when Jessie Weymouth tapped on my door. “Have you seen Frank?” I told her where I had seen him in the afternoon. “That woman!” she cried. “He’s not come back.” I assured her that the Radolins were gone back home. She stared at me and began to cry. She cried and cried, and I did not try to stop her. She was not only desolate and miserable, but bitter and angry. ‘So long as she can be angry,’ I thought, ‘she’ll get over it. One is not angry under a death-blow.’ At last she had cried her misery out, but not her anger or dismay. What was she to do? I tried to persuade her that Frank would turn up in time for them to start to-morrow evening. He was probably trying to work the thing out of his system; she must look on it as a fever, a kind of illness. She laughed wildly, scornfully, and went out. Weymouth did not turn up, but the morning brought me a letter, enclosing a cheque for three hundred pounds, a note to his wife, and a sealed envelope addressed to the headmaster of his Public School. The letter to me ran as follows: “OLD MAN, “I admit that I am behaving like a cad; but it’s either this or the sweet waters of oblivion; and there’s less scandal this way. I have made up some story for my chief; please post it. The cheque is for all my substance except some fifty pounds. Take care of it for my wife; she’ll get another five hundred, about, out of the turnover of our house. She will go to her father, no doubt, and forget me, I hope. Do, please, like a good fellow, see her safely on board. It’s not likely that I shall ever come back to England. The future is quite dark, but where _she_ is, there I must be. Poste restante Constantinople will find me, so far as I know at present. Good-bye!