“Your affectionate “F. W.” I did see Jessie Weymouth on board her ship, and a precious business it was. A week later I, too, started for Constantinople, partly because I had promised Mrs. Weymouth, partly because I could not reconcile myself to the vision of my friend in the grip of his passion, without a job, almost without money. The Radolins inhabited an old house on the far shore almost opposite the Rumeli Hissar. I called on them without warning, and found Hélène Radolin alone. In a room all Turkish stuffs and shadowy lights, she looked very different from her desert self. She had regained her pale languor, but her face had a definite spirit, lacking when I first saw her. She spoke quite freely. “I love him; but it is madness. I have tried to send him away; he will not go. You see, I am a Catholic; my religion means much to me. I must not go away with him. Take him back to England with you; I cannot bear to see him ruin his life like this for me.” I confess to looking at her with the wonder whether it was religion or the lack of l. s. d. “Ah!” she said. “You don’t understand; you think I am afraid of poverty with him. No! I am afraid of losing my soul, and his.” The way she said that was extraordinarily impressive. I asked her if she saw him. “Yes; he comes. I have to let him. I cannot bear the look on his face when I say ‘No.’” She gave me his address. He had a garret in a little Greek hotel, just above Galata--a ramshackle place, chosen for its cheapness. He did not seem surprised to see me. But I was startled. His face, shrunken and lined, had a bitter, burnt-up look, which deepened the set and colour of his eyes till they looked almost black. A long bout of disease will produce just that effect. “If she didn’t love me,” he said, “I could bear it. But she does. Well! So long as I can see her I shall stand it; and she’ll come--she’ll come to me at last.” I repeated her words to me; I spoke of his wife, of England--no memory, no allusion, no appeal touched him. I stayed a month and saw him nearly every day; I did not move him by one jot. At the end of that month I should never have known him for the Frank Weymouth who had started out with us from Mena House on New Year’s Day. Changed! He was! I had managed to get him a teaching job through a man I knew at the Embassy--a poor enough job--a bare subsistence. And, watching my friend day by day, I began to have a feeling of hatred for that woman. Yet I knew that her refusal to indulge their passion was truly religious. She really did see her lost soul and his, whirling entwined through purgatory, like the souls of Paola and Francesca in Watts’ picture. Call it superstition, or what you will, her scruples were entirely genuine, and, from a certain point of view, quite laudable. As for Radolin, he took it all precisely as if there were nothing to take; smooth and debonair as ever--a little harder about the mouth and eyes, and that was all.