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They took a caique and were rowed by a Kurdish boatman to a little palace in a garden on the edge of the Bosphorus, where the British Fleet lay at anchor. It was an old place with a flat roof surrounded by flowering plants in green tubs, where Mrs. Armstrong, the beautiful Beatrice, as Alden called her, gave little dances on summer nights, or lay reading in a deck-chair too many hours of the day when her husband was busy in his merchant’s office in the Grande Rue de Pera.

The garden was overgrown with creeping plants from which came a sweet, sickly smell on a dewy night. A tall cypress seemed to stab the stars with its spear point. From the other end of the garden a minaret gleamed white in the moonlight. It belonged to a little old mosque, where a Turkish Imam, very old and wrinkled, said his prayers, and slept, and read the Koran, and lived a hermit life.

“It’s nice of you to come,” said Mrs. Armstrong, holding out her hand to Alden. She didn’t give her hand to Paulett, but lowered her eyelids for a moment with a Mona Lisa smile.

She was certainly beautiful. Oliver Alden, who had an eye for beauty, whether in the feminine species or in natural scenery, or the shape of a vase, or the colour of silk, or the lines of an etching, never saw her without a sense of pleasure. He had seen her first before the War, in a Chelsea studio off the King’s Road. She was the daughter of Arthur Vicary, the portrait painter, who gave Bohemian parties, as they were called, to an amusing group of artists, literary men, and stage people.

Beatrice was then about nineteen, just home from a school in Auteuil, and very attractive and intelligent. She had a kind of enchantment difficult to describe, but obvious in its effects upon elderly painters and comic actors and young literary men. She had violet eyes and a straight little nose under a broad forehead, and there was an elusive humour about her mouth, as though smiling at her father’s friends, and this half squalid life in Chelsea, and, perhaps, life itself. There was always something a little secret and reserved about her, as though she hid her real thoughts.

Oliver Alden had taken her to the theatre now and then, and brought flowers to her father’s studio. He had gone with her to the Three Arts Ball, when she was dressed as Rossetti’s Belle Dame Sans Merci and looked startlingly beautiful. It was a blow to him when she married Henley Armstrong, who belonged to the old-established firm of that name trading in the Near East. Somehow he had drifted into her father’s studio—a rich young man, unlike most of the inhabitants of Chelsea or Maida Vale. He had a romantic look, with very dark, sleek hair, and slightly foreign manners.

“A touch of the Dago about him,” said one of Alden’s friends, with the usual English intolerance for any trace of the Mediterranean race. “He says he’s Scotch, but I should imagine his mother was a Levantine.”

Beatrice married him in Chelsea Old Church and went out with him to Constantinople three months before a world war. It seemed fantastic—Constantinople, of all places in the world! Now here she was in a little old palace on the Bosphorus, with a mosque in her garden and British battleships lying at anchor under a starlit sky.

She had changed a little, and was no longer the tall, slim thing he had known in Chelsea. Her bare arms were rounded. Her throat was a lovely column. She had the maturity of womanhood and was more beautiful, but still with that look of being in hiding, and with that elusive smile about her mouth.

She must have had a strange time during the War, shut up in this old palace—a mouldy old building—while her own people were at war with the Turks. She could hear the sound of the guns at Gallipoli—and Constantinople was crowded with German officers and Turkish troops. The Turks had been kind to her. She had nursed their wounded. German staff officers had clicked heels to her and called her Gnädige Frau. Henley Armstrong, her husband, had been allowed his liberty and the use of his office. He had done good business with his old friends the Turks. Perhaps she had a grudge against him for that.

Alden watched her that night when he went round with Paulett. Never once did she address any word to her husband. Never once did she look at him. He might not have been there, as far as she knew or cared. Armstrong looked sulky, though he was coldly polite to his guests and served out some good whisky. There were three naval officers from H.M.S. Lion and two battalion officers, and a French colonel and an Italian officer of the international police. There were only two other women, and they were Russians in shabby frocks.

Alden talked for some time to one of these Russian ladies, who tired him a little by her reproaches against England.

“England,” she said, “betrayed us. Your Winston Churchill promised us military aid and then your Government withheld it, while our White Armies were fighting without guns and without supplies.”

It was useless to argue with her. It was useless telling her that the supplies sent out by England had never reached the right place because of Russian corruption and inefficiency.

Beatrice Armstrong and Paulett, the newspaper-man, had gone out on to the leads. Someone—Beatrice, no doubt—had turned on a gramophone with dance music.

“Let’s go and look at the moonlit scene,” suggested Alden to Princess Ivanova.

“It’s too chilly,” said the Princess. “But take a peep at it yourself while I talk to this nice Italian.”

She turned to the Italian officer and spoke to him in his own language with great fluency.

Henley Armstrong spoke irritably.

“It’s ridiculous of Beatrice to go on to the roof. It’s as cold as death out there these nights.”

He stood for a moment with an angry frown and then poured himself out a stiff dose of whisky which he drank neat, as Alden noticed.

“I’ll give her a warning,” said Alden. “Even moonlight over the Bosphorus is not worth the risk of pneumonia.”

And yet when he went on to the leaded roof outside the window he was willing to risk pneumonia at least for a few minutes. And it was not chilly. The air, indeed, was soft and mild, and drenched with scent from the sleeping garden. There was a crescent moon above the spear-headed cypress. Innumerable stars were strewn across the velvet curtain of the sky. The Bosphorus looked like burnished silver, and there lay the British fleet with all its lights gleaming. Very faintly one could hear a naval band playing in one of the battleships, blurred by the tinkle of a gramophone just outside this window, until it ran down and went flat.

Alden saved the record by lifting off the needle. Beatrice had been dancing with Paulett and they now stopped and stood together behind one of the green tubs at the other end of the roof.

Alden forgot them, spellbound by this moonlit view. His thoughts wandered to the strange life in this city below him and around him, invisible—Constantinople. It had been a great place in the history of Christendom, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, the seat of learning, until the Turks had captured it and their leader had ridden his horse over the dead bodies in San Sofia and stooped down to dip his hand in their blood, and put the imprint of his bloody palm upon one of the walls. From this place had fled the scholars who brought Greek culture to the Western world—the beginning of that Renaissance which had flowered in Italy and France and then had come to England and touched the soul of Shakespeare.

It was amazing to think of all that now. Down below was a mosque with its minaret—a miserable little mosque compared with all the mosques of Stamboul built by Suleiman the Magnificent and other Sultans, to the glory of Allah and Mahommed His Prophet. Some of those old Turks had been monsters. The dead bodies of their victims had floated down the Bosphorus, not long ago, under Abdul the Damned. The bowstrings of their janizaries had strangled many men and women in palaces still standing on the Golden Horn.

Now this city was crowded with refugees from another Empire which had fallen. Thousands of those Russians would be sleeping tonight under vaulted arches where the poorest of them were huddled together in their sheepskins, ravaged by typhus, crawling with vermin. In miserable little rooms of apartment houses and Turkish tenements women of the old régime would be sleeping on truckle beds, or on mattresses laid upon bare boards. Ex-officers of the Imperial Army would be tossing under blankets, dreaming, perhaps, nightmare horrors of a civil war between Whites and Reds without mercy on either side. In the Petits Champs a Russian orchestra would still be thumping out its wild rhythms, and Russian girls would still be dancing, in an atmosphere of cigarette smoke and wine dregs and the stale smell of English beer, to a crowd of seamen, Turks, Armenians, Jews, and many other types.

“One could never put this into a novel,” thought Alden. “It’s all too fantastic. It’s all too crowded.”

He had forgotten Beatrice Armstrong and his friend Paulett. Now he remembered them. It was Paulett who spoke in a low voice, as he moved with this lady nearer to the parapet over which Alden was leaning.

“I shall have to go back to England in a week or two. I can’t bear to leave you here. I want you to come, Beatrice. I could make you happy.”

Beatrice Armstrong laughed very softly, and answered very quietly:

“Could you make me happy? I wonder! Can one forget seven years of torture?”

“It’s too frightful,” said Paulett. “It’s murder to a woman’s soul.”

“Hush!” whispered Beatrice.

She had seen the figure of Alden in the darkness beyond where the moonlight fell across her leaded roof.

They stayed very still for a moment, and then went into the lighted room. Beatrice’s voice was clear and false:

“It’s really rather chilly. I could do with a little drink.”

Oliver Alden went back into the room after a decent interval.