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Oliver Alden took tea now and then in the little old palace on the Bosphorus where there was a miniature mosque in the garden and a beautiful lady in the drawing-room. He found a pleasure in sinking into a deep arm-chair in a nicely furnished room which might have been in an English country house, except for polished floors strewn with Persian rugs, and that marvellous view from the lead roof outside. He also felt a pleasure in sitting opposite Beatrice Armstrong, who made a very charming picture in her short-sleeved frock of sprigged muslin, with the Turkish sun touching her reddish hair, as it streamed through the lattice windows. It was amusing and pleasant, he thought, to find this civilized and English-looking room in a city crowded with refugees and every type of race in the Near East. It was interesting to talk to Beatrice who had known his own crowd before the War, in Chelsea and Kensington. She talked intelligently, but always with that hint of being in hiding and keeping a little secret chamber of her soul locked against the outside world, and even against her best friends.

One afternoon she asked him about England.

“What’s it like now? Henley and I went back for a few weeks after the War, but we didn’t see much of it, and had to rush back again because of his business. He saw a chance of making some money and that’s a thing he never lets slip.”

Oliver Alden noticed a faint hint of contempt for a money-making husband, but took no notice of that and answered the question about England, which she repeated in another form.

“I can’t say I know much about those island people,” he said, accepting her offer of a Turkish cigarette. “I went home on leave four or five times during the War, and saw Chu Chin Chow and other shows, and listened respectfully to the platitudes of my honoured father, who was all for killing the last German, even though the last of our own blue-eyed boys were to die in the process. That made me feel rather sick, especially as my two kid brothers had already died like little gentlemen in the neighbourhood of Ypres. I didn’t like the ferocity of elderly ladies, or the smug satisfaction of University professors and retired civil servants who were doing their bit and denouncing the Hun as they grew potatoes on their back lawns or helped in the harvest fields. So many of my contemporaries were dead or mangled that I felt rather hipped on shore leave. I preferred being sick in the North Sea.”

“And now?” asked Beatrice. “Can one live in England without everyone prying into one’s private life? Have people become more broadminded?”

Alden puzzled over that sentence for a moment. Did it conceal any secret desire for a hiding-place? He remembered some strange words he had overheard between this woman and his friend Paulett, the newspaper correspondent.

“I don’t know about becoming broadminded,” he said. “I doubt if there’s much change in the English mind and tradition after the hectic fever of war days and the somewhat wild reaction of post-war days, when English girls seemed to lose their heads a bit and grab at the first man who offered them a drink, or a dance at a night-club. I expect all that is rather temporary. England is very traditional, especially when one gets beyond the reach of London where the pavement ends.”

“Yes,” said Beatrice thoughtfully, “I expect one must live in London if one wants to avoid gossip and social curiosity. I have a horror of that—and yet I pine for English lanes and meadows. Do your people still live in Cadogan Gardens?”

Alden laughed as though Cadogan Gardens hid a private jest.

“They do. My honoured father has only left Cadogan Gardens for three months during the last six years, and that was when he attended the Conference in Paris and helped to draw up the Treaty of Versailles, which its authors still proclaim to be a sacred covenant bringing peace to a stricken world and fulfilling the promises of a war to end war—and may God have mercy on their souls!”

“You don’t seem to agree with them,” said Beatrice, with her elusive smile.

“It was a peace of vengeance,” said Alden. “It violated all the promises of Wilson. It betrayed the hopes of the common folk for a new era of justice among peoples—their decent hopes for security and fellowship. It will lead to a pack of trouble in Europe. There are going to be many more chapters in the Martyrdom of Man.”

Beatrice Armstrong fluttered her eyelids at him as she answered in a low voice: “The martyrdom of woman will go on until the last chapter. No hope for her, I’m afraid. War or no war, she is the slave or the plaything of men. She’s bound to have a rotten time anyhow, because she’s made that way. Don’t you agree, Oliver?”

He hesitated to agree with such a philosophy of pessimism. He hedged on the subject.

“They’re more delicate, perhaps. They’re more easily wounded.”

“Private relationship is more difficult than international agreement,” said Beatrice. “It’s more difficult to live in peace with one man than with a nation. The warfare is secret but very deadly sometimes.”

Oliver Alden was silent for a moment. He knew perfectly well that this was a personal revelation. Women, except, perhaps, Russian women, never talk in the abstract, they bring every problem down to their own experience.

“Do you think of going back to England soon?” he asked irrelevantly, and then felt rather mean in asking this question, having heard those words between Paulett and Beatrice. It seemed like prying.

“Henley can’t leave Constantinople just yet,” she answered. “His business all went to pieces during the War. Now he has to build up again. As you know, his firm is the oldest trading house in the Mediterranean.”

“Yes,” said Alden, “I know that.”

“My husband,” said Beatrice, “is a trader by instinct and blood. He has a touch of the Mediterranean race. Some people call him a Dago. I heard a young English snotty the other day talking over a cocktail in this very room. He said, ‘That fellow Armstrong is a Dago’. Of course he didn’t know I heard him. The naval voice is very carrying.”

“He ought to have had his ears boxed,” said Alden.

Beatrice shrugged her beautiful shoulders.

“Oh, he was only telling the truth. Henley is a Dago all right. He has a touch of the Oriental.”

“Well, why not?” asked Alden. “What’s wrong with that?”

Suddenly, to Alden’s dismay, she put her hands up to her face and began to weep convulsively.

“My dear!” he said, “my dear. How can I help?”

He had known her as a girl. He had once been in love with her. He had often been to her father’s studio. He had a right to ask if he could help.

She calmed herself with a fine act of self-control.

“Sorry,” she said, after a few moments. “That’s idiotic. But you’re an old friend, Oliver, and I want a friend.”

“He’s here,” said Alden. “How can I be of any use, Beatrice?”

She left her chair and walked over to the window, and he could see her touching her eyes with her tiny handkerchief.

When she turned and spoke to him again she was very pale.

“What’s the good of pretending? Everybody knows I hate my husband. It’s common talk in the whole of the British Fleet.”

“Why do you hate him?” asked Alden. “I mean, would you care to tell me why you hate him?”

She told him at some length why she hated Henley Armstrong. It was a matter of temperament. The man was fiendishly jealous. He couldn’t bear her to be friendly with any other man. During the War they had quarrelled because she liked some of the German officers in Constantinople. He had sulked. He had a violent temper now and then. Once he had locked her in her bedroom. He drank much too when the mood was on him. Weeks would go by and he would hardly speak a word. She had suffered mental torture with him. It was like being shut up with a neurasthenic. He had behaved badly when the British Fleet had come to Constantinople, after the War. Naturally she was glad to see English naval officers. That made him insanely jealous again. He imagined they had all fallen in love with her.

“Very probably they did,” said Alden judicially. “I can quite understand his anxiety.”

Beatrice smiled faintly.

“Oh, they’re just boys. It’s rather a treat for them to come here.”

“Other people come,” said Alden. “Newspaper correspondents among them.”

Beatrice Armstrong glanced at him quickly and a sudden flame of colour leaped to her face.

“Why do you say that?” she asked. “Do you mean John Paulett? Has he said anything?”

“Not a word. But I was out there one night, on the leads. You were talking together. I heard.”

Beatrice was pale now. She looked frightened. There was a wild-bird look in her eyes—a wild-bird trapped.

“He wants me to go to England with him,” she said in a low voice. “He says he will make me happy. Perhaps you heard him say so.”

“Yes,” said Alden.

She stared into his eyes.

“Tell me about him,” she said. “Is he all right? I mean, is he a pukka sahib and all that?”

Alden thought out these questions before answering them.

“I know him only over restaurant tables. He seems very much like the ordinary man—though perhaps a little more intelligent. He has a sense of humour. He pays for drinks at the right time. He wears well-cut clothes, though they’re a bit shabby, as they ought to be. I like him.”

He hesitated for a moment, and then spoke bluntly:

“All the same I wouldn’t hop off with him if I were you. It’s taking too much of a risk. This fellow Paulett may be a first-class rotter for all I know. And though I hesitate to say so, because it seems like preaching, there’s such a thing as loyalty—I mean loyalty to a husband. Couldn’t you get on to better terms with Henley Armstrong? His very jealousy proves that he adores you.”

“No,” said Beatrice. “It’s the jealousy of a mad dog. It’s the jealousy of a Turkish Pasha. It’s degrading to me. It’s a daily torture.”

“If I can be of any help,” said Alden, “in any possible way——”

He wanted enormously to be of help, but her answer chilled him.

“No one can be of help, really. It’s my torture. One can’t take away from other people’s pain, even if it’s only toothache.”

Alden sighed and then smiled.

“Sympathy helps a bit now and then. Friendship helps. I knew you in Chelsea, Beatrice. I was in love with you as a boy. I’m your friend.”

“A good and honest one,” she said, holding out her hand.

It was unfortunate that he held her hand in his strong clasp when her husband came in unexpectedly. Instantly he looked suspicious. Alden could see a sullen line harden his mouth.

“Had a nice tea?” he asked in a cynical voice. “Another old friend?”

“Pre-war,” said Alden. “And, by Jove, how nice it is to see some of your father’s pictures, Beatrice.”

He went over to study one on the opposite wall—a good landscape painting of the Roman bridge at Eashing.

“One can’t beat English landscape painters. We have the tradition. It’s our line of country in the world of Art.”

“Have a cocktail?” suggested Henley Armstrong.

Oliver Alden declined with thanks and took his leave a little later.