He heard, this time really heard, a cry overhead, and then the muffled sound of some one moving about; and he went to the door, opened it and passed out into the hall.  He did not go upstairs, but waited in the hall until Doctor Mayson came down, looking as rosy and serene and unconcerned as ever.

“Well, Mr. Leith,” he said, “you’re a father.  I congratulate you.  You wife has got through beautifully.”

“Yes?”

“By the way, it’s a boy.”

“Yes, of course.”

Doctor Mayson looked genuinely surprised.

“Why ‘of course’?  I don’t quite understand.”

“She knew it was going to be a boy.”

The doctor smiled faintly.

“Women often have strange fancies at such times.  I mean before they are confined.”

“But you see she was right.  It is a boy.”

“Exactly,” returned the doctor, looking at his nails.

Dion saw the star falling above the hill of Drouva.

Did the Hermes know?

CHAPTER III

On the following Sunday afternoon Dion was able to fulfil his promise to Daventry.  Rosamund and the baby were “doing beautifully”; he was not needed at home, so he set out with Daventry, who came to fetch him, to visit Mrs. Willie Chetwinde in Lowndes Square.

When they reached the house Daventry said: 

“Now for Mrs. Clarke.  She’s really a wonderful woman, Dion, and she’s got a delicious profile.”

“Oh, it’s that—­”

“No, it isn’t.”

He gently pushed Mrs. Chetwinde’s bell.

As they went upstairs they heard a soft hum of voices.

“Mrs. Clarke’s got heaps of people on her side,” whispered Daventry. 
“This is a sort of rallying ground for the defense.”

“Where’s her child?  Here?”

“No, with some relations till the trial’s over.”

The butler opened the door, and immediately Dion’s eyes rested on
Mrs. Clarke, who happened to be standing very near to it with Esme
Darlington.  Directly Dion saw her he knew at whom he was looking. 
Something—­he could not have said what—­told him.

By a tall pedestal of marble, on which was poised a marble statuette of Echo,—­not that Echo who babbled to Hera, but she who, after her punishment, fell in love with Narcissus,—­he saw a very thin, very pale, and strangely haggard-looking woman of perhaps thirty-two talking to Esme Darlington.  At first sight she did not seem beautiful to Dion.  He was accustomed to the radiant physical bloom of his Rosamund.  This woman, with her tenuity, her pallor, her haunted cheeks and temples, her large, distressed and observant eyes—­dark hazel in color under brown eyebrows drawn with a precise straightness till they neared the bridge of the nose and there turning abruptly downwards, her thin and almost white-lipped mouth, her cloudy brown hair which had no shine or sparkle, her rather narrow and pointed chin, suggested to him unhealthiness, a human being perhaps stricken by some obscure disease which had drained her body of all fresh color, and robbed it of flesh, had caused to come upon her something strange, not easily to be defined, which almost suggested the charnel-house.