“I feel like a mother all over,” she replied, bending above the child.  “In every least little bit of me.”

“Then do you feel completely changed?”

“Completely, utterly.”

Dion sat still for a moment gazing at her.  She felt his look, perhaps, for she lifted her head, and her eyes went from the baby to him.

“What is it, Rosamund?  What are you considering?”

“Well——­” She hesitated.  “Perhaps no one could quite understand, but I feel a sense of release.”

“Release!  From what?”

Again she hesitated; then she looked once more at the child almost as if she wished to gain something from his helplessness.  At last she said: 

“Dion, as you’ve given me him, I’ll tell you.  Very often in the past I’ve had an urgent desire some day to enter into the religious life.”

“D’you—­d’you mean to become a Roman Catholic and a nun?” he exclaimed, feeling, absurdly perhaps, almost afraid and half indignant.

“No.  I’ve never wished to change my religion.  There are Anglican sisterhoods, you know.”

“But your singing!”

“I only intended to sing for a time.  Then some day, when I felt quite ready, I meant—­”

“But you married me?” he interrupted.

“Yes.  So you see I gave it all up.”

“But you said it was the child which had brought you a sensation of release!”

“Perhaps you have never been a prisoner of a desire which threatens to dominate your soul forever,” she said, quietly evading his point and looking down, so that he could not see her eyes.  “Look, he’s waking!”

Surely she had moved abruptly and the movement had awakened the child.  She began playing with him, and the conversation was broken.

The Clarke trial came on in May, when Robin was becoming almost elderly, having already passed no less than ten weeks in the midst of this wicked world.  On the day before it opened, Daventry made Dion promise to come into court at least once to hear some of the evidence.

“A true friend would be there every day,” he urged—­“to back up his old chum.”

“Business!” returned Dion laconically.

“What’s your real reason against it?”

“Well, Rosamund hates this kind of case.  I spoke to her about it the other day.”

“What did she say?”

“That she was delighted you had something to do, and that she hoped, if Mrs. Clarke were innocent, she’d win.  She pities her for being dragged through all this mud.”

“Yes?”

“She said at the end that she hoped I wouldn’t think her unsympathetic if she neither talked about the case nor read about it.  She hates filling her mind with ugly details and horrible suggestions.”

“I see.”

“You know, Guy, Rosamund thinks—­she’s told me so more than once—­that the mind and the soul are very sensitive, and that—­that they ought to be watched over, and—­and taken care of.”