knickerbockers to trousers.  Robin would be a boy, a youth, a man, and what Rosamund was might make all the difference in that Trinity.  The mystic who enters into religion dedicated her life to God.  Rosamund dedicated hers to her boy.  It was the same thing with a difference.  And as the mystic is often a little selfish in shutting out cries of the world—­cries sometimes for human aid which can scarcely be referred from the fellow-creature to God—­so Rosamund was a little selfish, guided by the unusual temperament which was housed within her.  She shut out some of the cries that she might hear Robin’s the better.

Robin’s sudden attack of illness during Mrs. Clarke’s ordeal had been overcome and now seemed almost forgotten.  Rosamund had encountered the small fierce shock of it with an apparent calmness and self-possession which at the time had astonished Dion and roused his admiration.  A baby often comes hardly into the world and slips out of it with the terrible ease of things fated to far-off destinies.  During one night Robin had certainly been in danger.  Perhaps that danger had taught Rosamund exactly how much her child meant to her.  Dion did not know this; he suspected it because, since Robin’s illness, he had become much more sharply aware of the depth of mother-love in Rosamund, of the hovering wings that guarded the nestling.  That efficient guarding implies shutting out was presently to be brought home to him with a definiteness leading to embarrassment.

The little interruptions a baby brings into the lives of a married couple were setting in.  Dion was sure that Rosamund never thought of them as interruptions.  When Robin grew much older, when he was in trousers, and could play games, and appreciate his father’s prowess and God-given capacities in the gymnasium, on the tennis lawn, over the plowland among the partridges, Dion’s turn would come.  Meanwhile, did he actually love Robin?  He thought he did.  He was greatly interested in Robin, was surprised by his abrupt manifestations and almost hypnotized by his outbursts of wrath; when Robin assumed his individual look of mild inquiry, Dion was touched, and had a very tender feeling at his heart.  No doubt all this meant love.  But Dion fully realized that his feeling towards Robin did not compare with Rosamund’s.  It was less intense, less profound, less of the very roots of being.  His love for Robin was a shadow compared with the substance of his love for Rosamund.  How would Rosamund’s two loves compare?  He began to wonder, even sometimes put to himself the questions, “Suppose Robin were to die, how would she take it?  And how would she take it if I were to die?” And then, of course, his mind sometimes did foolish things, asked questions beginning with, “Would she rather——?” He remembered his talks with Rosamund on the Acropolis—­talks never renewed—­and compared the former life without little Robin, with the present life pervaded gently, or vivaciously, or almost furiously by little