At Westgate Dion showed Rosamund Mrs. Clarke’s letter.  As she read it he watched her, but could gather nothing from her face.  She was looking splendidly well and, he thought, peculiarly radiant.  A surely perfect happiness gazed bravely out from her mother’s eyes, changed in some mysterious way since the coming of Robin.

“Well?” he said, as she gave him back the letter.

“It’s very kind of her.  Esme Darlington turns us all into swans, doesn’t he?  He’s a good-natured enchanter.  How thankful she must be that it’s all right about her boy.  Oh, here’s Robin!  Robino, salute your father!  He’s a hard-bitten military man, and some day—­who knows?—­he’ll have to fight for his country.  Dion, look at him!  Now isn’t he trying to salute?”

“And that he is, ma’am!” cried the ecstatic nurse.  “He knows, a boy!  It’s trumpets, sir, and drums he’s after already.  He’ll fight some day with the best of them.  Won’t he then, a marchy-warchy-umtums?”

And Robin made reply with active fists and feet and martial noises, assuming alternate expressions of severe decision almost worthy of a Field-Marshal, and helpless bewilderment that suggested a startled puppy.  He was certainly growing in vigor and beginning to mean a good deal more than he had meant at first.  Dion was more deeply interested in him now, and sometimes felt as if Robin returned the interest, was beginning to be able to assemble and concentrate his faculties at certain moments.  Certainly Robin already played an active part in the lives of his parents.  Dion realized that when, on the following Monday, he returned to town without having settled anything with regard to Mrs. Clarke.  Somehow Robin had always intervened when Dion had drawn near to the subject of the projected acquaintance between the woman who kept the door of her life and the woman who, innocently, followed the flitting light of desire.  There were the evenings, of course, but somehow they were not propitious for a discussion of social values.  Although Robin retired early, he was apt to pervade the conversation.  And then Rosamund went away at intervals to have a look at him, and Dion filled up the time by smoking a cigar on the cliff edge.  The clock struck ten-thirty—­bedtime at Westgate—­before one had at all realized how late it was getting; and it was out of the question to bother about things on the edge of sleep.  That would have made for insomnia.  The question of Mrs. Clarke could easily wait till the autumn, when Rosamund would be back in town.  It was impossible for the two women to know each other when the one was at Claridge’s and the other at Westgate.  Things would arrange themselves naturally in the autumn.  Dion never said to himself that Rosamund did not intend to know Mrs. Clarke, but he did say to himself that Mrs. Clarke intended to know Rosamund.