“Yes.  One would think you reveled in society if one only knew you in that phase.”

“Well, I don’t really care for it one bit.  I can’t, because I never miss it if I don’t have it.”

“I believe you really care for very few things and for very few people,” he said.

“Perhaps that’s true about people.”

“How many people, I wonder?”

“I don’t think one always knows whom one cares for until something happens.”

“Something?”

“Until one’s threatened with loss, or until one actually does lose somebody one loves.  I”—­she hesitated, stretched out her hand, and drew some notepaper out of a green case which stood on the table—­“I had absolutely no idea what I felt for my mother until she died.  She died very suddenly.”

Tears rushed to her eyes and her whole face suddenly reddened.

“Then I knew!” she said, in a broken voice.

Dion had never before seen her look as she was looking now.

For a moment he felt almost as if he were regarding a stranger.  There was a sort of heat of anger in the face, which looked rebellious in its emotion; and he believed it was the rebellion in her face which made him realize how intensely she had been able to love her mother.

“Now I must write to Mrs. Chetwinde,” she said, suddenly bending over the notepaper, “and tell her we’ll come, and I’ll sing.”

“Yes.”

He stood a moment watching the moving pen.  Then he bent down and just touched her shoulder with a great gentleness.

“If you knew what I would do to keep every breath of sorrow out of your life!” he said, in a low voice.

Without looking up she touched his hand.

“I know you would.  You could never bring sorrow into my life.”

From that day Dion realized what intensity of feeling lay beneath Rosamund’s serene and often actively joyous demeanor.  Perhaps she cared for very few people, but for those few she cared with a force surely almost abnormal.  Her mother had now been dead for many years; never before had Rosamund spoken of her death to him.  He understood the reason of that silence now, and from that day the desire to keep all sorrow from her became almost a passion in him.  He even felt that its approach to her, that its cold touch resting upon her, would be a hateful and almost unnatural outrage.  Yet he saw all around him people closely companioned by sorrow and did not think that strange.  Sorrow even approached very near to Rosamund and to him in that very month of January, for Beatrice had a miscarriage and lost her baby.  She said very little about it, but Dion believed that she was really stricken to the heart.  He was very fond of Beatrice, he almost loved her; yet her sorrow was only a shadow passing by him, not a substance pressing upon him.  And that fact, which he realized, made him know how little even imagination and quiet affection can help men feel the pains of others.  The heart knoweth only its own bitterness and the bitterness of those whom it deeply and passionately loves.