Were they talking about the baby?  Dion wondered, as for a moment he watched them, forgetting his surroundings.  Rosamund was speaking with her usual swift vivacity.  At home she was now often rather quiet, moving, Dion sometimes thought, in an atmosphere of wide serenity; but in society she was always full of sunshine and eager life.  Something within her leaped up responsively at the touch of humanity, and to-night she had just been singing, and the whole of her was keenly awake.  The contrast between her and Mrs. Clarke was almost startling:  her radiant vitality emphasized Mrs. Clarke’s curious, but perfectly natural, gravity; the rose in her cheeks, the yellow in her hair, the gaiety in her eyes, drew the attention to Mrs. Clarke’s febrile and tense refinement, which seemed to have worn her body thin, to have drained the luster out of her hair, to have fixed the expression of observant distress in her large and fearless eyes.  Animal spirits played through Rosamund to-night; from Mrs. Clarke they were absent.  Her haggard composure, confronting Rosamund’s pure sparkle, suggested the comparison of a hidden and secret pool, steel colored in the depths of a sunless forest, with a rushing mountain stream leaping towards the sea in a tangle of sun-rays.  Dion realized for the first time that Mrs. Clarke never laughed, and scarcely ever smiled.  He realized, too, that she really was beautiful.  For Rosamund did not “kill” her; her delicacy of line and colorless clearness stood the test of nearness to Rosamund’s radiant beauty.  Indeed Rosamund somehow enhanced the peculiarly interesting character of Mrs. Clarke’s personality, which was displayed, but with a sort of shadowy reticence, in her physique, and at the same time underlined its melancholy.  So might a climbing rose, calling to the blue with its hundred blossoms, teach something of the dark truth of the cypress through which its branches are threaded.

But Mrs. Clarke would certainly never be Rosamund’s stairway towards heaven.

Some one he knew spoke to Dion, and he found himself involved in a long conversation; people moving hid the two women from him, but presently the piano sounded again, and Rosamund sang that first favorite of hers and of Dion’s, the “Heart ever faithful,” recalling him to a dear day at Portofino where, in a cozy room, guarded by the wintry woods and the gray sea of Italy, he had felt the lure of a faithful spirit, and known the basis of clean rock on which Rosamund had built up her house of life.  Bruce Evelin stood near to him while she sang it now, and once their eyes met and exchanged affectionate thoughts of the singer, which went gladly out of the gates eager to be read and understood.

When the melody of Bach was finished many people, impelled thereto by the hearty giant whom Mrs. Chetwinde had most strangely married, went downstairs to the black-and-white dining-room to drink champagne and eat small absurdities of various kinds.  A way was opened for Dion to Mrs. Clarke, who was still on the red sofa.  Dion noticed the fair young man hovering, and surely with intention in his large eyes, in the middle distance, but he went decisively forward, took Mrs. Clarke’s listless yet imperative hand, and asked her if she would care to go down with him.