“Then you advise me to do nothing?” he said.

“What about, my boy?”

“About Mrs. Clarke.”

“What could you do?”

Dion was silent.

“I think it’s better to let women settle these little things among themselves.  They have a deep and comprehensive understanding of trifles which we mostly lack.  How’s Robin?”

Robin again!  Was he always to be the buffer between 5 Little Market Street and Mrs. Clarke?

“He’s well and tremendously lively, and I honestly think he’s growing better looking.”

“Dear little chap!” said Bruce Evelin, with a very great tenderness in his voice.  “Dion, we shall have to concentrate on Robin.”

Dion looked at him with inquiry.

“Poor Beattie, I don’t think she’ll have a child.”

“Beattie!  Not ever?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Dion was shocked and startled.

“But I haven’t heard a word—­” he began.

“No.  Both Beattie and Guy feel it terribly.  I had a talk with Beattie’s doctor to-day.”

“How dreadful!  I’m sorry.  But——­” He paused.

He didn’t like to ask intimate questions about Beattie.

“I’m afraid it is so,” said Bruce Evelin.  “You must let us all have a share in your Robin.”

He spoke very quietly, but there was a very deep, even intense, feeling in his voice.

“Poor Beattie!” Dion said.

And that, too, was an evasion.

He went away from Great Cumberland Place accompanied by a sense of walking, not perhaps in darkness, but in a dimness which was not delicately beautiful like the dimness of twilight, but was rather akin to the semi-obscurity of fog.

Not a word more was said about Mrs. Clarke between Rosamund and Dion, and the latter never let Mrs. Clarke know about the Turkish songs, never fulfilled his undertaking to go and see Jimmy again.  In a contest he could only be on Rosamund’s side.  The whole matter seemed to him unfortunate, even almost disagreeable, but, for him, there could be no question as to whether he wished Rosamund’s or Mrs. Clarke’s will to prevail.  Whatever Rosamund’s reason was for not choosing to be friends with Mrs. Clark he knew it was not malicious or petty.  Perhaps she had made a mistake about Mrs. Clarke.  If so it was certainly an honest mistake.  It was when he thought of his promise to Jimmy that he felt most uncomfortable about Rosamund’s never expressed decision.  Jimmy had a good memory.  He would not forget.  As to Mrs. Clarke, of course she now fully understood that Mrs. Dion Leith did not want to have anything to do with her.  She continued to go often to Beattie and Daventry, consolidated her friendship with them.  But Dion never met her in De Lorne Gardens.  From Daventry he learnt that Mrs. Clarke had been extraordinarily kind to Beattie when Beattie’s expectation of motherhood had faded away.  Bruce Evelin’s apprehension was well founded.  For reasons which Daventry did not enter into Beattie could never now hope to have a child.  Daventry was greatly distressed about it, but rather for Beattie’s sake than for his own.