“Perhaps you are tired?”

“No.”

“I fancied—­well, good-by, Beattie.”

“Good-by, Dion.”

That had been all.  At the door he had looked round, and had seen Beattie standing with her back to him and her face to the firelight, stooping slightly, and he had felt a strong impulse to go to her again, and to—­he hardly knew what—­to say good-by again, perhaps, in a different, more affectionate or more tender way.  But he had not done it.  Instead he had gone out and had shut the door behind him very quietly.  It was odd that Beattie had not even looked after him.  Surely people generally did that when a friend was going away, perhaps for ever.  But Beattie was different from other people, and somehow he was quite sure she cared.

The three last good-bys had been said to his mother, Robin and Rosamund, in Queen Anne’s Mansions and Little Market Street.  He had stayed with his mother for nearly two hours.  She had a very bad cold, unbecoming, complicated with fits of sneezing, a cold in the “three handkerchiefs an hour” stage.  And this commonplace malady had made him feel very tender about her, and oddly pitiful about all humanity, including, of course, himself.  While they talked he had thought several times, “It’s hard to see mother in such a state when perhaps I shall never see her again.  I don’t want to remember her with a cold.”  And the thought, “I shan’t be here to see her get well,” had pained him acutely.

“I’m looking and feeling glazed, dee-ar,” had been her greeting to him.  “My nose is shiny and my mind is woolly.  I don’t think you ought to kiss me or talk to me.”

And then he had kissed her, and they had talked, intimately, sincerely.  In those last hours mercifully Dion had not felt shy with his mother.  But perhaps this was because she was never shy, not even in tenderness or in sorrow.  She was not afraid of herself.  They had even been able to discuss the possibility of his being killed in the war, and Mrs. Leith had been quite simple about it, laying aside all her usual elaboration of manner.

“The saddest result of such an honorable and noble end would be the loss to Robin, I think,” she had said.

“To Robin?  But he’s got such a mother!”

“Do you think he doesn’t need, won’t need much more later on, the father he’s got?  Dion, my son, humility is a virtue, no doubt, but I don’t believe in excess even in the practice of virtue, and sometimes I think you do.”

“I didn’t know it.”

“This going to the war is a splendid thing for you.  I wouldn’t have you out of it even though——­”

Here she had been overcome by a tremendous fit of sneezing from which she had emerged with the smiling remark: 

“I’m not permitted to improve the occasion.”

“I believe I know what you mean.  Perhaps you’re right, mother.  You’re cleverer than I am.  Still I can’t help seeing that Robin’s got a mother such as few children have.  Look round at all the mothers you know in London!”