“Yes.  Rosamund was created to be a mother.  But just to-day I want to look at Robin’s father.”

And so they had talked of him.

That talk had done Dion good.  It had set his face towards a shining future.  If he came back from the war he now felt, through the feeling of his mother, that he would surely come back tempered, tried, better fitted to Robin’s uses, more worthy of any woman’s gift of herself.  Without preaching, even without being remarkably definite, his mother had made him see in this distant war a great opportunity, not to win a V.C. or any splashing honor that would raise him up in the eyes of the world, but to reach out and grip hold of his own best possibilities.  Had his mother done even more than this?  Had she set before him some other goal which the war might enable him to gain if he had not already gained it?  Had she been very subtle when seeming to be very direct?  Even when she held him in her arms—­despite the cold!—­and gave him the final kiss and blessing, he was not sure.  If it had been done it had been done with extraordinary delicacy, with the marvelous cunning of clever love which knows how to avoid all the pitfalls.  And it had been done, too, with the marvelous unselfishness of which, perhaps, only the highest type of mother-love is capable.

After he had left his mother, and was just going out of the flat, Dion had heard through the half-open door a sound, a ridiculous sound, which had made him love her terribly, and with the sudden yearning which is the keenest pain of the heart because it defines all the human limitations:  she was sneezing again violently.  As he shut the front door, “If she were to die while I’m away, and I were to come back!” had stabbed his mind.  Outside in the court he had gazed up at the towering rows of lighted windows and had said another good-by out there.

Shutting his eyes for a moment as the “Ariosto” plowed her way onwards through a rather malignant sea, Dion saw again those rows of lighted windows, and he wondered, almost as earnestly as a child wonders, whether his mother’s cold was better.  What he had done, volunteering for active service and joining the C.I.V. battalion, had made him feel simpler than usual; but he did not know it, did not look on at his own simplicity.

And then, last of all, had come the parting from Robin and Rosamund.

Rosamund and Dion had agreed not to make very much of his departure to Robin.  Father was going way for a time, going over the sea picturesquely, with a lot of friends, all men, all happy to be together and to see wonderful things in a country quite different from England.  Some day, when Robin was a big as his father, perhaps he, too, would make such a voyage with his friends.  Robin had been deeply interested, and had shown his usual ardor in comment and—­this was more embarrassing—­in research.  He had wanted to know a great deal about his father’s intentions and the intentions of