“If I get engagements.”

“You will.  You had a good many for concerts last winter.  You’ve got several for June and July.  You’ll get many more.  But who’s to go with you on your travels?”

“Beattie, of course.  Why do you look at me like that?”

“How do we know Beatrice won’t marry?”

Rosamund looked grave.

“Why shouldn’t she?” asked Dion.

“She may, of course.”

“D’you think she’ll remain your apanage now?” he asked, with a hint of smiling sarcasm that could not hurt her.

“My apanage?”

“Hasn’t she been something like that?”

“Perhaps she has.  But Beattie always sinks herself in others.  She wouldn’t be happy if she didn’t do that.  Of course, your friend Guy Daventry’s in love with Beattie.”

“Deeply.”

“But I’m not at all sure that Beattie—­”

She paused abruptly.  After a moment she continued: 

“You asked me to-day why I married you.  I didn’t answer you and I’m not going to answer you now—­entirely.  But you’re not like other men, most other men.”

“In what way?”

“A way that means very much to me,” she answered, with a delicious purity and directness.  “Women feel such things very soon when they know men.  I could easily have never married, but I could never, never have married a man who had lived, as I believe most men have lived.”

“I think I always knew that from the first moment I saw you.”

“Did you?  I’m glad.  I care tremendously for that in you, Dion—­more than you will ever know.”

“That’s my great, too great reward,” he said soberly, almost with a touch of deep awe.  Then, reddening and looking away, he added, “You were the very first.”

“Was I?”

“Yes, but—­but you mustn’t think that it was a religious feeling, anything of that kind, which kept me back from—­from certain things.  It was more the desire to be strong, healthy, to have the sane mind in the sane body, I think.  I was mad about athletics, all that sort of thing.  Anyhow, you know now.  You were the first.  You will be the only one in my life.”

There was a long silence between them.  Then Rosamund said, with a change of manner to practical briskness: 

“If Beattie ever should marry, I could take a maid about with me.”

“Yes.  An hotel in Liverpool with a maid!  In Blackpool, in Huddersfield, in Wolverhampton, in Glasgow, when there’s a heavy thaw on, with a maid!  Oh, how delightful it will be!  Manchester on a wet day in early spring with a—­”

“Hush!” she put one hand on his lips gently, and looked at him with a sort of smiling challenge in her eyes.  “Do you mean to forbid me?”

“I don’t think I could ever forbid you to do anything.”

“We shall see in England.”

“But, Rosamund”—­there was no one in sight, and he slipped one arm round her—­“if something came to fill your life, both our lives, to the brim?”