Welsley, she thought, had changed her a good deal.  She was not a self-conscious woman as a rule, but to-day was not like other days, and she was not quite like herself on other days.  Perhaps, for once, she was what women often call “strung up”; certainly she felt peculiarly alive—­alive specially in the nerves of her body.

Those two arm-chairs were talking to her; they were telling her of the imminent renewal of the life closely companioned, watched over, protected, beloved.  They were telling, and they were asking, too.  She felt absurdly that it was they who were asking how much she had missed Dion.

It would be good to have him back, but she now suddenly realized, in a self-conscious way, that she had managed to be very happy without him.  But then she had always looked forward to his eventual return.  Suppose he had not come back?

She got up restlessly, went to the window and looked out into the garden.  Robin was not there, nor was he in the house.  Obedient to an impulse which she had not understood at the time, Rosamund had arranged a small, and rather odd, festivity for him which had taken him away from home, and would keep him out till five o’clock:  he was having tea in a cake-shop near the top of Wesley High Street with his nurse and Mr. Thrush, who, not unexpectedly, had arrived in Welsley.  The first meeting between his father and mother would not be complicated by his eager young presence.

So the garden was empty to-day.  Not even the big young gardener was to be seen; he only came on four days in the week, and this was not one of them.  As Rosamund looked down into the garden, she loved its loneliness, its misty, autumnal aspect.  It was surely not her fault if she had a natural affection for solitude—­not for the hideous solitude of a childless mother, but for the frequent privacy of a mother who was alone, but who knew that her child was near, playing perhaps, or gone for a little jaunt with his faithful nurse, or sleeping upstairs.

As she looked at the garden a faint creeping sense of something almost like fear came to her.  Since Dion had been away she had surely altered, because she had had a new experience; she had, as it were, touched the confines of that life which she had deliberately renounced when she had married.

It seemed to her, as she stood there and remembered her long meditations in that enclosed and ancient garden, that in these months she had drawn much nearer to God, and—­could it be because of that?—­perhaps had receded a little from her husband.

The sense of uneasiness—­she could not call it fear—­deepened in her.  Was the receding then implicit in the drawing near?  She began to feel almost confused.  She put up a hand to her face; her cheek was hot.

The clock in the room struck four; two minutes later the chimes sounded, and then Big John announced the hour.

Dion might arrive at any moment now.  She turned away rather quickly from the window.  She hated the unusual feeling of self-consciousness which had come to her.