Robin opened the door, went straight up to the very dark and very thin man whom he saw sitting by the fire, and, staring at this man with intensity, lifted up his face, at the same time saying: 

“’Ullo, Fa!”

There was a dropped aitch for which nurse, who was very choice in her English, would undoubtedly have rebuked him had she been present.  The dark man did not rebuke Robin, but caught him up and enfolded him in a hug that was powerful but not a bit rough.  Robin was quite incapable of analyzing a hug, but he loved it as he would not have loved it if it had been rough, or if it had been merely gentle.  A sense of great happiness and of great confidence flooded him.  From that moment he adored his father as he had never adored him before.  The new authority of his father’s love for him captured him.  He knew nothing about it and he knew all about it, as is the way with children, those instinctive sparks fresh from the great furnace.

Long before dinner time Dion knew that he had won something beside the D.C.M. which he had won in South Africa, something that was wonderfully precious to him.  He gave Robin the Toby jar and another gift.

He cared for his little son that night as he had never cared for him before.  It was as if the sex in Robin spoke to the sex in him for the first time with a clear, unmistakable voice, saying, “We’re of the comradeship of the male sex, we’re of the brotherhood.”  It was not even a child’s voice that spoke, though it spoke in a little child.  Dion blessed South Africa that night, felt as if South Africa had given him his son.

That gift would surely be a weapon in his hands by means of which, or with the help of which, he would conquer the still unconquered mystery, Rosamund’s whole heart.  South Africa had done much for Dion.  Out there in that wonderful atmosphere he had seen very clearly, his vision had pierced great distances; he saw clearly still, in England.  War, it seemed, was so terribly truthful that it swept a man clean of lies; Dion was swept clean of lies.  He did not feel able any longer even to tell them occasionally to himself.  He knew that Rosamund’s greeting to him, warm, sweet, sincere though it had been, had lacked something which he had found in Robin’s.  But he felt that now he had got hold of Robin so instantly, and so completely, the conquest of the woman he had only won must be but a question of time.  That was not pride in him but instinct, speaking with that voice which seems a stranger to the brain of man, but a friend to something else; something universal of which in every man a fragment is housed, or by which every man is mysteriously penetrated.

A fortnight’s holiday—­and then?

On that first evening it had been assumed that as soon as Dion went back to business in Austin Friars, No. 5 Little Market Street would receive its old tenants again, be scented again with the lavender, made musical with Rosamund’s voice, made gay with the busy prattle and perpetual activities of Robin.