“You darling!” she whispered, so that only he could hear.  “I love you in your gaiters better than I ever loved you before.”  Then she handed him up to his father as if he were a dear little parcel.

“That’s it,” said Dion.  “Put your arm round here, boy.  Hold on tight!  Let him go!”

The hard-lipped man stood to one side and the horse—­well, moved.  Robin gazed down at his mother with the faint hint of an almost shy smile, Dion saluted her with his whip, and the glorious day was fairly begun.  Traveling with a sort of rakish deliberation the dogcart skirted the velvet lawn of the Green Court and disappeared from sight beneath the ancient archway.

Rosamund sighed as she turned to walk back to Little Cloisters.  She had made a real sacrifice that day in giving up Robin to his father and staying at home.  Secretly she had longed to go with her “men-folk” upon the great expedition, to be present at Robin’s initiation into the Doric life.  But something very dear in Dion had prompted her to be unselfish.  Dion was certainly much more impressive to her since his return from the war.  Even the dear things in him meant more.  There seemed to be more muscle in them than there had been when he went away.

“Even our virtues can be weak or strong, I suppose,” Rosamund thought, as she turned into the walled garden which she loved so much, and there followed the thought: 

“I wonder which mine are.”

She meant to spend that day in saying good-by to Welsley.  Dion had said they would talk things over again that night; probably he would be ready to fall in with any desire of hers, but she felt almost sure that she would not tell him how much she wished to stay on at Little Cloisters.

An obscure feeling had come to her that perhaps it was not quite safe for her to remain any longer here in the arms of the Precincts.  Looking backward to that which has been deliberately renounced is surely an act of weakness.

Even the imaginative effort to live a life that has been put aside is a feeble concession to an inclination at least partially morbid.  Rosamund was in fact a mother, and yet here in Welsley, she had, as it were, sometimes played at being one of those “Sisters” who are content to be brides of heaven and mothers of the poor.  For her own sake it was doubtless best to renounce Welsley at once.  The new meaning of Dion would help her to do that bravely.  He had often been unselfish for her; she would try to counter his unselfishness with hers.

When she was in the house again she had a colloquy with the cook about the dinner for that evening.  As Esme Darlington had given up an engagement in London to come to Little Cloisters, her dinner must be something special.  She told the cook so in her cordial, almost confidential, way, and they “put their heads together” and devised a menu full of attractions.  That done she had the day to herself.  Dion and Robin would come home some time in the afternoon, and they were all going to have tea together up in the nursery.  It might be at half-past four, it might be at half-past five.  Till then she was free.