He said nothing more just then, but at that moment he felt as if he, too, knew, not merely hoped, or guessed, something about their joint future, knew in the depths of him that a boy-child would some day be sent to Rosamund and to him, to influence and to change their lives.

The wind began to fail almost suddenly, the sky grew brighter, a shaft of sun lay on the marble at their feet.

“It’s going to be fine,” Dion said.  “Let’s be active for once.  The wind has made me restless.  Suppose we get a couple of horses and ride out to the convent of Daphni!”

She got up at once.

“Yes.  I’ve brought my habit, and haven’t had it on once.”

As they left the Great Temple she looked up at the mighty columns and said;

“Doric!  If we have a boy let us bring him up to be Doric.”

“Yes, Rosamund,” he said quietly and strongly.  “We will.”

Afterward he believed that it was then, and only then, that he caught something of her deep longing to have a child.  He began to see how a man’s child might influence him and affect his life, might even send him upwards by innocently looking up to him.  It would be bad, very bad, to fail as a husband, but, by Jove! it would be one of the great tragedies to fail as a father.  Mentally Dion measured the respective heights of himself and a very small boy; saw the boy’s trusting eyes looking, almost peering, up at him.  Such eyes could change, could become very attentive.  “It wouldn’t do to be adversely criticized by your boy,” he thought.  And one day he said to Rosamund, but in almost a casual way: 

“If we ever do have a boy, Rose, and want him to be Doric, we shall have to start in by being Doric ourselves, eh?”

“Yes,” she answered, “I’ve thought that, too.”

“D’you think I could ever learn to be that?”

“I know you could.  You are on the way already, I think.  I noticed in London that you were never influenced by all the affectations and absurdities, or worse, that seem to have taken hold of so many people lately.”

“There has been a wave of something rather beastly passing over London certainly.  But I almost wonder you knew it.”

“Why?”

“Can your eyes see anything that isn’t good?”

“Yes.  But I don’t want ever to look long on what I hate.”

“You aren’t afraid you might cease from hating it!”

“Oh, no.  But I believe in feeding always on wholesome food.”

“Modern London doesn’t.”

“I shall never be modern, I’m afraid,” she said, half laughing, and with a soft touch of apparently genuine deprecation.

“Be eternal, that’s better!” he almost whispered.  “Listen to that nightingale.  It’s singing a song of all the ages.  You have a message like that for me.”