“Oh, if you feel it, I’m sure it is so.  But how awfully odd.  Isn’t it?”

“Yes, it really is rather odd in Beattie.  Do you want Beattie to marry Guy Daventry?”

“Of course I do.  Don’t you?”

“Dear Beattie!  I want her to be happy.  But I think it’s very difficult, even when one knows some one very, very well, to know just how she can get happiness, through just what.”

“Rose, have I made you happy?”

“Yes.”

“As happy as you could be?”

“I think, perhaps, you will have—­soon.”

“Oh, you mean——?”

“Yes.”

She went on stitching quietly.  Her hands looked very contented.  Dion drew up a little nearer to the fire with a movement that was rather brusk.  It just struck him that his walk home in the driving sleet had decidedly chilled his body.

“I believe I know what you mean about Beattie,” he said, after a pause, looking into the fire.  “But do you think that would be fair to Guy?”

“I’m not quite sure myself what I mean, honestly, Dion.”

“Well, let’s suppose it.  If it were so, would it be fair?”

“I think Beattie’s so really good that Mr. Daventry, as he loves her, could scarcely be unhappy with her.”

Dion thought for a moment, then he said: 

“Perhaps with Guy it wouldn’t be unfair, but, you know, Rose, that sort of thing wouldn’t do with some men.  Some men could never stand being married for anything but the one great reason.”

He did not explain what that reason was, and Rosamund did not ask.  There was a sort of wide and sweet tranquillity about her that evening.  Dion noticed that it seemed to increase upon her, and about her, as the days passed by.  She showed no sign of nervousness, had evidently no dread at all of bodily pain.  Either she trusted in her splendid health, or she was so wrapped up in the thought of the joy of being a mother that the darkness to be passed through did not trouble her; or perhaps—­he wondered about this—­she was all the time schooling herself, looking up, in memory, to the columns of the Parthenon.  He was much more strung up, much more restless and excitable than she was, but she did not seem to notice it.  Always singularly unconscious of herself she seemed at this period to be also unobservant of those about her.  He felt that she was being deliberately egoistic for a great reason, that she was caring for herself, soul and body, with a sort of deep and quiet intensity because of the child.

“She is right,” he said to himself, and he strove in all ways in his power to aid her beautiful selfishness; nevertheless sometimes he felt shut out; sometimes he felt as if already the unseen was playing truant over the seen.  He was conscious of the child’s presence in the little house through Rosamund’s way of being before he saw the child.  He wondered what other women were like in such periods, whether Rosamund was instinctively conforming to an