gritted as, with all the solemn intensity of childhood, he strove to obey on the instant Jenkins’s loud words of command.  It was obvious that he looked to Jenkins as a savage looks to his Tribal God.  His anxious but admiring mother was forgotten; the world was forgotten; Jenkins and the small boy were alone in a universe of grip dumb-bells, heavy weights, “exercisers,” boxing-gloves, horizontal bars, swinging balls and wooden “horses.”  Dion stood in the doorway and looked on till the lesson was finished.  It ended with a heavy clap on the small boy’s shoulders from the mighty paw of Jenkins, and a stentorian, “You’re getting along and no mistake, Master Tim!”

The face of Master Tim at this moment was a study.  All the flags of triumph and joy were hung out in it and floated on the breeze; a soul appeared at the two windows shining with perfect happiness; and, mysteriously, in all the little figure, from the ruffled primrose-colored feathers of hair to the feet in the white shoes, the pride of manhood looked forth through the glowing rapture of a child.

“What a jolly boy!” said Dion to Jenkins, when Master Tim and his mother had departed.  “It must be good to have a boy like that.”

“I hope you’ll have one some day, sir,” said Jenkins, speaking heartily in his powerful voice, but looking, for the moment, unusually severe.

He and Bert, his wife, had had one child, a girl, which had died of quinsy, and they had never had another.

“Now I’m ready for you, sir!” he added, with a sort of outburst of recovery.  “I should like a round with the gloves to-day, if it’s all the same to you.”

It was all the same to Dion, and, when he reached Queen Anne’s Mansions in the darkness of evening, he was still glowing from the exercise; the blood sang through his veins, and his heart was almost as light as his step.

Marion, the parlor-maid, let him in, and told him his mother was at home.  Dion put his hand to his lips, stole across the hall noiselessly, softly opened the drawing-room door, and caught his mother unawares.

Whenever he came into the well-known flat alone, he had a moment of retrogression, went back to his unmarried time, and was again, as for so many years, in the intimate life of his mother.  But to-day, as he opened the door, he was abruptly thrust out of his moment.  His mother was in her usual place on the high-backed sofa near the fire.  She was doing nothing, was just sitting with her hands, in their wrinkled gloves, folded in her lap, and her large, round blue eyes looking.  Dion thought of them as looking because they were wide open, but they were strangely emptied of expression.  All of his mother seemed to him for just the one instant which followed on his entrance to be emptied, as if the woman he had always known—­loving, satirical, clever, kind, observant—­had been poured away.  The effect upon him was one of indescribable, almost of horrible, dreariness.  Omar Khayyam, his mother’s black pug, was not in the room as usual, stretched out before the fire.