“Only for a few minutes.  I am sorry.  I’ll write to the dear mother.”

She went quietly out of the room.  Dion sprang up to open the door for her, but she had been sitting nearer to the door than he, and he was too late; he shut it, however, and came slowly back to Beatrice.

“I wonder——­” He looked at Beatrice’s pale face and earnest dark eyes.  “D’you think Rosamund disliked my mentioning poor Omar’s being killed?”

“No.”

“But didn’t she leave us rather abruptly?”

“I think perhaps she didn’t want to hear any details.  You were just beginning to—­”

“How stupid of me!”

“You see, Rosamund has the child to live for now.”

“Yes—­yes.  What blunderers we men are, however much we try—­”

“That’s not a blame you ought to take,” Beatrice interrupted, with earnest gentleness.  “You are the most thoughtful man I know—­for a woman, I mean.”

Dion flushed.

“Am I?  I try to be.  If I am it’s because—­well, Beattie, you know what Rose is to me.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Dearer and dearer every day.  But nobody——­Mother thinks a lot of her.”

“Who doesn’t?  There aren’t many Roses like ours.”

“None.  Poor mother!  Beattie, d’you think she feels very lonely?  You know she’s got heaps of friends—­heaps.”

“Yes.”

“It isn’t as if she knew very few people, or lived alone in the country.”

“No but I’m very sorry her little dog’s dead.”

“I want to give her another.”

“It would be no use.”

“But why not?”

“You see, little Omar was always there when you were living there.”

“Well?”

“He was part of her life with you.”

“Oh—­yes.”

Dion looked rather hard at Beatrice.  In that moment he began to realize how much of the intelligence of the heart she possessed, and how widely she applied it.  His application of his intelligence of the heart was, he feared, much less widespread than hers.

“Go to see mother when you can, will you?” he said.  “She’s very fond of you, I think.”

“I’ll go.  I like going to her.”

“And, Beattie, may I say something rather intimate?  I’m your brother now.”

“Yes.”

She was sitting opposite to him near the fire on a low chair.  There was a large shaded lamp in the room, but it was on a rather distant table.  He saw Beatrice’s face by the firelight and her narrow thoroughbred figure in a dark dress.  And the firelight, he thought, gave to both face and figure a sort of strange beauty that was sad, and that had something of the strangeness and the beauty of those gold and red castles children see in the fire.  They glow—­and that evening there was a sort of glow in Beatrice; they crumble—­and then there was a pathetic something in Beatrice, too, which suggested wistful desires, perhaps faint hopes and an ending of ashes.