“I’m glad you’ve joined.”

“I thought you would be.  I shall see a little less of you, I suppose, but, after all, a husband can’t be perpetually hanging about the house, can he?”

Rosamund looked at him and smiled, then laughed gently.

“Dion, how absurd you are!  In some ways you are only a boy still.”

“Why, what to you mean?”

“A man who sticks to business as you do, hanging about the house!”

“You wouldn’t like it if I did.”

“No, because I should know it was doing you harm.”

“And besides—­do you realize how independent you are?”

“Am I?”

“For a woman I think you are extraordinarily independent.”

She sat still for a minute, looking straight before her in an almost curious stillness.

“I believe I know why perhaps I seem so,” she said at length.

And then she quietly, and very naturally, turned the conversation into another channel; she was a quieter Rosamund in those days of waiting than the Rosamund unaffected by motherhood.  That Rosamund had been vigorous and joyous; this Rosamund was strongly serene.  In all she was and did at this time Dion felt strength; but it was shown chiefly in stillness.  She worked sometimes; she read a great deal sitting upstairs in her own little room.  One day Dion found her with a volume of Tennyson; another day she was reading Shakespeare’s “Henry the Fifth”; she had the “Paradiso” in hand, too, and the Greek Testament with the English text in parallel columns.  In the room there was a cottage piano, and one evening, when Dion had been drilling and came back late, he heard her singing.  He stood still in the hall, after shutting softly the door of the lobby, and listened to the warm and powerful voice of the woman he loved.  He could hear the words of the song, which was a setting of “Lead, kindly Light.”  Rosamund had only just begun singing it when he came into the hall; the first words he caught were, “The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead thou me on.”  He thrust his hands into the pockets of the black jacket he was wearing and did not move.  He had never before heard Rosamund sing any piece of music through without seeing her while she was doing it; her voice seemed to him now different from the voice he knew so well; perhaps because he was uninfluenced by her appearance.  That counted for much in the effect Rosamund created when she sang to people.  The thought went through Dion’s mind, “Am I really the husband of this voice?” It was beautiful, it was fervent, but it was strange, or seemed strange to him as it came down through the quiet house on this winter evening.  For the first time, listening thus, he was able imaginatively to realize something of what it must be like to be a mystic, or rather, perhaps, to have within one a definite tendency towards mysticism, a definite and ceaseless and governing aspiration towards harmony with the transcendental order.  When this voice