“I hope not.  Still, lots of business men do.  And I’m sitting about three-quarters of my time.  One does get soft, and the softer a chap gets the less inclined he is to make the effort required of him, if he wants to get hard.  If I ever am to be the father of a growing-up son—­when they get to about sixteen, you know, they get awfully critical about games and athletics, sport, everything of that kind—­I should like to be able to keep my end up thoroughly well with him.  He’d respect me far more then.  I know exactly the type of fellow real boys look up to.  It isn’t the intelligent softy, however brainy he may be; it’s the man who can do all the ordinary things superlatively well.”

She smiled at him with her now curiously tranquil yellow-brown eyes, and he thought he saw in them approval.

“I think few men would prepare as you do,” she said.

“And how many women would prepare as you do?” he returned.

“I couldn’t do anything else.  But now I feel as if we were working together, in a way.”

He squeezed her hand.  She let it lie motionless in his.

“But if it weren’t a boy?” he said, struck by a sudden reaction of doubt.

And the thought went, like an arrow, through him: 

“What chance should I have then?”

“I know it will be a boy,” she answered.

“Why?  Not because you sleep north and south!” he exclaimed, with a laughing allusion to the assertion of Herrick.

“I don’t.”

“I always thought the bed——­”

“No, it’s east and west.”

“Fishermen say the dead sleep east and west.”

“Are you superstitious?”

“I don’t know.  Perhaps, where you are concerned.”

“Don’t be.  Superstition seems to me the opposite of belief.  Just wait, and remember, I know it will be a boy.”

One evening Dion went to Great Cumberland Place to dine with Bruce Evelin and Beatrice, leaving Rosamund apparently in her usual health.  She was going to have “something on a tray” in her sitting-room, and he went in there to say good-by to her just before he started.  He found her sitting by the fire, and looking at Hermes and the Child with steady eyes.  They were lit up rather faintly by a couple of wax candles placed on the writing-table.  The light from these candles and from the fire made a delicate and soothing radiance in the room, which was plainly furnished, and almost somber in color.  A very dim and cloudy purple-blue pervaded it, a very beautiful hue, but austere, and somehow suggestive of things ecclesiastical.  On a small, black oak table at Rosamund’s elbow two or three books were lying beside a bowl of dim blue glass which had opalescent lights in it.  This bowl was nearly full of water upon which a water-lily floated.  The fire on the hearth was small, but glowing with red and gold.  Dark curtains were drawn across the one window which looked out at the back of the house.  It was a frosty night and windless.