Suddenly he felt aware of a peculiar sort of strength in her, in her softness, a strength not at all as of iron, mysterious and tenacious.

“Dear old Beattie!” he said.

Moisture had sprung into his eyes.

“How lonely our lives are,” he continued, looking at her now with a sort of deep curiosity.  “The lives of all of us.  I don’t care who it is, man, woman, child, he or she, every one’s lonely.  And yet——­”

A doubt had surely struck him.  He sat very still for a minute.

“When I think of Rosamund I can’t think of her as lonely.”

“Can’t you?”

“No.  Somehow it seems as if she always had a companion with her.”

He turned a few more pages of Mrs. Clarke’s book, glancing here and there.

“Rosamund would hate this book,” he said presently.  “It seems thoroughly anti-Christian.  But it’s very wonderful.”

He put the book down.

“Dear Beattie!  Guy cares very much for you.”

“Yes, I know,” said Beatrice, with a great simplicity.

“If he comes well out of this case, and feels he’s on the road to success, he’ll be another man.  He’ll dare as a man ought to dare.”

She went on sewing the little garment for Dion’s child.

“I’ll walk across the Park with you, old Dion,” said Daventry that night, as they left the house in Great Cumberland Place, “whether you’re going to walk home or whether you’re not, whether you’re in a devil of a hurry to get back to your Rosamund, or whether you’re in a mood for friendship.  What time is it, by the way?”

He was wrapped in a voluminous blue overcoat, with a wide collar, immense lapels, and apparently only one button, and that button so minute that it was scarcely visible to the naked eye.  From somewhere he extracted a small, abnormally thin watch with a gold face.

“Only twenty minutes to eleven.  We dined early.”

“You really wish to walk?”

“I not only wish to walk, I will walk.”

The still glory of frost had surely fascinated London, had subdued the rumbling and uneasy black monster; it seemed to Dion unusually quiet, almost like something in ecstasy under the glittering stars of frost, which shone in a sky swept clear of clouds by the hand of the lingering winter.  It was the last night of February, but it looked, and felt, like a night dedicated to the Christ Child, to Him who lay on the breast of Mary with cattle breathing above Him.  As Dion gazed up at the withdrawn and yet almost piercing radiance of the wonderful sky, instinctively he thought of the watching shepherds, and of the coming of that Child who stands forever apart from all the other children born of women into this world.  He wished Rosamund were with him to see the stars, and the frost glistening white on the great stretches of grass, and the naked trees in the mysterious and romantic Park.

“Shall we take the right-hand path and walk round the Serpentine?” said Daventry presently.