As Dion had said, the baby was an ordinary baby. “In looks,” the nurse remarked, “he favors his papa.” Certainly in this early stage of his career the baby had little of the beauty and charm of Rosamund. As his head was practically bald, his forehead, which was wrinkled as if by experience and the troubles of years, looked abnormally high. His face, full of puckers, was rather red; his nose meant very little as yet; his mouth, with perpetually moving lips, was the home of bubbles. His eyes were blue, and looked large in his extremely small countenance, which was often decorated with an expression of mild inquiry. This expression, however, sometimes changed abruptly to a network of wrath, in which every feature, and even the small bald head, became involved. Then the minute feet made feeble dabs, or stabs, at the atmosphere; the tiny fists doubled themselves and wandered to and fro as if in search of the enemy; and a voice came forth out of the temple, very personal and very intense, to express the tempest of the soul.

“Hark at him!” said the nurse. “He knows already what he wants and what he don’t want.”

And Rosamund, listening as only a mother can listen, shook her head over him, trying to condemn the rage, but enjoying the strength of her child in the way of mothers, to whom the baby’s roar perhaps brings the thought, “What a fine, bold man he’ll be some day.” If Rosamund had such a thought the nurse encouraged it with her. “He’s got a proud spirit already, ma’am. He’s not to be put upon. Have his way he will, and I don’t altogether blame him.” Nor, be sure, did Rosamund altogether blame the young varmint for anything. Perhaps in his tiny fisticuffs and startlingly fierce cries she divined the Doric, in embryo, as it were; perhaps when “little master” shrieked she thought of the columns of the Parthenon.

But Dion told the truth to Canon Wilton when he had said that Rosamund was marvelously reasonable, so far, in her love for her baby son. The admirable sanity, the sheer healthiness of outlook which Dion loved in her did not desert her now. To Dion it seemed that in the very calmness and good sense of her love she showed its great depth, showed that already she was thinking of her child’s soul as well as of his little body.

Dion felt the beginnings of a change in Rosamund, but he did not find either her or himself suddenly and radically changed by the possession of a baby. He had thought that perhaps as mother and father they would both feel abruptly much older than before, even perhaps old. It was not so. Often Dion gazed at the baby as he bubbled and cooed, sneezed with an air of angry astonishment, stared at nothing with a look of shallow surmise, or, composing his puckers, slept, and Dion still felt young, even very young, and not at all like a father.

“I’m sure,” he once said to Rosamund, “women feel much more like mothers when they have a baby than men feel like fathers.”

“I feel like a mother all over,” she replied, bending above the child. “In every least little bit of me.”

“Then do you feel completely changed?”

“Completely, utterly.”

Dion sat still for a moment gazing at her. She felt his look, perhaps, for she lifted her head, and her eyes went from the baby to him.

“What is it, Rosamund? What are you considering?”

“Well——” She hesitated. “Perhaps no one could quite understand, but I feel a sense of release.”

“Release! From what?”

Again she hesitated; then she looked once more at the child almost as if she wished to gain something from his helplessness. At last she said:

“Dion, as you’ve given me him, I’ll tell you. Very often in the past I’ve had an urgent desire some day to enter into the religious life.”

“D’you—d’you mean to become a Roman Catholic and a nun?” he exclaimed, feeling, absurdly perhaps, almost afraid and half indignant.

“No. I’ve never wished to change my religion. There are Anglican sisterhoods, you know.”

“But your singing!”

“I only intended to sing for a time. Then some day, when I felt quite ready, I meant—”

“But you married me?” he interrupted.

“Yes. So you see I gave it all up.”

“But you said it was the child which had brought you a sensation of release!”

“Perhaps you have never been a prisoner of a desire which threatens to dominate your soul forever,” she said, quietly evading his point and looking down, so that he could not see her eyes. “Look, he’s waking!”

Surely she had moved abruptly and the movement had awakened the child. She began playing with him, and the conversation was broken.

The Clarke trial came on in May, when Robin was becoming almost elderly, having already passed no less than ten weeks in the midst of this wicked world. On the day before it opened, Daventry made Dion promise to come into court at least once to hear some of the evidence.

“A true friend would be there every day,” he urged—“to back up his old chum.”

“Business!” returned Dion laconically.

“What’s your real reason against it?”

“Well, Rosamund hates this kind of case. I spoke to her about it the other day.”

“What did she say?”

“That she was delighted you had something to do, and that she hoped, if Mrs. Clarke were innocent, she’d win. She pities her for being dragged through all this mud.”

“Yes?”

“She said at the end that she hoped I wouldn’t think her unsympathetic if she neither talked about the case nor read about it. She hates filling her mind with ugly details and horrible suggestions.”

“I see.”

“You know, Guy, Rosamund thinks—she’s told me so more than once—that the mind and the soul are very sensitive, and that—that they ought to be watched over, and—and taken care of.”

Dion looked rather uncomfortable as he finished. It was one thing to speak of such matters with Rosamund, and quite another to touch on them with a man, even a man who was a trusted friend.

“Perhaps you’d rather not come at all?”

“No, no. I’ll come once. You know how keen I am on your making a good start.”

Daventry took him at his word, and got him a seat beside Mrs. Chetwinde on the third day of the trial, when Mrs. Clarke’s cross-examination, begun on the previous day, was continued by Sir Edward Jeffson, Beadon Clarke’s leading counsel.

Dion told Rosamund where he was going when he left the house in the morning.

“I hope it will go well for poor Mrs. Clarke,” she said kindly, but perhaps rather indifferently.

She had not looked at the reports of the case in the papers, and had not discussed its progress with Dion. He was not sorry for that. It was a horrible case, full of abominable allegations and suggestions such as he would have hated to discuss with Rosamund. As he stood in the little hall of their house, which was delicately scented with lavender and lit by pale sunshine, bidding her good-by, he realized the impossibility of such a woman as she was ever being “mixed up” in such a trial. Simply that couldn’t happen, he thought. Instinct would keep her far from every suggestion of a possible impurity. He felt certain that Mrs. Clarke was innocent, but, as he looked into Rosamund’s honest brown eyes, he thought that Mrs. Clarke must have been singularly imprudent. He remembered how she had held his hand in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room. Wisdom and unwisdom; he compared them: the one was a builder up, the other a destroyer of beauty—the beauty that is in every completely sane and perfectly poised life.

“Rose,” he said, leaning forward to kiss his wife, “I think you are very wise.”

“Why wise all of a sudden?” she asked, smiling.

“You keep the door of your life.”

He glanced round at the little hall, simple, fresh, with a few white roses in a blue pot, the pale sunshine lying on the polished floor of wood, the small breeze coming in almost affectionately between snowy curtains. Purity—everything seemed to whisper of that, to imply that; simplicity ruling, complexity ruled out.

And then he was sitting in the crowded court, breathing bad air, hearing foul suggestions, watching strained or hateful faces, surrounded by people who were attracted by ugly things as vultures are attracted by the stench of dead and decaying bodies. At first he loathed being there; presently, however, he became interested, then almost fascinated by his surroundings and by the drama which was being played slowly out in the midst of them.

Daventry, in wig and gown, looked tremendously legal and almost severe in his tense gravity. Sir John Addington, his leader, a man of great fame, was less tense in his watchfulness, amazingly at his ease with the Court, and on smiling terms with the President, who, full of worldly and unworldly knowledge, held the balance of justice with an unwavering firmness. The jury looked startlingly commonplace, smug and sleepy, despite the variety of type almost inevitably presented by twelve human beings. Not one of them looked a rascal; not one of them looked an actively good man. The intense Englishness of them hit one in the face like a well-directed blow from a powerful fist. And they had to give the verdict on this complex drama of Stamboul! How much they would have to tell their wives presently! Their sense of their unusual importance pushed through the smugness heavily, like a bulky man in broadcloth showing through a dull crowd.

Mrs. Clarke occasionally glanced at them with an air of almost distressed inquiry, as if she had never seen such cabbages before, and was wondering about their gray matter. Her life in Stamboul must have effected changes in her. She looked almost exotic in this court, despite the simplicity of her gown, her unpretending little hat; as if her mind, perhaps, had become exotic. But she certainly did not look wicked. Dion was struck again by the strong mentality of her and by her haggardness. To him she seemed definitely a woman of mind, not at all an animal woman. When he gazed at her he felt that he was gazing at mind rather than at body. Just before she went into the box she met his eyes. She stared at him, as if carefully and strongly considering him; then she nodded. He bowed, feeling uncomfortable, feeling indeed almost a brute.

“She’ll think I’ve come out of filthy curiosity,” he thought, looking round at the greedy faces of the crowd.

No need to ask why those faces were there.

He felt still more uncomfortable when Mrs. Clarke was in the witness-box, and Sir Edward Jeffson took up the cross-examination which he had begun late in the afternoon of the previous day.

Dion had very seldom been in a Court of Justice, and had never before been in the Divorce Court. As the cross-examination of Mrs. Clarke lengthened out he felt as if his clothes, and the clothes of all the human beings who crowded about him, were being ruthlessly stripped off, as if an ugly and abominable nakedness were gradually appearing. The shame of it all was very hateful to him; and yet—yes, he couldn’t deny it—there was a sort of dreadful fascination in it, too.

The two co-respondents, Hadi Bey and Aristide Dumeny of the French Embassy in Constantinople, were in court, sitting not far from Dion, to whom Mrs. Chetwinde, less vague than, but quite as self-possessed as, usual, pointed them out.

Both were young men. Hadi Bey, who of course wore the fez, was a fine specimen of the smart, alert, cosmopolitan and cultivated Turk of modern days. There was a peculiar look of vividness and brightness about him, in his piercing dark eyes, in his red lips, in his healthy and manly face with its rosy brown complexion and its powerful decided chin. He had none of the sleepiness and fatalistic languor of the fat hubble-bubble smoking Turk of caricature. The whole of him looked aristocratic, energetic, perfectly poised and absolutely self-possessed. Many of the women in court glanced at him without any distaste.

Aristide Dumeny was almost strangely different—an ashy-pale, dark-eyed, thin and romantic-visaged man, stamped with a curious expression of pain and fatalism. He looked as if he had seen much, dreamed many dreams, and suffered not a little. There was in his face something slightly contemptuous, as if, intellectually, he seldom gazed up at any man. He watched Mrs. Clarke in the box with an enigmatic closeness of attention which seemed wholly impersonal, even when she was replying to hideous questions about himself. That he had an interesting personality was certain. When his eyes rested on the twelve jurymen he smiled every so faintly. It seemed to him, perhaps, absurd that they should have power over the future of the woman in the witness-box.

That woman showed an extraordinary self-possession which touched dignity but which never descended to insolence. Despite her obvious cleverness and mental resource she preserved a certain simplicity. She did not pose as a passionate innocent, or assume any forced airs of supreme virtue. She presented herself rather as a woman of the world who was careless of the conventions, because she thought of them as chains which prevented free movement and were destructive of genuine liberty. She acknowledged that she had been a great deal with Hadi Bey and Dumeny, that she had often made long excursions with each of them on foot, on horseback, in caiques, that she had had them to dinner, separately, on many occasions in a little pavilion which stood at the end of her husband’s garden and looked upon the Bosporus. These dinners had frequently taken place when her husband was away from home. Monsieur Dumeny was a good musician and had sometimes sung and played to her till late in the night. Hadi Bey had sometimes been her guide in Constantinople and had given to her the freedom of his strange and mysterious city of Stamboul. With him she had visited the mosques, with him she had explored the bazaars, with him she had sunk down in the strange and enveloping melancholy of the vast Turkish cemeteries which are protected by forests of cypresses. All this she acknowledged without the least discomposure. One of her remarks to the cross-examining counsel was this:

“You suggest that I have been very imprudent. I answer that I am not able to live what the conventional call a prudent life. Such a life would be a living death to me.”

“Kindly confine yourself to answering my questions,” retorted Counsel harshly. “I suggest that you were far more than imprudent. I suggest that when you and Hadi Bey remained together in that pavilion on the Bosporus until midnight, until after midnight, you——” and then followed another hideous accusation, which, gazing with her observant eyes at the brick-red shaven face of her accuser, Mrs. Clarke quietly denied. She never showed temper. Now and then she gave indications of a sort of cold disgust or faint surprise. But there were no outraged airs of virtue. A slight disdain was evidently more natural to the temperament of this woman than any fierceness of protestation. Once when Counsel said, “I shall ask the jury to infer”—something abominable, Mrs. Clarke tranquilly rejoined:

“Whatever they infer it won’t alter the truth.”

Daventry moved his shoulders. Dion was certain that he considered this remark ill-advised. The jury, however, at whom Mrs. Clarke gazed in the short silence which followed, seemed, Dion thought, impressed by her firmness. The luncheon interval prevented Counsel from saying anything further just then, and Mrs. Clarke stepped down from the box.

“Isn’t she wonderful?”

Dion heard this murmur, which did not seem to be addressed to any particular person. It had come from Mrs. Chetwinde, who now got up and went to speak to Mrs. Clarke. The whole court was in movement. Dion went out to have a hasty lunch with Daventry.

“A pity she said that!” Daventry said in a low voice to Dion, hitching up his gown. “Juries like to be deferred to.”

“I believe she impressed them by her independence.”

“Do you, though? She’s marvelously intelligent. Perhaps she knows more of men, even of jurymen, than I do.”

At lunch they discussed the case. Daventry had had two or three chances given to him by Sir John Addington, and thought he had done quite well.

“Do you think Mrs. Clarke will win?” said Dion.

“I know she’s innocent, but I can’t tell. She’s so infernally unconventional and a jury’s so infernally conventional that I can’t help being afraid.”

Dion thought of his Rosamund’s tranquil wisdom.

“I think Mrs. Clarke’s very clever,” he said. “But I suppose she isn’t very wise.”

“I’ll tell you what it is, old Dion; she prefers life to wisdom.”

“Well, but——” Dion Began.

But he stopped. Now he knew Mrs. Clarke a little better, from her own evidence, he knew just what Daventry meant. He looked upon the life of unwisdom, and he was able to feel its fascination. There were scents in it that lured, and there were colors that tempted; in its night there was music; about it lay mystery, shadows, and silver beams of the moon shining between cypresses like black towers. It gave out a call to which, perhaps, very few natures of men were wholly deaf. The unwise life! Almost for the first time Dion considered it with a deep curiosity.

He considered it more attentively, more curiously, during the afternoon, when Mrs. Clarke’s cross-examination was continued.

It was obvious that during this trial two women were being presented to the judge and jury, the one a greedy and abominably secret and clever sensualist, who hid her mania beneath a cloak of intellectuality, the other a genuine intellectual, whose mental appetites far outweighed the appetites of her body, who was, perhaps, a sensualist, but a sensualist of the spirit and not of the flesh. Which of these two women was the real Cynthia Clarke? The jury would eventually give their decision, but it might not be in accordance with fact. Meanwhile, the horrible unclothing process was ruthlessly proceeded with. But already Dion was becoming accustomed to it. Perhaps Mrs. Clarke’s self-possession helped him to assimilate the nauseous food which was offered to him.

Beadon Clarke was in court, and had been pointed out to Dion, an intellectual and refined-looking man, bald, with good features, and a gentle, but now pained, expression; obviously a straight and aristocratic fellow. Beside him sat his mother, that Lady Ermyntrude who, it was said, had forced on the trial. She sat upright, her eyes fixed on her daughter-in-law, a rather insignificant small woman, not very well dressed, young looking, with hair done exactly in Queen Alexandra’s way, and crowned with a black toque.

Dion noticed that she had a very firm mouth and chin. She did not look actively hostile as she gazed at the witness, but merely attentive—deeply, concentratedly attentive. Mrs. Clarke never glanced towards her.

Perhaps, whatever Lady Ermyntrude had believed hitherto, she was now beginning to wonder whether her conception of her son’s wife had been a wrong one, was beginning to ask herself whether she had divined the nature of the soul inhabiting the body which now stood up before her.

About an hour before the close of the sitting the heat in the court became almost suffocating, and the Judge told Mrs. Clarke she might continue her evidence sitting down. She refused this favor.

“I’m not at all tired, my lord,” she said.

“She’s made of iron,” Mrs. Chetwinde murmured to Dion. “Though she generally looks like a corpse. She was haggard even as a girl.”

“Did you know her then?” he whispered.

“I’ve known her all my life.”

Daventry wiped his brow with a large pocket-handkerchief, performing the action legally. One of the jurymen, who was too fat, and had something of the expression of a pug dog, opened his mouth and rolled slightly in his seat. The cross-examination became with every moment more disagreeable. Beadon Clarke never lifted his eyes from his knees. All the women in court, except Mrs. Chetwinde and Mrs. Clarke, were looking strangely alive and conscious. Dion had forgotten everything except Stamboul and the life of unwisdom. Suppose Mrs. Clarke had lived the life imputed to her by Counsel, suppose she really were a consummately clever and astoundingly ingenious humbug, driven, as many human beings are driven, by a dominating vice which towered over her life issuing commands she had not the strength to resist, how had it profited her? Had she had great rewards in it? Had she been led down strange ways guided by fascination bearing the torch from which spring colored fires? Good women sometimes, perhaps oftener than many people realize, look out of the window and try to catch a glimpse of the world of the wicked women, asking themselves, “Is it worth while? Is their time so much better than mine? Am I missing—missing?” And they shut the window—for fear. Far away, turning the corner of some dark alley, they have seen the colored gleam of the torch.

Rosamund would never do that—would never even want to do that. She was not one of the good women who love to take just a peep at evil “because one ought to know something of the trials and difficulties of those less fortunately circumstanced than oneself.”

But, for the moment, Dion had quite forgotten his Rosamund. She was in England, but he was in Stamboul, hearing the waters of the Bosporus lapping at the foot of Mrs. Clarke’s garden pavilion, while Dumeny played to her as the moon came up to shine upon the sweet waters of Asia; or sitting under the plane trees of the Pigeon Mosque, while Hadi Bey showed her how to write an Arabic love-letter—to somebody in the air, of course. In this trial he felt the fascination of Constantinople as he had never felt it when he was in Constantinople; but he felt, too, that only those who strayed deliberately from the beaten paths could ever capture the full fascination of the divided city, which looks to Europe and to Asia, and is set along the way of the sea.

Whether innocent or guilty, Mrs. Clarke had certainly done that. He watched her with a growing interest. How very much she must know that he did not know. Then he glanced at Hadi Bey, who still sat up alertly, who still looked bright and vivid, intelligent, ready for anything, a man surely with muscles of steel and a courageous robust nature, and at Aristide Dumeny. Upon the latter his eyes rested for a long time. When at last he again looked at Mrs. Clarke he had formed the definite impression that Dumeny was corrupt—an interesting man, a clever, probably a romantic as well as a cynical man, but certainly corrupt.

Didn’t that tell against Mrs. Clarke?

She was now being questioned about a trip at night in a caique with Hadi Bey down the sweet waters of Asia where willows lean over the stream. Mrs. Chetwinde’s pale eyes were fastened upon her. Beadon Clarke bent his head a little lower as, in her husky voice, his wife said that he knew of the expedition, had apparently smiled upon her unconventionalities, knowing how entirely free she was from the ugly bias towards vice attributed to her by Counsel.

Lady Ermyntrude Clarke shot a glance at her son, and her firm mouth became firmer.

The willows bent over the sweet waters in the warm summer night; the Albanian boatmen were singing.

“She must have had wonderful times!”

The whisper came from an unseen woman sitting just behind Dion. His mind echoed the thought she had expressed. Now the Judge was rising from the bench and bowing to the Court; Mrs. Clarke was stepping down from the witness-box; Dumeny, his eyes half closed, was brushing his shining silk hat with the sleeve of his coat; Beadon Clarke was leaning to speak to his mother.

The Court was adjourned.

As Dion got up he felt the heat as if it were heat from a furnace. His face and his body were burning.

“Come and speak to Cynthia, and take us to tea somewhere—can you?” said Mrs. Chetwinde.

“Of course, with pleasure.”

“Your Rosamund——?”

Her eyes were on him for a moment.

“She won’t expect me at any particular time.”

“Mr. Daventry can come too.”

Dion never forgot their difficult exit from the court. It made him feel ashamed for humanity, for the crowd which frantically pressed to stare at a woman because perhaps she had done things which were considered by all right-minded people to be disgusting. Mrs. Clarke and her little party of friends had to be helped away by the police. When at length they were driving away towards Claridge’s Hotel, Dion was able once more to meet the eyes of his companions, and again he was amazed at the self-possession of Mrs. Clarke. Really she seemed as composed, as completely mistress of herself, as when he had first seen her standing near the statue of Echo in the drawing-room of Mrs. Chetwinde.

“You haven’t been in court before to-day, have you?” she said to Dion.

“No.”

“Why did you come to-day?”

“Well, I——” He hesitated. “I promised Mr. Daventry to come to-day.”

“That was it!” said Mrs. Clarke, and she looked out of the window.

Dion felt rather uncomfortable as he spoke to Mrs. Chetwinde and left further conversation with Mrs. Clarke to Daventry; but when they were all in a quiet corner of the tearoom at Claridge’s, a tea-table before them and a band playing softly at a distance, he was more at his ease. The composure of Mrs. Clarke perhaps conveyed itself to him. She spoke of the case quite naturally, as a guilty woman surely could not possibly have spoken of it—showing no venom, making no attack upon her accusers.

“It’s all a mistake,” she said, “arising out of stupidity, out of the most widespread and, perhaps, the most pitiable and dangerous lack in human nature.”

“And what’s that?” asked Daventry, rather eagerly.

“I expect you know.”

He shook his head.

“Don’t you?” she asked of Dion, spreading thinly some butter over a piece of dry toast.

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Cynthia means the lack of power to read character, the lack of psychological instinct,” drifted from the lips of Mrs. Chetwinde.

“Three-quarters of the misunderstandings and miseries of the world come from that,” said Mrs. Clarke, looking at the now buttered toast. “If my mother-in-law and my husband had any psychological faculty they would never have mistaken my unconventionality, which I shall never give up, for common, and indeed very vulgar, sinfulness.”

“Confusing the pastel with the oleograph,” dropped out Mrs. Chetwinde, looking abstractedly at an old red woman in a turret of ostrich plumes, who was spread out on the other side of the room before a plate of cakes.

“You are sure Lady Ermyntrude didn’t understand?” said Daventry, with a certain sharp legality of manner.

“You mean that she might be wicked instead of only stupid?”

“Well, yes. I suppose it does come to that.”

“Believe me, Mr. Daventry, she’s a quite honest stupid woman. She honestly thinks that I’m a horrible creature.”

And Mrs. Clarke began to bite the crisp toast with her lovely teeth. Mrs. Chetwinde’s eyes dwelt on her for a brief instant with, Dion thought, a rather peculiar look which he could not quite understand. It had, perhaps, a hint of hardness, or of cold admiration, something of that kind, in it.

“Tell me some more about the baby,” was Mrs. Clarke’s next remark, addressed to Dion. “I want to get away for a minute into a happy domestic life. And yours is that, I know.”

How peculiarly haggard, and yet how young she looked as she said that! She added:

“If the case ends as I feel sure it will, I hope your wife and I shall get to know each other. I hear she’s the most delightful woman in London, and extraordinarily beautiful. Isn’t she?”

“I think she is beautiful,” Dion said simply.

And then they talked about Robin, while Mrs. Chetwinde and Daventry discussed some question of the day. Before they parted Dion could not help saying:

“I want to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“Why do you feel sure that the trial will end as it ought to end? Surely the lack of the psychological instinct is peculiarly abundant—if a lack can be abundant!”—he smiled, almost laughed, a little deprecatingly—“in a British jury?”

“And so you think they’re likely to go wrong in their verdict?”

“Doesn’t it rather follow?”

She stared at him, and her eyes were, or looked, even more widely opened than usual. After a long pause she said;

“You wish to frighten me.”

She got up, and began to draw on her dove-colored Swedish kid gloves.

“Tippie,” she said to Mrs. Chetwinde, “I must go home now and have a little rest.”

Only then did Dion realize how marvelously she was bearing a tremendous strain. He began to admire her prodigiously.

When he said good-by to her under the great porch he couldn’t help asking:

“Are your nerves of steel?”

She leaned forward in the brougham.

“If your muscles are of iron.”

“My muscles!” he said.

“Haven’t you educated them?”

“Oh—yes.”

“And perhaps I’ve educated my nerves.”

Mrs. Chetwinde’s spirited horses began to prance and show temper. Mrs. Clarke sat back. As the carriage moved away, Dion saw Mrs. Chetwinde’s eyes fixed upon him. They looked at that moment not at all vague. If they had not been her eyes, he would have been inclined to think them piercing. But, of course, Mrs. Chetwinde’s eyes could never be that.

“How does one educate one’s nerves, Guy?” asked Dion, as the two friends walked away.

“By being defendant in a long series of divorce cases, I should say.”

“Has Mrs. Clarke ever been in another case of this kind?”

“Good heavens, no. If she had, even I couldn’t believe in her innocence, as I do now.”

“Then where did she get her education?”

“Where do women get things, old Dion? It seems to me sometimes straight from God, and sometimes straight from the devil.”

Dion’s mental comment on this was, “What about Mrs. Clarke?” But he did not utter it.

Before he left Daventry, he was pledged to be in court on the last day of the case, when the verdict would be given. He wished to go to the court again on the morrow, but the thought of Rosamund decided him not to do this; he would, he knew, feel almost ashamed in telling her that the divorce court, at this moment, fascinated him, that he longed, or almost longed, to follow the colored fires of a certain torch down further shadowy alleys of the unwise life. He felt quite sure that Mrs. Clarke was an innocent woman, but she had certainly been very unconventional indeed in her conduct. He remembered the almost stern strength in her husky voice when she had said “my unconventionality, which I shall never give up.” So even this hideous and widely proclaimed scandal would not induce her to bow in the future before the conventional gods. She really was an extraordinary woman. What would Rosamund think of her? If she won her case she evidently meant to know Rosamund. Of course, there could be nothing against that. If she lost the case, naturally there could never be any question of such an acquaintance; he knew instinctively that she would never suggest it. Whatever she was, or was not, she was certainly a woman of the world.

That evening, when he reached home, he found Rosamund sitting in the nursery in the company of Robin and the nurse. The window was partially open. Rosamund believed in plenty of air for her child, and no “cosseting”; she laughed to scorn, but genially, the nurse’s prejudice against “the night air.”

“My child,” she said, “must get accustomed to night as well as day, Nurse—and the sooner the better.” So now “Master Robin” was played upon by a little wind from Westminster. He seemed in no way alarmed by it. This evening he was serene, and when his father entered the room he assumed his expression of mild inquiry, vaguely agitated his small rose-colored fists, and blew forth a welcoming bubble.

Dion was touched at the sight.

“Little rogue!” he said, bending over Robin. “Little, little rogue!”

Robin raised his, as yet scarcely defined, eyebrows, stared tremendously hard at the nursery atmosphere, pulled out his wet lips and gurgled, at the same time wagging his head, now nicely covered with silky fair hair, or down, whichever you chose to call it.

“He knows his papa, ma’am, and that he does, a boy!” said the nurse, who approved of Dion, and had said below stairs that he was “as good a husband as ever wore shoe-leather.”

“Of course he does,” said Rosamund softly. “Babies have plenty of intelligence of a kind, and I think it’s a darling kind.”

Dion sat down beside her, and they both bent over Robin in the gathering twilight, while the nurse went softly out of the room.

Dion had quite forgotten the Clarke case.