ltogether
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