spite the peaceful happiness of his married life
there was a very faint coldness at, or near to, his heart. It came upon
him like a breath of frost stealing up out of the darkness to one who,
standing in a room lit and warmed by a glowing fire, opens a window and
lets in for a moment a winter night. But he shut his window quickly, and
he turned to look at the fire and to warm his hands at its glow.

Mrs. Clarke rapidly established a sort of intimacy with the Daventrys.
As Daventry had helped to fight for her, and genuinely delighted in her
faculties, this was very natural; for Beatrice, unlike Rosamund, was
apt to take her color gently from those with whom she lived, desiring to
please them, not because she was vain and wished to be thought charming,
but because she had an unusually sweet disposition and wished to
be charming. She was sincere, and if asked a direct question always
returned an answer that was true; but she sometimes fell in with an
assumption from a soft desire to be kind. Daventry quite innocently
assumed that she found Mrs. Clarke as delightful as he did. Perhaps
she did; perhaps she did not. However it was, she gently accepted Mrs.
Clarke as a friend.

Dion, of course, knew of this friendship; and so did Rosamund. She never
made any comment upon it, and showed no interest in it. But her life
that autumn was a full one. She had Robin; she had the house to
look after, "my little house"; she had Dion in the evenings; she had
quantities of friends and acquaintances; and she had her singing. She
had now definitely given up singing professionally. Her very short
career as an artist was closed. But she had begun to practise diligently
again, and showed by this assiduity that she loved music not for
what she could gain by it, but for its own sake. Of her friends and
acquaintances she saw much less than formerly. Many of them complained
that they never could get a glimpse of her now, that she shut them
out, that "not at home" had become a parrot-cry on the lips of her
well-trained parlor-maid, that she cared for nobody now that she had
a husband and a baby, that she was self-engrossed, etc., etc. But they
could not be angry with her; for if they did happen to meet her, or if
she did happen to be "at home" when they called, they always found
her the genial, radiant, kind and friendly Rosamund of old; full,
apparently, of all the former interest in them and their doings,
eager to welcome and make the most of th