nd feeling glazed, dee-ar," had been her greeting to him.
"My nose is shiny and my mind is woolly. I don't think you ought to kiss
me or talk to me."

And then he had kissed her, and they had talked, intimately, sincerely.
In those last hours mercifully Dion had not felt shy with his mother.
But perhaps this was because she was never shy, not even in tenderness
or in sorrow. She was not afraid of herself. They had even been able to
discuss the possibility of his being killed in the war, and Mrs. Leith
had been quite simple about it, laying aside all her usual elaboration
of manner.

"The saddest result of such an honorable and noble end would be the loss
to Robin, I think," she had said.

"To Robin? But he's got such a mother!"

"Do you think he doesn't need, won't need much more later on, the father
he's got? Dion, my son, humility is a virtue, no doubt, but I don't
believe in excess even in the practice of virtue, and sometimes I think
you do."

"I didn't know it."

"This going to the war is a splendid thing for you. I wouldn't have you
out of it even though----"

Here she had been overcome by a tremendous fit of sneezing from which
she had emerged with the smiling remark:

"I'm not permitted to improve the occasion."

"I believe I know what you mean. Perhaps you're right, mother. You're
cleverer than I am. Still I can't help seeing that Robin's got a mother
such as few children have. Look round at all the mothers you know in
London!"

"Yes. Rosamund was created to be a mother. But just to-day I want to
look at Robin's father."

And so they had talked of him.

That talk had done Dion good. It had set his face towards a shining
future. If he came back from the war he now felt, through the feeling
of his mother, that he would surely come back tempered, tried, better
fitted to Robin's uses, more worthy of any woman's gift of herself.
Without preaching, even without being remarkably definite, his mother
had made him see in this distant war a great opportunity, not to win a
V.C. or any splashing honor that would raise him up in the eyes of the
world, but to reach out and grip hold of his own best possibilities. Had
his mother done even more than this? Had she set before him some other
goal which the war might enable him to gain if he had not already gained
it? Had she been very subtle when seeming to be very direct? Even when
she held him in her arms--despite the cold!--and gave him the final kiss
and bles