dark man did not rebuke Robin, but caught him up and enfolded him in a
hug that was powerful but not a bit rough. Robin was quite incapable of
analyzing a hug, but he loved it as he would not have loved it if it had
been rough, or if it had been merely gentle. A sense of great happiness
and of great confidence flooded him. From that moment he adored his
father as he had never adored him before. The new authority of his
father's love for him captured him. He knew nothing about it and he
knew all about it, as is the way with children, those instinctive sparks
fresh from the great furnace.

Long before dinner time Dion knew that he had won something beside the
D.C.M. which he had won in South Africa, something that was wonderfully
precious to him. He gave Robin the Toby jar and another gift.

He cared for his little son that night as he had never cared for him
before. It was as if the sex in Robin spoke to the sex in him for the
first time with a clear, unmistakable voice, saying, "We're of the
comradeship of the male sex, we're of the brotherhood." It was not even
a child's voice that spoke, though it spoke in a little child. Dion
blessed South Africa that night, felt as if South Africa had given him
his son.

That gift would surely be a weapon in his hands by means of which, or
with the help of which, he would conquer the still unconquered mystery,
Rosamund's whole heart. South Africa had done much for Dion. Out there
in that wonderful atmosphere he had seen very clearly, his vision had
pierced great distances; he saw clearly still, in England. War, it
seemed, was so terribly truthful that it swept a man clean of lies; Dion
was swept clean of lies. He did not feel able any longer even to tell
them occasionally to himself. He knew that Rosamund's greeting to him,
warm, sweet, sincere though it had been, had lacked something which he
had found in Robin's. But he felt that now he had got hold of Robin so
instantly, and so completely, the conquest of the woman he had only won
must be but a question of time. That was not pride in him but instinct,
speaking with that voice which seems a stranger to the brain of man, but
a friend to something else; something universal of which in every man a
fragment is housed, or by which every man is mysteriously penetrated.

A fortnight's holiday--and then?

On that first evening it had been assumed that as soon as Dion went back
to business in Austin Friars, No. 5 Little Market Street