ight take an occasional flight to the gods. Hermes, of
course, was really a rascal, many-sided, and, like most many-sided
people and gods, capable of insincerity and even of cunning; but the
Hermes of Olympia, their Hermes, was the messenger purged, by Praxiteles
of very bit of dross--noble, manly, pure, serene. Little Robin bore at
present no resemblance to the Hermes, or indeed--despite the nurse's
statements--to any one else except another baby; but already it was
beginning mysteriously to be possible to foresee the great
advance--long clothes to short clothes, short clothes to knickerbockers,
knickerbockers to trousers. Robin would be a boy, a youth, a man, and
what Rosamund was might make all the difference in that Trinity. The
mystic who enters into religion dedicated her life to God. Rosamund
dedicated hers to her boy. It was the same thing with a difference. And
as the mystic is often a little selfish in shutting out cries of the
world--cries sometimes for human aid which can scarcely be referred from
the fellow-creature to God--so Rosamund was a little selfish, guided by
the unusual temperament which was housed within her. She shut out some
of the cries that she might hear Robin's the better.

Robin's sudden attack of illness during Mrs. Clarke's ordeal had been
overcome and now seemed almost forgotten. Rosamund had encountered the
small fierce shock of it with an apparent calmness and self-possession
which at the time had astonished Dion and roused his admiration. A baby
often comes hardly into the world and slips out of it with the terrible
ease of things fated to far-off destinies. During one night Robin
had certainly been in danger. Perhaps that danger had taught Rosamund
exactly how much her child meant to her. Dion did not know this; he
suspected it because, since Robin's illness, he had become much more
sharply aware of the depth of mother-love in Rosamund, of the hovering
wings that guarded the nestling. That efficient guarding implies
shutting out was presently to be brought home to him with a definiteness
leading to embarrassment.

The little interruptions a baby brings into the lives of a married
couple were setting in. Dion was sure that Rosamund never thought
of them as interruptions. When Robin grew much older, when he was in
trousers, and could play games, and appreciate his father's prowess
and God-given capacities in the gymnasium, on the tennis lawn, over the
plowland among the partridges, Di