alking about the baby? Dion wondered, as for a moment he
watched them, forgetting his surroundings. Rosamund was speaking with
her usual swift vivacity. At home she was now often rather quiet,
moving, Dion sometimes thought, in an atmosphere of wide serenity; but
in society she was always full of sunshine and eager life. Something
within her leaped up responsively at the touch of humanity, and to-night
she had just been singing, and the whole of her was keenly awake. The
contrast between her and Mrs. Clarke was almost startling: her radiant
vitality emphasized Mrs. Clarke's curious, but perfectly natural,
gravity; the rose in her cheeks, the yellow in her hair, the gaiety
in her eyes, drew the attention to Mrs. Clarke's febrile and tense
refinement, which seemed to have worn her body thin, to have drained
the luster out of her hair, to have fixed the expression of observant
distress in her large and fearless eyes. Animal spirits played through
Rosamund to-night; from Mrs. Clarke they were absent. Her haggard
composure, confronting Rosamund's pure sparkle, suggested the comparison
of a hidden and secret pool, steel colored in the depths of a sunless
forest, with a rushing mountain stream leaping towards the sea in a
tangle of sun-rays. Dion realized for the first time that Mrs. Clarke
never laughed, and scarcely ever smiled. He realized, too, that she
really was beautiful. For Rosamund did not "kill" her; her delicacy of
line and colorless clearness stood the test of nearness to Rosamund's
radiant beauty. Indeed Rosamund somehow enhanced the peculiarly
interesting character of Mrs. Clarke's personality, which was displayed,
but with a sort of shadowy reticence, in her physique, and at the same
time underlined its melancholy. So might a climbing rose, calling to the
blue with its hundred blossoms, teach something of the dark truth of the
cypress through which its branches are threaded.

But Mrs. Clarke would certainly never be Rosamund's stairway towards
heaven.

Some one he knew spoke to Dion, and he found himself involved in a long
conversation; people moving hid the two women from him, but presently
the piano sounded again, and Rosamund sang that first favorite of hers
and of Dion's, the "Heart ever faithful," recalling him to a dear day
at Portofino where, in a cozy room, guarded by the wintry woods and the
gray sea of Italy, he had felt the lure of a faithful spirit, and known
the basis of clean rock on which Rosamu