“No,” said Dion, thinking of the way his hand had been held in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room.  “I suppose not.”

“I wonder when Rosamund will get to know her,” said Daventry, with perhaps a slightly conscious carelessness.

“Never, perhaps,” said Dion, with equal carelessness.  “Often one lives for years in London without knowing, or even ever seeing, one’s next-door neighbor.”

“To be sure!” said Daventry.  “One of London’s many advantages, or disadvantages, as the case may be.”

And he began to talk about Whistler’s Nocturnes.  Dion had never happened to tell Daventry about Jimmy Clarke’s strained hip and his own application of Elliman’s embrocation.  He had told Rosamund, of course, and she had said that if Robin ever strained himself she should do exactly the same thing.

That night, when the Daventrys had gone, Dion asked Rosamund whether she thought Beattie was happy.  She hesitated for a moment, then she said with her usual directness: 

“I’m not sure that she is, Dion.  Guy is a dear, kind, good husband to her, but there’s something homeless about Beattie somehow.  She’s living in that pretty little flat in De Lorne Gardens, and yet she seems to me a wanderer.  But we must wait; she may find what she’s looking for.  I pray to God that she will.”

She did not explain; he guessed what she meant.  Had she, too, been a wanderer at first, and had she found what she had been looking for?  While Rosamund was speaking he had been pitying Guy.  When she had finished he wondered whether he had ever had cause to pity some one else—­now and then.  Despite 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.