“Now I’m ready for you, sir!” he added, with a sort of outburst of recovery. “I should like a round with the gloves to-day, if it’s all the same to you.”
It was all the same to Dion, and, when he reached Queen Anne’s Mansions in the darkness of evening, he was still glowing from the exercise; the blood sang through his veins, and his heart was almost as light as his step.
Marion, the parlor-maid, let him in, and told him his mother was at home. Dion put his hand to his lips, stole across the hall noiselessly, softly opened the drawing-room door, and caught his mother unawares.
Whenever he came into the well-known flat alone, he had a moment of retrogression, went back to his unmarried time, and was again, as for so many years, in the intimate life of his mother. But to-day, as he opened the door, he was abruptly thrust out of his moment. His mother was in her usual place on the high-backed sofa near the fire. She was doing nothing, was just sitting with her hands, in their wrinkled gloves, folded in her lap, and her large, round blue eyes looking. Dion thought of them as looking because they were wide open, but they were strangely emptied of expression. All of his mother seemed to him for just the one instant which followed on his entrance to be emptied, as if the woman he had always known—loving, satirical, clever, kind, observant—had been poured away. The effect upon him was one of indescribable, almost of horrible, dreariness. Omar Khayyam, his mother’s black pug, was not in the room as usual, stretched out before the fire.
Even as Dion realized this, his mother was poured back into the round face and plump figure beside the fire, and greeted him with the usual almost saccharine sweet smile, and:
“Dee-ar, I wasn’t expecting you to-day. How is the beloved one?”
“The beloved one” was Mrs. Leith’s rendering of Rosamund.
“How particularly spry you look,” she added. “I’m certain it’s the Jenkins paragon. You’ve been standing up to him. Now, haven’t you?”
Dion acknowledged that he had, and added:
“But you, mother? How are you?”