“Is it wonderful?”
“Yes.”
“Very wonderful?”
“Yes.”
“Children too!”
Daventry sighed.
“One wants to be worthy of it all,” he murmured. “And then”—he laughed, as if calling in his humor to save him from something—“the children, in their turn, feel they would like to live up to papa. Dion, people can be caught in the net of goodness very much as they can be caught in the net of evil. Let us praise the stars for that.”
They arrived at the bridge. The wide road, which looked to-night extraordinarily clean, almost as if it had been polished up for the passing of some delicate procession in the night, was empty. There were no vehicles going by; the night-birds kept among the trees. The quarter after eleven chimed from some distant church. Dion thought of Rosamund, as he paused on the bridge, thought of himself as a husband yielding his wife up to the solitude she evidently desired. He took Daventry for his companion; she had the child for hers. There was suffering of a kind even in a very perfect marriage, but what he had told Daventry was true; it had been very wonderful. He had learnt a great deal in his marriage, dear lessons of high-mindedness in desire, of purity in possession. If Rosamund were to be cut off from him even to-night he had gained enormously by the possession of her. He knew what woman can be, and without disappointment; for he did not choose to reckon up those small, almost impalpable things which, like passing shadows, had now and then brought a faint obscurity into his life with Rosamund, as disappointments. They came, perhaps, from himself. And what where they? He looked out over the long stretch of unruffled water, filmed over with ice near the shores, and saw a tiny dark object traveling through it with self-possession and an air of purpose beneath the constellations; some aquatic bird up to something, heedless of the approaching midnight and the Great Bear.
“Look at that little beggar!” said Daventry. “And we don’t know so very much more about it all than he does. I expect he’s a Muscovy duck, or drake, if you’re a pedant about genders.”
“He’s evidently full of purpose.”