That evening, when he reached home, he found Rosamund sitting in the nursery in the company of Robin and the nurse. The window was partially open. Rosamund believed in plenty of air for her child, and no “cosseting”; she laughed to scorn, but genially, the nurse’s prejudice against “the night air.”
“My child,” she said, “must get accustomed to night as well as day, Nurse—and the sooner the better.” So now “Master Robin” was played upon by a little wind from Westminster. He seemed in no way alarmed by it. This evening he was serene, and when his father entered the room he assumed his expression of mild inquiry, vaguely agitated his small rose-colored fists, and blew forth a welcoming bubble.
Dion was touched at the sight.
“Little rogue!” he said, bending over Robin. “Little, little rogue!”
Robin raised his, as yet scarcely defined, eyebrows, stared tremendously hard at the nursery atmosphere, pulled out his wet lips and gurgled, at the same time wagging his head, now nicely covered with silky fair hair, or down, whichever you chose to call it.
“He knows his papa, ma’am, and that he does, a boy!” said the nurse, who approved of Dion, and had said below stairs that he was “as good a husband as ever wore shoe-leather.”
“Of course he does,” said Rosamund softly. “Babies have plenty of intelligence of a kind, and I think it’s a darling kind.”
Dion sat down beside her, and they both bent over Robin in the gathering twilight, while the nurse went softly out of the room.
Dion had quite forgotten the Clarke case.