He stood a moment watching the moving pen. Then he bent down and just touched her shoulder with a great gentleness.
“If you knew what I would do to keep every breath of sorrow out of your life!” he said, in a low voice.
Without looking up she touched his hand.
“I know you would. You could never bring sorrow into my life.”
From that day Dion realized what intensity of feeling lay beneath Rosamund’s serene and often actively joyous demeanor. Perhaps she cared for very few people, but for those few she cared with a force surely almost abnormal. Her mother had now been dead for many years; never before had Rosamund spoken of her death to him. He understood the reason of that silence now, and from that day the desire to keep all sorrow from her became almost a passion in him. He even felt that its approach to her, that its cold touch resting upon her, would be a hateful and almost unnatural outrage. Yet he saw all around him people closely companioned by sorrow and did not think that strange. Sorrow even approached very near to Rosamund and to him in that very month of January, for Beatrice had a miscarriage and lost her baby. She said very little about it, but Dion believed that she was really stricken to the heart. He was very fond of Beatrice, he almost loved her; yet her sorrow was only a shadow passing by him, not a substance pressing upon him. And that fact, which he realized, made him know how little even imagination and quiet affection can help men feel the pains of others. The heart knoweth only its own bitterness and the bitterness of those whom it deeply and passionately loves.
CHAPTER VIII
On January the fifteenth Rosamund put on the gown which had been bought for the Carlton dinner but not worn at it.
Although she had not really wanted to go to Mrs. Chetwinde’s party she looked radiantly buoyant, and like one almost shining with expectation, when she was ready to start for Lowndes Square.
“You ought to go out every night,” Dion said, as he put her cloak over her shoulders.