, which had been spoken
fatalistically. Then his face became very grave.

Suddenly there dawned upon him, like a vision in the London street, one
of the vast Turkish cemeteries, dusty, forlorn, disordered, yet full
of a melancholy touched by romance; and among the thousands of graves,
through the dark thickets of cypresses, he was walking with Mrs. Clarke,
who looked exactly like Echo.

A newsboy at the corner was crying his latest horror--a woman found
stabbed in Hyde Park. But to Dion his raucous and stunted voice sounded
like a voice from the sea, a strange and sad cry lifted up between
Europe and Asia.

BOOK III -- LITTLE CLOISTERS

CHAPTER I

More than a year and a half passed away, and in the autumn of 1899 the
Boer War broke out and the face of England was changed; for the heart of
England began to beat more strongly than usual, and the soul of England
was stirred. The winter came, and in many Englishmen a hidden conflict
began; in their journey through life they came abruptly to a parting of
the ways, stood still and looked to the right and the left, balancing
possibilities, searching their natures and finding within them strange
hesitations, recoils, affirmations, determined nobilities.

Dion had followed the events which led up to the fateful decision of
Wednesday, October the eleventh, with intense interest. As the October
days drew on he had felt the approach of war. It came up, this footfall
of an enemy, it paced at his side. Would he presently be tried by this
enemy, would it test him and find out exactly what metal he was made of?
He wondered, but from the moment when the first cloud showed itself on
the horizon he had a presentiment that this distant war was going to
have a strong effect on his life.

On the afternoon of October the eleventh he walked slowly home from
the City alone. There was excitement in the air. The voices of the
newsvendors sounded fateful in his ears; the faces of the passers-by
looked unusually eager and alert. As he made his way through the crowd
he did not debate the rights and wrongs of the question about to
be decided between Briton and Boer. His mind avoided thoughts about
politics. For him, perhaps strangely, the issue had already narrowed
down to a personal question: "What is this war going to mean to me?"

He asked himself this; he put the question again and again. Nevertheless
it was answered somewhere within him almost as soon as it was put. If
ther