her. She
was fond of him, she trusted him, she got on excellently with him, she
believed in him, she even admired him for having been able to live as he
had lived before their marriage, but she did not passionately love
him. He might have been tempted to think that, with all her fine, even
splendid, qualities, she was deprived of the power of loving intensely
if he had not seen her with Robin, if he had not once spoken with her
about her mother.

If he were killed in South Africa would Rosamund be angry at his death?
That was her greatest tribute, anger, directed surely not against
any human being, but against the God Whom she loved and Who, so she
believed, ruled the world and directed the ways of men. Once Rosamund
had said that she knew it was possible for human beings to hurt God. She
had doubtless spoken out of the depths of her personal experience. She
had felt sure that by her anger at the death of her mother she had
hurt God. Such a conviction showed how she thought of God, in what a
closeness of relation with God she felt herself to be. Dion knew now
that she had loved her mother, that she loved Robin, as she did not love
him. If he were to die she would be very sorry, but she would not be
very angry. No, she would be able to breathe out a "farewell!" simply,
with a resignation comparable to that of the Greeks on those tombs which
she loved, and then--she would concentrate on Robin.

If he, Dion, were to be shot, and had time for a thought before dying,
he knew what his thought would be: that the Boer's bullet had only hit a
man, not, like so many bullets fired in war, a man and a woman. And that
thought would add an exquisite bitterness to the normal bitterness of
death.

So Dion, on the "Ariosto," voyaged towards South Africa, companioned
by new and definite knowledge--new at any rate in the light and on the
surface, definite because in the very big moments of life truth becomes
as definite as the bayonet piercing to the man who is pierced.

His comrades were a mixed lot, mostly quite young. The average age was
about twenty-five. Among them were barristers, law students, dentists,
bank clerks, clerks, men of the Civil Service, architects, auctioneers,
engineers, schoolmasters, builders, plumbers, jewelers, tailors, Stock
Exchange men, etc., etc. There were representatives of more than a
hundred and fifty trades, and adherents to nine religions, among the men
of the C.I.V. Their free patriotism welded the