*

The hills of Madeira faded. Three days later there was a burial at sea
in the early morning. A private, who had been ill with enteric, had died
in the night. The body sank into the depths, the ship went on her
way and ran into a stiff gale. Already England was rousing herself to
welcome her returning sons, bruskly but lustily, in her way, which was
not South Africa's way. Dion loved that gale though it kept him awake
all night.

Next morning they were off the Start, and heard the voices of the sirens
bidding them good day.

* * * * *

On the last day of October, at about four o'clock in the afternoon,
Rosamund was waiting for Dion. He was due by the express which, when up
to time, reached Welsley Station at 3.55. She would naturally have been
at the station to meet him if she had not received a telegram from him
begging her to stay at home.

"Would much rather meet you first in Little Cloisters,--Dion," were the
last words of the telegram.

So Rosamund had stayed at home.

It was a peculiarly still autumn afternoon. A suggestion--it was
scarcely more than that--of mist made the Precincts look delicately sad,
but not to the eyes of Rosamund. She delighted in this season of tawny
colors and of fluttering leaves, of nature's wide-eyed and contemplative
muteness. The beauty of autumn appealed to her because she possessed a
happy spirit, and was not too imaginative. She had imagination, but it
was not of the intensely sensitive and poetic kind which dies with the
dying leaves, and in the mists loses all the hopes that were born with
the birth of summer. The strong sanity which marked her, and which had
always kept her in central paths, far away from the byways in which the
neurotic, the decadent, the searchers after the so-called "new" things
loved to tread, led her to welcome each season in is turn, and to
rejoice in its special characteristics.

So she loved the cloistral feeling autumn brought with it to Welsley.
Green summer seemed to open the doors, and one rejoiced in a golden
freedom; tawny autumn seemed softly to close the doors, and one was
happy in a sensation of being tenderly guarded, of being kept very safe
in charge for the coming winter with its fires, and its cosy joys of the
interior.

Another reason which made Rosamund care very much for the autumn was
this: in the autumn the religious atmosphere which hung about the
Precincts of Welsley seemed to her to become more definite, more
touching,