s.

"You can't miss it. The name's writ on the door in the wall, and a rare
old wall it is," said the venerable man.

Dion thanked him warmly and walked on, while the verger looked after
him.

"I shouldn't wonder if that's Mrs. Leith's husband home from the war,"
he murmured. "Looks as if he'd been fighting, he does, and burnt pretty
near to a cinder by something, the sun as like as not."

And he walked on down the tiny street towards the muffin which awaited
him at home, well pleased with his perspicuity, and making mental
preparations for the astonishing of his wife with a tidbit of news.

Dion came into the Green Court, and immediately felt Welsley, felt it
in the depths of him, and understood Rosamund's love of it so often
expressed in her letters. As he looked at the moist green lawn in the
center, at the gray and brown houses which fronted it, at the Deanery
garden full of the ruddy flowers of autumn behind the iron railings, at
the immense Cathedral with its massive and yet almost tenderly graceful
towers, a history in stone of the faithful work and the progress of men,
he knew why Rosamund had come to live here. He stood still. In the
misty air he heard the voices of the rooks. The door of a Canon's house
opened, and two clergymen, one of them in gaiters and a shovel hat, came
out, and walked slowly away in earnest conversation. Bells sounded in
one of the towers.

He understood. Here was a sort of essence of ecclesiasticism. It seemed
to penetrate the whole atmosphere. Rosamund was at home in it.

He remembered his terrible thought that God had always stood between his
wife and him, dividing them.

How would it be now?

Again he looked up at the great house of God, and he felt almost afraid.
But he was not the man he had been when he said good-by to Rosamund; he
had gained in force of character, and he knew it. Surely out there in
South Africa, he had done what his mother had wanted him to do, he had
laid hold of his best possibilities. At any rate, he had sincerely tried
to do that. Why, then, should he be afraid--and of God?

He walked on quickly, and came to Little Cloisters by way of the Dark
Entry.

It was very dark that day, for the autumn evening was already making its
moist presence felt, and there was a breathing of cold from the old gray
stones which looked like the fangs of Time.

Dion shook his broad shoulders in an irresistible shiver as he came
out into the passage-way between Rosam