probably you would know it and I shouldn't."

"Yes, I dare say that's true. You aren't conscious of it, then?"

But she was giving him his tea, and that took her mind away from his
question, no doubt. He felt a change in her, but it was not almost
fiercely marked like the change in him, on whom a Continent had written
with its sun and its wind, and with its battlefields. The body of a man
was graven by such a superscription. And no doubt even a child could
read something of it. But the writing on Rosamund was much fainter, was
far less easy to decipher; it was perhaps traced on the soul rather than
on the body. The new legend of Dion was perhaps an assertion. But this
story of Rosamund, what was it? She saw the man in Dion, lean, burnt,
strong, ardent, desirous, full of suppressed emotion that was warmly and
intensely human; he saw in her, as well as the mother, something that
was perhaps almost pale, almost elusive, like the still figure and
downbent face of a recluse seen in passing an open window.

She saw in Dion his actions; he saw in her her meditations. Perhaps that
was it. All this time he had been living incessantly in the midst of
men, never alone, nearly always busy, often fiercely active, marching,
eating, sleeping in company. And all the time she had been here, in the
midst of this cloistral silence, and perhaps often alone.

"You know everybody here, I suppose?" he asked, drinking his tea with
relish, and eating the toast which seemed to him crisply English, but
always faintly aware of that still figure and of that downbent face.

"Almost everybody. I've sung a great deal, and got to know them all
partly through that. And they're dear people most of them. They let one
alone when they know one wants to be alone."

"And I expect you can enjoy being alone here."

"Yes," she said simply. "At times. It would be difficult to feel lonely,
in the miserable, dreadful way, I mean, in the Precincts. We are rather
like a big family here, each one with his, or her, own private room in
the big family house."

"I know you've always loved a certain amount of solitude, Rose," he said
tenderly. "D'you remember that day in London when I burst in upon your
solitude with Dante, and was actually jealous of the 'Paradiso'?"

"Yes," she said, smiling.

"But you forgave me, or I shouldn't be here now."

He gave her his cup for some more tea.

"You can't imagine how absolutely wonderful it is to me to be here after
wh