at I've been through."

He lay back in his chair, but he still looked tremendously alert, wiry,
powerful even.

Dion was much more impressive than he had been when he went away.
Rosamund felt a faint creeping of something that was almost like shyness
in her as she looked at him.

"After Green Point Camp and Orange River--I shall never forget the
dust-storm we had there!--and Springfontein and Kaffir River--oh, the
heat there, Rose!--and Kaalfontein and all the rest of it. It was near
Kaalfontein that we first came under fire. I shan't forget that."

He was silent for a moment. She looked at him across the tea-table. All
that he knew and she did not know now made him seem rather strange to
her. The uniting of two different, utterly different, experiences of
life, was more tremendous, more full of meaning and of mystery, than the
uniting of two bodies. This, then, was to be a second wedding-day for
her and for Dion? All their letters, in which, of course, they had tried
to tell each other something of their differing experiences, had really
told very little, almost nothing. Dion's glance told her more than all
his letters, that and his color, and certain lines in his face, and the
altered shapes of his hands, and his way of holding himself, and his way
of speaking. Even his voice was different. He was an unconscious record
of what he had been through out there; and much of it, she felt sure, he
would never tell to her except unconsciously by being a different Dion
from the Dion who had gone away.

"How little one can tell in letters," she said. "Scarcely anything."

"You made me feel Welsley in yours."

"Did I? Why did you walk from the station?"

"I wanted to taste your home, to get into your atmosphere, if I could,
before seeing you. Rose, love can make a man almost afraid at times."

It seemed to her that his dark eyes burned with fires they had
captured in South Africa. Sitting in the old room with its homely and
ecclesiastical look, he had an oddly remote appearance, she thought, as
if he belonged to a very different milieu. Always dark, he now looked
almost gipsy-like; yet he had the unmistakable air of a soldier. But if
there had ever been anything there was now nothing left of the business
man in Dion.

"Won't you find it very difficult to settle down again to the life in
Austin Friars, Dion?" she said.

"Perhaps I should, but for one thing."

"What's that?"

"You and Robin at home when the drudger