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 what 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.