He knew he would not hold back; but he knew also that his was not the eagerness to go of the man assumed by journalists to be the typical Englishman.  He was not mad to plunge into the great game, reckless of the future and shouting for the fray.  He was not one of the “hard-bitten raw-boned men with keen eyes and ready for anything” beloved of the journalists, who loom so large in the public eye when “big things are afoot.”  On that autumn evening, as he walked homeward, Dion knew the bunkum that is given out to the world as truth, knew that brave men have souls undreamed of in newspaper offices.  He perceived the figure of war just then as a figure terribly austere, grim, cold, harsh—­a figure stripped of all pleasant flesh and sweet coloring, of all softness and warm humanity.  It accompanied him like an iron thing which nevertheless was informed with life.  Joy withered beside it, yet it had the power to make things bloom.  Already he knew that as he had not known it before.

In the crowded Strand the voices of the newsvendors were insistently shrill, raucous, almost fierce.  As he heard them he faced tests.  Many things were going to be put to the test in the almost immediate future.  Among them perhaps would be Rosamund’s exact feeling for him.

Upon the hill of Drouva they had slept in the same tent, husband and wife, more than three years ago; in green and remote Elis they had sat together before the Hermes, hidden away from the world and hearing the antique voices; in Westminster Robin was theirs; yet this evening, facing in imagination the tests of war, Dion knew that Rosamund’s exact feeling for him was still a secret from him.  If he went to South Africa that secret must surely be revealed.  Rosamund would inevitably find out then the nature of her feeling for him, how much she cared, and even if she did not tell him how much she cared he would know, he could not help knowing.

He knew with a terrible thoroughness this evening how much he cared for her.

He considered Robin.

Robin was now more than two and a half years old; a personage in a jersey and minute knickerbockers, full of dancing energy and spirits, full of vital interest in the smaller problems of life.  He was a fidget and he was a talker.  Out of a full mind he poured forth an abundant stream of words, carelessly chosen at times, yet on the whole apt to the occasion.  His intelligence was marked, of course,—­what very young child’s is not?—­and he had inherited an ample store of the joie de vivre which distinguished his mother.  The homeliness of feature which had marked him out in the baldhead stage of his existence had given place to a dawning of what promised to be later on distinct good looks.  Already he was an attractive-looking child, with a beautiful mouth, a rather short and at present rather snub nose, freckled on the bridge, large blue eyes, and a forehead, temples and chin which hinted at Rosamund’s.