and they to him, that their blackness in the October evening was part of the color of him, that the Westminster sounds, chimes, footfalls, the dull roar of traffic, human voices from street, from bridge, from river, harmonized with the voices in him, in the very depths of him.  This was England, this closeness, this harmony of the outer to and with the inner, this was England saying to one of her sons, “You belong to me and I to you.”  The race spoke and the land, they walked with Dion in the darkness.

For he did not go straight home.  He walked for a long time beside the river.  By the river he kissed Robin and he said good-by to Rosamund, by the river he climbed upon the troopship, and he saw the fading of England on the horizon, and he felt the breath of the open sea.  And in the midst of a crowd of men going southward he knew at last what loneliness was.  The lights that gleamed across the river were the last lights of England that he would see for many a day, perhaps forever; the chime from the clock-tower was the last of the English sounds.  He endured in imagination a phantom bitterness of departure which seemed abominably real; then suddenly he was recalled from a possible future to the very definite present.

He met by the river two men, sleek people in silk hats, with plump hands—­hands which looked as if they were carefully fed on very nutritious food every day by their owners—­warmly covered.  As they passed him one of those know-alls said to the other: 

“Oh, it’ll only be a potty little war.  What can a handful of peasants do against our men?  I’ll lay you five to one in sovereigns two months will see it out.”

“I dare say you will,” returned the other, in a voice that was surely smiling, “but I won’t take you.”

“By Jove, what a plunger I am!” thought Dion.  “Racing ahead like a horse that’s lost his wits.  Ten to one they’ll never want volunteers.”

But Westminster still looked exceptional, full of the inner meaning, and somewhere within him a voice still said, “You will go.”  Nevertheless he was able partly to put off his hybrid feeling, half-dread, half-desire.  The sleek people in the silk hats had made their little effect on the stranger.  “The man in the street is often right,” Dion said to himself; though he knew that the man in the street is probably there, and remains there, because he is so often wrong.

When he reached Little Market Street Dion told Rosamund there would be war in South Africa, but he did not even hint at his thought that volunteers might be called for, at his intention, if they were, to offer himself.  To do that would not only be absurdly premature, but might even seem slightly bombastic, an uncalled-for study in heroics.  He kept silence.  The battles of Ladysmith, of Magersfontein, of Stormberg, of Colenso, unsettled the theories of sleek people in silk hats.  England came to a very dark hour when Robin was playing with a new set of bricks which