Presence; his feeling was that it was the Presence of God.  Abruptly he seemed to be aware that God had always stood, was standing now, between him and his wife.  He remembered the words in the marriage service, “Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.”  “But God,” he thought, “did not join us.  He stood between us always.  He stands between us now.”  It was an awful thought.  It was like a great blasphemy.  He was afraid of it.  And yet he now felt that it was an old, old thought in his mind which only now had he been able to formulate.  He had known without knowing consciously, but now he consciously knew.

He took care at this moment not to look at Rosamund.  If he looked, surely she would see in his eyes his terrible thought, the thought he was going to carry with him to South Africa.  Making a great effort he began to tell her all that he knew about the C.I.V.  They discussed matters in a comradely spirit.  Rosamund said many warm-hearted things, showed herself almost eagerly solicitous.  They went up to sit by the fire in her little room.  Dion smoked.  They talked for a long time.  Had any one been there to listen he would probably have thought, “This man has got the ideal wife.  She’s a true comrade as well as a wife.”  But all the time Dion kept on saying to himself, “This is the result of her prayers before dinner.  She is being good.”  Only when it was late, past their usual hour for going to bed, did he feel that the strong humanity in Rosamund had definitely gained ground, that she was being genuinely carried away by warm impulses connected with dear England, our men, and with him.

When they got up at last to go to bed she exclaimed: 

“I shall always love what you have done, Dion.  You know that.”

“But not the way of my doing it!” trembled on his lips.

He did not say it, however.  Why lead her back even for a moment to bitterness?

That night he lay with his thoughts, and in the darkness the ray was piercing bright and looked keen like a sharpened sword.

CHAPTER II

On the fourth of January Dion and about nine hundred other men were sworn in at the Guildhall; on January the seventeenth, eight hundred of them, including Dion, were presented with the Freedom of the City of London; on the nineteenth they were equipped and attended a farewell service at St. Paul’s Cathedral, after which they were entertained at supper, some at Gray’s Inn and some at Lincoln’s Inn; on the twentieth they entrained for Southampton, from which port they sailed in the afternoon for South Africa.  Dion was on board of the “Ariosto.”