If he were killed in South Africa would Rosamund be angry at his death?  That was her greatest tribute, anger, directed surely not against any human being, but against the God Whom she loved and Who, so she believed, ruled the world and directed the ways of men.  Once Rosamund had said that she knew it was possible for human beings to hurt God.  She had doubtless spoken out of the depths of her personal experience.  She had felt sure that by her anger at the death of her mother she had hurt God.  Such a conviction showed how she thought of God, in what a closeness of relation with God she felt herself to be.  Dion knew now that she had loved her mother, that she loved Robin, as she did not love him.  If he were to die she would be very sorry, but she would not be very angry.  No, she would be able to breathe out a “farewell!” simply, with a resignation comparable to that of the Greeks on those tombs which she loved, and then—­she would concentrate on Robin.

If he, Dion, were to be shot, and had time for a thought before dying, he knew what his thought would be:  that the Boer’s bullet had only hit a man, not, like so many bullets fired in war, a man and a woman.  And that thought would add an exquisite bitterness to the normal bitterness of death.

So Dion, on the “Ariosto,” voyaged towards South Africa, companioned by new and definite knowledge—­new at any rate in the light and on the surface, definite because in the very big moments of life truth becomes as definite as the bayonet piercing to the man who is pierced.

His comrades were a mixed lot, mostly quite young.  The average age was about twenty-five.  Among them were barristers, law students, dentists, bank clerks, clerks, men of the Civil Service, architects, auctioneers, engineers, schoolmasters, builders, plumbers, jewelers, tailors, Stock Exchange men, etc., etc.  There were representatives of more than a hundred and fifty trades, and adherents to nine religions, among the men of the C.I.V.  Their free patriotism welded them together, the thing they had all spontaneously done abolished differences between Baptists and Jews, Methodists and Unitarians, Catholics and Protestants.  The perfumery manager and the marine engineer comprehended each other’s language; the dentist and the insurance broker “hit it off together” at first sight; printers and plumbers, pawnbrokers and solicitors, varnish testers and hop factors—­they were all friendly and all cheerful together.  Each one of them had done a thing which all the rest secretly admired.  Respect is a good cement, and can stand a lot of testing.  In his comrades Dion was not disappointed.  Among them were a few acquaintances, men whom he had met in the City, but there was only one man whom he could count as a friend, a barrister named Worthington, a bachelor, who belonged to the Greville Club, and who was an intimate of Guy Daventry’s.  Worthington knew Daventry much better than he knew Dion, but both Dion and he were glad to be together and to exchange impressions in the new life which they had entered so abruptly, moved by a common impulse.  Worthington was a dark, sallow, narrow-faced man, wiry, with an eager intellect, fearless and energetic, one of the most cheerful men of the battalion.  His company braced Dion.