Next morning they were off the Start, and heard the voices of the sirens bidding them good day.

* * * * *

On the last day of October, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, Rosamund was waiting for Dion.  He was due by the express which, when up to time, reached Welsley Station at 3.55.  She would naturally have been at the station to meet him if she had not received a telegram from him begging her to stay at home.

“Would much rather meet you first in Little Cloisters,—­Dion,” were the last words of the telegram.

So Rosamund had stayed at home.

It was a peculiarly still autumn afternoon.  A suggestion—­it was scarcely more than that—­of mist made the Precincts look delicately sad, but not to the eyes of Rosamund.  She delighted in this season of tawny colors and of fluttering leaves, of nature’s wide-eyed and contemplative muteness.  The beauty of autumn appealed to her because she possessed a happy spirit, and was not too imaginative.  She had imagination, but it was not of the intensely sensitive and poetic kind which dies with the dying leaves, and in the mists loses all the hopes that were born with the birth of summer.  The strong sanity which marked her, and which had always kept her in central paths, far away from the byways in which the neurotic, the decadent, the searchers after the so-called “new” things loved to tread, led her to welcome each season in is turn, and to rejoice in its special characteristics.

So she loved the cloistral feeling autumn brought with it to Welsley.  Green summer seemed to open the doors, and one rejoiced in a golden freedom; tawny autumn seemed softly to close the doors, and one was happy in a sensation of being tenderly guarded, of being kept very safe in charge for the coming winter with its fires, and its cosy joys of the interior.

Another reason which made Rosamund care very much for the autumn was this:  in the autumn the religious atmosphere which hung about the Precincts of Welsley seemed to her to become more definite, more touching, the ancient things more living and powerful in their message.

“Welsley always sends out influences,” she had once said to Father Robertson.  “But in certain autumn days it speaks.  I hear its voice in the autumn.”

She heard its voice now as she waited for Dion.

The lattice window which gave on to the garden was partly open; there was a fire in the wide, old-fashioned grate; vases holding chrysanthemums stood on the high wood mantelpiece and on the writing-table; the tea-table had been placed by Annie near the hearth.

Rosamund listened to the cloistral silence, and looked at two deep, old-fashioned arm-chairs which were drawn up by the tea-table.

Just how much had she missed Dion?

That question had suddenly sprung up in her mind as she looked at the two arm-chairs.

The first time she had been in Little Cloisters she had spoken to Canon Wilton of Dion, had wondered if he would come back from South Africa altered; and she had said that if she came to live in it Welsley might alter her.  Canon Wilton had made no comment on her remark.  She had scarcely noticed that at the time, perhaps had not consciously noticed it; but her subconscious mind had recorded the fact, and she recalled it now.