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.”
Strangely, perhaps, he was almost glad when the ship cast off and the shores of England faded and presently were lost beyond the horizon line. He was alone now with his duty. Life was suddenly simplified. It was better so. In the last days he had often felt confused, beset, had often felt that he was struggling in a sea of complications which threatened to overwhelm him. There had been too much to do and there had been too much to endure; he had been obliged to be practical when he was feeling intensely emotional. The effort to dominate and to conceal his emotion had sometimes almost exhausted him in the midst of all he had had to do. He had come to the knowledge of the fact that it is the work of the spirit which leaves the whole man tired. He was weary, not from hard energies connected with his new profession, not from getting up at dawn, marching through dense crowds of cheering countrymen, traveling, settling in on shipboard, but from farewells. He looked back now upon a sort of panorama of farewells, of partings from his mother, his uncle, Bruce Evelin, Guy, Beatrice, Robin, Rosamund.
Quite possibly all these human companions had vanished out of his life for ever. It was a tremendous thought, upon which he was resolved not to dwell lest his courage and his energies might be weakened.