“But you forgave me, or I shouldn’t be here now.”
He gave her his cup for some more tea.
“You can’t imagine how absolutely wonderful it is to me to be here after what I’ve been through.”
He lay back in his chair, but he still looked tremendously alert, wiry, powerful even.
Dion was much more impressive than he had been when he went away. Rosamund felt a faint creeping of something that was almost like shyness in her as she looked at him.
“After Green Point Camp and Orange River—I shall never forget the dust-storm we had there!—and Springfontein and Kaffir River—oh, the heat there, Rose!—and Kaalfontein and all the rest of it. It was near Kaalfontein that we first came under fire. I shan’t forget that.”
He was silent for a moment. She looked at him across the tea-table. All that he knew and she did not know now made him seem rather strange to her. The uniting of two different, utterly different, experiences of life, was more tremendous, more full of meaning and of mystery, than the uniting of two bodies. This, then, was to be a second wedding-day for her and for Dion? All their letters, in which, of course, they had tried to tell each other something of their differing experiences, had really told very little, almost nothing. Dion’s glance told her more than all his letters, that and his color, and certain lines in his face, and the altered shapes of his hands, and his way of holding himself, and his way of speaking. Even his voice was different. He was an unconscious record of what he had been through out there; and much of it, she felt sure, he would never tell to her except unconsciously by being a different Dion from the Dion who had gone away.
“How little one can tell in letters,” she said. “Scarcely anything.”
“You made me feel Welsley in yours.”
“Did I? Why did you walk from the station?”