he thought of parting
from Rosamund. As he walked down Parliament Street he imagined the
good-by to her on the eve of sailing for South Africa. That acute moment
might never come. This evening he felt it on the way. Whatever happened
it would be within his power to stay with Rosamund, for there was no
conscription in England. If he went to South Africa then the action
of leaving her would be deliberate on his part. Was there within him
something that was stronger than his love for her? There must be, he
supposed, for he knew that if men were called for, and if Rosamund
asked, or even begged him not to go, he would go nevertheless.

Vaporous Westminster, dark and leaning to the great river, for how long
he had not seen it, or realized what it meant to him! Custom had blinded
his eyes and had nearly closed his mind to it. The day's event had
given him back sight and knowledge. This evening his familiarity with
Westminster bred in him intensity of vision and apprehension. It seemed
to him that scales had fallen from his eyes, that for the first time
he really saw Parliament Street, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster
Bridge, the river. The truth was, that for the first time he really
felt them, felt that he belonged to them and they to him, that their
blackness in the October evening was part of the color of him, that the
Westminster sounds, chimes, footfalls, the dull roar of traffic, human
voices from street, from bridge, from river, harmonized with the voices
in him, in the very depths of him. This was England, this closeness,
this harmony of the outer to and with the inner, this was England saying
to one of her sons, "You belong to me and I to you." The race spoke and
the land, they walked with Dion in the darkness.

For he did not go straight home. He walked for a long time beside the
river. By the river he kissed Robin and he said good-by to Rosamund,
by the river he climbed upon the troopship, and he saw the fading of
England on the horizon, and he felt the breath of the open sea. And
in the midst of a crowd of men going southward he knew at last what
loneliness was. The lights that gleamed across the river were the last
lights of England that he would see for many a day, perhaps forever;
the chime from the clock-tower was the last of the English sounds. He
endured in imagination a phantom bitterness of departure which seemed
abominably real; then suddenly he was recalled from a possible future to
the very defini