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Indeed, he was hardly sincere about that matter with himself. Perhaps this was his only insincerity. With his friend, Canon Wilton, too, he had spoken of Rosamund, and had found himself in the presence of a sort of noble anger. Now, in his little room, as he knelt in meditation, he remembered a saying of the Canon's, spoken in the paneled library at Welsley: "Leith has a great heart.
In the shelter of the gray towers, and within the enclosing walls, she would go again to some of her dreams, while the chimes marked the passing of the quiet hours, and the watchman's voice was lifted up to the stars which looked down on Welsley. And Robin would be with her.
A faint noise, like an oncoming sigh, above Rosamund's head heralded the organ's awakening, and was followed by the whisper of its most distant voice, a voice which made her think she knew not why of the sea whispering about a coral reef in an isle of the Southern Seas, part of God's world, mysteriously linked to "my Welsley."
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?"
In this enclosed calm of the precincts of Welsley where, pacing within the walls by the edge of the velvety lawns, the watchman would presently cry out the hour Canon Wilton was conscious of a life at a distance, the life of a man he had met first in St. James's Square. The beautiful woman in the chair by the fire had surely forgotten that man. Presently the distant sound of the organ ceased.
People, certain people, might mean everything in the life of a woman; many women lived, really lived, only in and through their lovers, their husbands, their children; but what woman lived in and through the life of the place? She had only to compare mentally the loss of Welsley with say the loss of Dion, the new Dion, to realize how little Welsley really meant to her.
Duncan Browning would, or would not, renew really tormented Rosamund, and the uncertainty in which she was living, and the misery it caused her, showed her how much of her heart had been given to Welsley. The Dean's widow was capricious and swayed by fluctuations of health. She was "up and down," whatever that betokened.
"I'm going to spend a quiet day, Annie," she said. "Yes, ma'am," said Annie, with an air of intelligent comprehension. "Though what else any one ever does in old Welsley I'm sure I couldn't say," she afterwards remarked to the cook. "You're a cockney at 'eart, Annie," repeated that functionary. "The country says nothing to you. You want the parks, that's what you want."
"However," Welsley wrote cheerfully, "though the revolution has the support of the uneducated element of the population, which comprises most of the people, as they have neither arms, ammunition nor money, they can't do much, unless some fool in the north is induced to finance them. You could help us a lot by looking about and seeing if there is any danger of such a thing."
Two lines appeared in her forehead. "I thought of taking it for six months, and then I can see. My little house in Westminster is let for six months from the first of March." She had turned to Father Robertson: "I'm only afraid " She paused. She looked almost disturbed. "What are you afraid of?" asked Canon Wilton. "I'm afraid of getting too fond of Welsley."
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