“Three or four times shells burst about the beach, and then that ceased.  Each time that happened all the lizards scuttled in and hid for a space.  That was all the mischief done, except that once a stray bullet gashed the stone hard by—­made just a fresh bright surface.

“As the shadows grew longer, the stillness seemed greater.

“The curious thing,” he remarked, with the manner of a man who makes a trivial conversation, “is that I didn’t think—­at all.  I sat with her in my arms amidst the stones—­in a sort of lethargy—­stagnant.

“And I don’t remember waking up.  I don’t remember dressing that day.  I know I found myself in my office, with my letters all slit open in front of me, and how I was struck by the absurdity of being there, seeing that in reality I was sitting, stunned, in that Paestum Temple with a dead woman in my arms.  I read my letters like a machine.  I have forgotten what they were about.”

He stopped, and there was a long silence.

Suddenly I perceived that we were running down the incline from Chalk Farm to Euston.  I started at this passing of time.  I turned on him with a brutal question, with the tone of “Now or never.”

“And did you dream again?”

“Yes.”

He seemed to force himself to finish.  His voice was very low.

“Once more, and as it were only for a few instants.  I seemed to have suddenly awakened out of a great apathy, to have risen into a sitting position, and the body lay there on the stones beside me.  A gaunt body.  Not her, you know.  So soon—­it was not her . . . .

“I may have heard voices.  I do not know.  Only I knew clearly that men were coming into the solitude and that that was a last outrage.

“I stood up and walked through the temple, and then there came into sight—­first one man with a yellow face, dressed in a uniform of dirty white, trimmed with blue, and then several, climbing to the crest of the old wall of the vanished city, and crouching there.  They were little bright figures in the sunlight, and there they hung, weapon in hand, peering cautiously before them.

“And further away I saw others and then more at another point in the wall.  It was a long lax line of men in open order.

“Presently the man I had first seen stood up and shouted a command, and his men came tumbling down the wall and into the high weeds towards the temple.  He scrambled down with them and led them.  He came facing towards me, and when he saw me he stopped.

“At first I had watched these men with a mere curiosity, but when I had seen they meant to come to the temple I was moved to forbid them.  I shouted to the officer.

“‘You must not come here,’ I cried, ’I am here.  I am here with my dead.’

“He stared, and then shouted a question back to me in some unknown tongue.

“I repeated what I had said.