It was a far cry from the downs of Chilton to the summit of the Acropolis.  Dion remembered the crowd assembled to hear “Elijah”; he felt the ugly heat, the press of humanity.  And all that was but the prelude to this!  Even the voice crying “Woe unto them!” had been the prelude to the wonderful silence of Greece.  He felt marvelously changed.  And Rosamund often seemed to him changed, too, because she was his own.  That wonderful fact gave her new values, spread about her new mysteries.  And some of these mysteries Dion did not attempt to fathom at first.  Perhaps he felt that some silences of love are like certain ceremony with a friend—­a mark of the delicacy which is the sign-manual of the things that endure.  In the beginning of that honeymoon there was a beautiful restraint which was surely of good augury for the future.  Not all the doors were set violently open, not all the rooms were ruthlessly visited.

Dion found that he was able to reverence the woman who had given herself to him more after he had received the gift than before.  And this was very wonderful to him, was even, somehow, perplexing.  For Rosamund had the royal way of bestowing.  She was capable of refusal, but not of half-measures or of niggardliness.  There was something primitive in her which spoke truth with a voice that was fearless; and yet that very primitiveness seemed closely allied with her purity.  Dion only understood what that purity was when he was married to her.  It was like the radiant atmosphere of Greece to him.  Had not Greece led him to it, made him desire it with all that was best in his nature?  Now he had brought it to Greece.  Actually, day after day, he trod the Acropolis with Rosamund.

Greece had already, he believed, put out a hand and drawn them more closely together.

“Love me, love the land I love.”

Laughingly, yet half-anxiously too, Dion had said that to Rosamund when they left Brindisi and set sail for Greece.  With her usual sincerity she had answered: 

“I want to love it.  Do you wish me to say more than that, to make promises I may not be able to keep?”

“No,” he had answered.  “I only want truth from you.”  And after a moment he had added, “I shall never want anything from you but your truth.”

She had looked at him rather strangely, like one moved by conflicting feelings, and after a slight hesitation she had said: 

“Dion, do you realize all the meaning in those words of yours?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then if you really mean them you must be one of the most daring of human beings.  But I shall try a compromise with you.  I shall try to give you my best truth, never my worst.  You deserve that, I think.  Indeed, I know you do.”

And he had left it to her.  Was he not wise to do that?  Already he trusted her absolutely, as he had never thought to trust any one.

“I could face any storm with you,” he once said to Rosamund.