A shepherd’s crook, a coat of fleece,
     A grazing flock;—­the sense of peace,
     The long sweet silence,—­this is Greece!”

Rosamund gazed before her at Greece in the evening light.

“‘The freshness of the world of old,’” she repeated, and her voice had a thrill in it. “’The sense of peace, the long sweet silence,—­this is Greece.’  If there was music with the music of those words I should love to sing them.”

“And how you could sing them.  Like no other.”

“At any rate my heart would be in them.  ’The freshness of the world of old—­the sense of peace, the long sweet silence.’”

She was standing now near the edge of the sacred rock, looking out over the tawny plain flanked by gray Hymettos, and away to the sea.  There were no voices rising from below.  There was no sound of traffic on the white road which wound away down the slope to the hidden city.  Her contralto voice lingered on the words; her lips drew them out softly, lengthening the sounds they loved.

“Freshness, that which belonged to the early world, long sweet silence, peace.  Oh, Dion, if you know how something in me cares for freshness and for peace!”

Her glad energies were strangely stilled; yet there was a kind of force in her stillness, the force that is in all deep truths of whatever nature they may be.  He felt that he was near to perhaps the most essential part of her, to that which was perhaps more truly her than even the radiant and buoyant humanity by means of which she drew people to her.

“Could you live always out of the world?” he asked her.

“But it wouldn’t be out of the world.”

“Away from people—­with me?”

“With you?”

She looked at him for a moment almost as if startled.  Then there came into her brown eyes a scrutiny that seemed half-inward, as if it were partially applied to herself.

“It’s difficult to be certain what one could do.  I suppose one has several sides.”

“Ah!  And your singing side?”

“I want to speak about that.”

Her voice was suddenly more practical, and her whole look and manner changed, losing in romance and strangeness, gaining in directness and energy.

“We’ve never discussed it.”

She sat down on a slab of rock at the edge of the precipice, and went on: 

“You don’t mind your wife being a public singer, do you, Dion?”

“Suppose I do?”

“Do you?”

“You’re so energetic I doubt if you could be happy in idleness.”

“I couldn’t in England.”

“And in Greece?  But we are only here for such a short time.”

He took her hand in his.

“Learning the lessons of happiness.”

“Good lessons for us!” she said, smiling.

“The best there are.  I believe in the education of joy.  It opens the heart, calls up all the generous things.  But your singing; can I bear your traveling about perpetually all over England?”