“If we had a child—­Dion, you must believe me!—­we should be drawn ever so much nearer together by it.  If we ever do have one, we shall look back on this time—­you will—­and think ’We were much farther apart then than we are now.’”

“I don’t like to hear you say that,” he said gravely, almost with pain.

Could a woman like Rosamund be driven by an instinct blindly?  She was such a perfect type of womanhood.  It would be almost a tragedy if she—­such a woman—­died childless.  Perhaps instinct had obscurely warned her of that, had taught her where to look for a mate.  He, Dion, had always lived purely.  That day she had acknowledged that she had divined it.  Was that, perhaps, her real, her instinctive reason for marrying him?  But a man wants to be married for one thing only, because the woman longs for him.  And Dion was just an ordinary man with very strong feelings.

“Let’s take one more stroll before we go down,” he said.

“Yes, to the maidens,” she answered.

Her voice sounded relieved.  She pushed her arm gently through his as they moved away, and he felt all his body thrill.  The mystery of love was almost painful to him at that moment.  He realized that a great love might grow to have an affinity with a disease.  “I must be careful.  I must take great care with this love of mine,” he thought.

They went slowly over the slabs of marble and the gray rocks and passed before the west front of the Parthenon.  Dion felt slight resistance in Rosamund’s arm, and stopped.  In the changing light the marble was full of warm color, was in places mysterious and translucent almost as amber.  The immense power, the gigantic calm of the temple, a sort of still breathing of Eternity upon Time, confronted a glory which was beginning to change in the face of its changelessness.  Soon the seas that held their dream under the precipices of Sunion, and along the shores of Aegina, where the tall shepherd boys in their fleeces of white lead home the flocks in the twilight, would lose the wonder of their shining, and the skies the rapture of their diffused light.  In the quietly austere Attic Plain, through the whispering groves of Academe, and along the sacred way to Eleusis, a very delicate vagueness was beginning to travel, like a wanderer setting forth to greet the coming of the night.  The ranges of hills and mountains, Hymettos and Pentelicus, Parnes stretching to the far distance, Mount Corydallus, the peak of Salamis, the exquisitely long mountains of Trigania—­“the greyhounds of their tribe,” Rosamund loved to call them—­were changing almost from moment to moment, becoming a little softer, a little more tender, putting off their distinct hues of the day for the colors of sleep and forgetting.  But the great Doric columns fronting them, the core of the heart of this evening splendor, seemed not to defy, but to ignore, all the processes of change.  In its ruin the Parthenon seemed to say, “I have not changed.”  And it was true.  For the same soul which had confronted Pericles confronted the two lovers who now stood at the foot of the temple.