Hermes and the child came before her.  In the stillness of Welsley it was as if she heard the green stillness of Elis.  She was quite alone in that inner room where stood the messenger with the wings on his sandals.  Dion had stayed outside.  He had been unselfish that day as to-day she had been unselfish.  For she had wanted to go with the little gaiters.  She could see the smiling look of eternity upon the face of the messenger.  He had no fear for the child.  He had mounted on winged feet to the region where no fear is.  How his benign and eternal calm had sunk into Rosamund’s soul that day in Elis.  Far off she had seen through the frame of the Museum doorway a bit of the valley in which the Hermes had dwelt, and stretching across it a branch of wild olive.  She had looked at it and had thought of the victor’s Crown, a crown which had even been won by a boy at the games.

Already then a fore-knowledge of Robin had been in her.

She had gazed at the branch and loved it.  Certainly she had been dreaming, as she had afterwards told Dion, and in her dream had been Hermes and the child, and surely another child for whose future the messenger would not fear.  The branch of wild olive had, perhaps, entered into the dream.  Into a crown she had wound it to set upon the little fair head.  And that was why she had suffered, had really suffered, when a cruel hand had come into Elis and had torn down the wild olive branch.  Dion’s hand!

That action had been like a murder.  She remembered even now her feeling of anger and distress.  She had been startled.  She had been ruthlessly torn away from the exquisite calm in which, with the Hermes, she had been celestially dreaming.  Dion had torn her away, Dion who loved her so much.

Why had he done it?  Even now she did not know.

He had taken her out of that dream, and now he was going to take her away from Welsley.

The misty brightness was already fading from the garden; the song of the thrush was no longer audible:  he had flown away from the elder bush and from Rosamund.  The coldness and silence of the day seemed to deepen about her.  Welsley was fading out of her life.  She felt that.  She was going to begin again.  But as she had carried Elis with her when she left it, and the dear tombs and temples of Greece, when she had bidden good-by to the bare and beautiful land whose winds and whose waters are not as the winds and the waters of any other region, so she would carry away with her Welsley, this garden with its seclusion, its old religious atmosphere, the music of the chimes, even the thrush’s song from the elder bush.  “Farewell!” She must say that.  But she had her precious possession.  Another page of the book of life would be turned.  That was all.

That was all?  She sighed.  A painful sense of the impermanence of the things of this world came suddenly upon her.  Like running water life was slipping by; its joys, the shining bubbles poised upon the surface, drifted into the distance and—­how quickly!—­were out of reach.