the sea, and as Rosamund and Dion no longer saw the whirling dust clouds in the plain they had, for the moment, almost an illusion of peace.  They sat down on the guardian’s bench, just beneath some faint fragments of paintings which dated from the time when the temple was made use of as a church by Greek Christians; and immediately Rosamund went on talking about the child.  She spoke very quietly and earnestly, with the greatest simplicity, and by degrees Dion came to see her as a mother, to feel that perhaps only as a mother could she fulfil herself.  The whole of her beauty would never be revealed unless she were seen with a child of her own.  Hitherto he had thought of her chiefly in relation to himself, as the girl he longed to win, then as the girl he most wonderfully had succeeded in winning.  She put herself before him now in a different light, and he saw in her new and beautiful possibilities.  While she was talking his imagination began to play about the child, and presently he realized that he was thinking of it as a boy.  Then, in a moment, he realized that on the previous evening he had thought of a male, not of a female child.  With this in his mind he said abruptly: 

“What sort of a child do you wish to have, Rosamund?”

“What sort?” she said, looking at him with surprise in her brown eyes.

“Yes.”

“What do you mean?  A beautiful, strong, healthy child, of course, the sort of child every married woman longs to have, and imagines having till it comes.”

“Beautiful, strong, healthy!” he repeated, returning her look.  “Of course it could only be that—­your child.  But I meant, do you want it to be a boy or a girl?”

“Oh!”

She paused, and looked away from him and down at the uncemented marble blocks which form the pavement of the Parthenon.

“Well?” he said, as she kept silence.

“If it were to be a girl I should love it.”

“You wish it to be a girl?”

“I didn’t say that.  The fact is, Dion”—­and now she again looked at him, “I have always thought of our child as a boy.  That’s why your question almost startled me.  I have never even once thought of having a girl.  I don’t know why.”

“I think I do.”

“Why then?”

“The thought was born of the desire.  You wanted our child to be a son and so you thought of it as a son.”

“Perhaps that was it.”

“Wasn’t it?”

He spoke with a certain pressure.  She remained silent for a moment, and two little vertical lines appeared in her forehead.  Then she said: 

“Yes, I believe it was.  And you?”

“I confess that when yesterday we spoke of a child I was thinking all the time about a boy.”

She gazed at him with something visionary in her eyes, which made them look for a moment like the eyes of a woman whom he had not seen till now.  Then she said quietly: 

“It will be a boy, I think.  Indeed, if it weren’t perhaps absurd, I should say that I know it will be a boy.”