He had visited Constantinople and had sailed from it to Greece.  From Greece he had taken ship to Brindisi, and was now on his way home to England.

What he had thought at the time to be an ill chance had sent him on his way alone.  Guy Daventry, his great friend, who was to go with him, had been seized by an illness.  It was too late then to find another man free.  So, reluctantly, and inclined to grumble a little at fate, Dion had set off in solitude.

He knew now that his solitude had given him keen sensations, which he could scarcely have felt with the best of friends.  Never, in any company, had he been so repelled, enticed, disgusted, deeply enchanted, as on these lonely wanderings which were now a part of his life.

How he had hated Constantinople, and how he had loved Greece!  His expectation had been betrayed by the event.  He had not known himself when he left England, or the part of himself which he had known had been the lesser part, and he had taken it for the greater.  For he had set out on his journey with his hopes mainly fixed on Constantinople.  Its road of wildness and tumult, its barbaric glitter, its crude mixture of races, even its passions and crimes—­a legend in history, a solid fact of to-day—­had allured his mind.  The art of Greece had beckoned to him; its ancient shrines had had their strong summons for his brain; but he had scarcely expected to love the country.  He had imagined it as certainly beautiful but with an austere and desolate beauty that would be, perhaps, almost repellent to his nature.  He had conceived of it as probably sad in its naked calm, a country weary with the weight of a glorious past.

But he had been deceived, and he was glad of that.  Because he had been able to love Greece so much he felt a greater confidence in himself.  Without any ugly pride he said to himself:  “Perhaps my nature is a little bit better, a little bit purer than I had supposed.”

As the breeze in the public garden touched his bare head, slightly lifting his thick dark hair, he remembered the winds of Greece; he remembered his secret name for Greece, “the land of the early morning.”  It was good to be able to delight in the early morning—­pure, delicate, marvelously fresh.

He at down on a bench under a chestnut tree.  The children’s voices had died away.  Silence seemed to be drawing near to the garden.  He saw a few moving figures in the shadows, but at a distance, fading towards the city.

The line of the figure, the poise of the head of that girl with whom he had driven from the station, came before Dion’s eyes.

CHAPTER II