They rode one day to Eleusis; on another day to Tatoi, buried in oak-woods on the slope of Parnes; on another through noisy and mongrel Piraeus, and over undulating wrinkled ground, burnt up by the sun and covered with low scrub and bushes of myrtle, to the shore of the gulf opposite to Salamis; on yet another to Marathon, where they lunched on the famous mound beneath which the bodies of the Athenians who fell in the battle were buried.  They took no companion with them.  Dion carried a revolver in his hip pocket, but never had reason to show or to use it.  When they dismounted they tethered the horses to a bush or tree, or sometimes hobbled their forelegs, and turned them loose for a while.

Such days were pure joy to them both.  In them they went back to the early world.  They did not make the hard and self-conscious imaginative effort of the prig to hurl themselves into an historic past.  They just let the land and its memories take them.  As, sitting on the warm ground among the wild myrtle bushes, they looked across the emerald green unruffled waters to Salamis, that very long isle with its calm gray and orange hills and its indented shores, perhaps for a moment they talked of the Queen of Halicarnassus, and of the deception of Xerxes watching from his throne on Mount Aegaleos.  But the waters were now so solitary, the peace about them was so profound, that the memory of battles soon faded away in the sunshine.  Terror and death had been here once.  A queen had destroyed her own people in that jeweled sea, a king had fled from those delicate mountains.  But now sea and land were for lovers.  A fly with shining wings journeyed among the leaves of the myrtles, a beetle crept over the hot sandy ground leaving a minute pattern behind it; and Rosamund and Dion forgot all about Artemisia, as they brooded, wide-eyed, over the activities of the dwellers in the waste.  At such moments they realized the magic of life, as they had never realized it in the turmoil of London.  The insect with its wings that caught the sun, the intent and preoccupied little traveler whose course could be deflected by a twig, revealed the wonder that is lost and forgotten in the crowded highways of men.

It was when they were at Marathon that Rosamund told Dion she loved Greece partly because of its emptiness.  The country was not only rather bare of vegetation, despite its groves of glorious old olives, its woods of oaks round Tatoi, its delicious curly forests of yellow-green pines, which looked, Rosamund declared, as if they had just had their dainty heads perfectly dressed by an accomplished coiffeur, it was also almost strangely bare of men.

“Where are the Greeks?” Rosamund had often asked during their first few rides, as they cantered on and on, scarcely ever meeting a human being.

“In the towns to be sure!” Dion had answered.

“And where are the towns?”

“Ah!  That’s more than I can tell you!” he had said, laughing.