“I am going to climb up into that house.  The owner will never come, I’m sure.”

Near them upon the mound was a dwelling of Arcady, in which surely a shepherd sometimes lay and piped to the sun and the sea god.  It was lifted upon a tripod of poles, and was deftly made of brushwood, with roof, floor and two walls all complete.  A ladder of wood, from which the bark had been stripped, led up to it.

“You want to sleep?” Dion asked.

She looked at him.

“Perhaps.”

He helped her up to her feet.  Quickly she mounted the ladder and stepped into the room.

“Good-by!” she said, looking down at him and smiling.

“Good-by!” he answered, looking up.

She made a pretense of shutting a door and withdrawing into privacy.  He lit his pipe, hesitated a moment, then went to lie down under her room.  Now he no longer saw her, but he heard her movements overhead.  The dry brushwood crackled as she lay down, as she settled herself.  She was lying surely at full length.  He guessed that she had stretched out her arms and put her two hands under her head.  She sighed.  Below he echoed her sigh with a long breath of contentment.  Then they both lay very still.

Marathon!

He remembered his schoolbooks.  He remembered beginning Greek.  He had never been very good at Greek.  His mother, if she had been a man and had gone to Oxford or Cambridge, would have made a far better classic than he.  She had helped him sometimes during the holidays when he was quite small.  He remembered exactly how she had looked when he had been conjugating—­half-loving and half-satirical.  He had made a good many mistakes.  Later he had read Greek history with his mother, he had read about the battle of Marathon.

“Marathon”—­it was written in his school history, “became a magic word at Athens . . . the one hundred and ninety-two Athenians who had perished in the battle were buried on the field, and over their remains a tumulus or mound was erected, which may still be seen about half a mile from the sea.”  As a small boy he had read that with a certain inevitable detachment.  And now here he lay, a man, on that very tumulus, and the brushwood creaked above his head with the movement of the woman he loved.

How wonderful was the weaving of the Fates!

And if some day he should sit in the place of his mother, and should hear a small boy, his small boy, conjugating.  By Jove!  He would have to rub up his classics!  Not for ten years old; he wasn’t so bad as that; but for twenty, when the small boy would be going up to Oxford, and would, perhaps, be turning out alarmingly learned.

Rosamund the mother of a young man!

But Dion shied away from that.  He could imagine her as the mother of a child, beautiful mother of a child almost as beautiful; but he could not conceive of her as the “mater” of a person with a mustache.

Their youth, their youth—­must it go?