had dyed red this serene wilderness, a battle which was great because it had been gently sung, lifted up by the music of poets, set on high by the lips of orators.  He looked over the land and thought:  “Here Miltiades won the name which has resounded through history.  To that shore, where I see the cattle, the Persians were driven.”  And it seemed to him that the battle of Marathon had been fought in order that Rosamund and he, in the nineteenth century, might be drawn to this place to meet the shining afternoon.  Yes, it was fought for that, and to make this place the more wonderful for them.  It was their Garden of Eden consecrated by History.

What a very small animal that was which had strayed away from its kind over the tawny ground where surely there was nothing to feed upon!  The little dark body of it looked oddly detached as it moved along.  And now another animal was following it quickly.  The arrival of the second darkness, running, made Dion know that the first was human, the guardian of the beasts, no doubt.

So Eden was invaded already!  He smiled as he thought of the serpent.  The human being came on slowly, always moving in the direction of the mound, and always accompanied by its attendant animal—­a dog, of course.  Soon Dion knew that both were making for the mound.  It occurred to him that Rosamund was in the private room of him who was approaching, was possibly sound asleep there.

“Rosamund!” he almost whispered.

There was no answer.

“Rosamund!” he murmured, looking upward to his roof, which was her floor.

“Hush!” came down to him through the brushwood.  “I’m willing it to come to us.”

“What—­the guardian of the cattle?”

“Guardian of the ——!  It’s a child!”

“How do you know?”

“I do know.  Now you’re not to frighten it.”

“Of course not!”

He lay very still, his chin in his palms, watching the on-comers.  How had she known?  And then, seeing suddenly through her eyes, he knew that of course it was a child, that it could not be anything else.  All its movements now proclaimed to him its childishness, and he watched it with a sort of fascination.

For he had never seen Rosamund with a child.  That would be for him a new experience with something, perhaps, prophetic in it.

Child and animal approached steadily, keeping an undeviating course, and presently Dion saw a very small, but sturdy, Greek boy of perhaps ten years old, wearing a collarless shirt, open at a deep brown throat, leggings of some thin material, boots, and a funny little patched brown coat and pointed hood made all in one, and hanging down with a fulness almost of skirts about the small determined legs.  The accompanying dog was a very sympathetic, blunt-nosed, round-headed, curly-coated type, whose whiteness, which positively invited the stroking hand, was broken by two great black blotches set all askew on the back, and by a black patch which ringed the left eye and completely smothered the cocked-up left ear.  The child carried a stick, which nearly reached to his shoulder, and which ended in a long and narrow crook.  The happy dog, like its master, had no collar.