Neither of them ever knew what it meant.  It was long, and sounded like an explanation.  Having spoken, Miltiades suddenly looked shy.  He wriggled towards the top of the ladder.  Dion thought that Rosamund would try to stop him from leaving her, but she did not.  On the contrary, she drew up her legs and made way for him, carefully.  The child deftly descended, picked up his staff and turned.  The dog, barking joyously, had leaped after him, and now gamboled around him.  For a moment the child hesitated, and in that moment Dion popped the remains of their lunch into his coat pockets; then slowly he walked to the side of the tumulus by which he had come up.  There he stood for two or three minutes staring once more up at Rosamund.  She waved a friendly hand to him, boyishly, Dion thought.  He smiled cautiously, then confidentially, suddenly turned and bolted down the slope uttering little cries—­and so away once more to the far-off cattle on the old battlefield, followed by his curly dog.

When Dion had watched him into the distance, beyond which lay the shining glory of the sea, and looked up to Rosamund again, she was pulling the little dry leaves from her undulating hair.

“I’m all brushwood,” she said, “and I love it.”

“So do I.”

“I ought to have been born a shepherdess.  Why do you look at me like that?”

“Perhaps because I’m seeing a new girl who’s got even more woman in her than I knew till to-day.”

“Most women are like that, Dion, when they get the chance.”

“To think you knew all those tricks and never told me!”

“Help me down.”

He stretched out his arms to her.  When she was on the ground he still held her for a moment.

“You darling!” he whispered.  “Never shall I forget this day at Marathon, the shining, the child, and you—­you!”

They did not talk much on the long ride homeward.  The heat was great, but they were not afraid of it, for the shining fires of this land on the edge of the east cherished and did not burn them.  The white dust lay deep on the road, and flew in light clouds from under the feet of their horses as they rode slowly upwards, leaving the blue of their pastoral behind them, and coming into the yellow of the pine woods.  Later, as they drew nearer to Athens, the ancient groves of the olives, touched with a gentle solemnity, would give them greeting; the fig trees and mulberry trees would be about them, and the long vineyards watched over by the aristocratic cypress lifting its dark spire to the sun.  But now the kingdom of the pine trees joyously held them.  They were in the happy woods in which even to breathe was sheer happiness.  Now and then they pulled up and looked back to the crescent-shaped plain which held a child instead of armies.  They traced the course of the river marked out by the reeds and sedges.  They saw the tiny dark specks, which were cattle grazing, with the wonder of blue beyond them.  In these