moments, half-unconsciously, they were telling memory to lay in its provision for the future.  Perhaps they would never come back; never again would Rosamund rest in her brushwood chamber, never again would Dion hear the dry music above him, and feel the growth of his love, the urgency of its progress just as he had felt them that day.  They might be intensely happy, but exactly the same happiness would probably not be theirs again through all the years that were coming.  The little boy and his dog had doubtless gone out of their lives for ever.  Their good-by to Marathon might well be final.  They looked back again and again, till the blue of the sea was lost to them.  Then they rode on, faster.  The horses knew they were going homeward, and showed a new liveliness, sharing the friskiness of the little graceful trees about them.  Now and then the riders saw some dusty peasants—­brown and sun-dried men wearing the fustanella, and shoes with turned-up toes ornamented with big black tassels; women with dingy handkerchiefs tied over their heads; children who looked almost like the spawn of the sun in their healthy, bright-eyed brownness.  And these people had cheerful faces.  Their rustic lot seemed enviable.  Who would not shed his sorrows under these pine trees, in the country where the solitudes radiated happiness, and even bareness was like music?  Here was none of the heavy and exotic passion, none of the lustrous and almost morbid romance of the true and distant East, drowsy with voluptuous memories.  That setting was not for Rosamund.  Here were a lightness, a purity and sweetness of Arcadia, and people who looked both intelligent and simple.

At a turn of the road they met some Vlachs—­rascally wanderers, lean as greyhounds, chicken-stealers and robbers in the night, yet with a sort of consecration of careless cheerfulness upon them.  They called out.  In their cries there was the sound of a lively malice.  Their brown feet stirred up the dust and set it dancing in the sunshine, a symbol surely of their wayward, unfettered spirits.  A little way off, on a slope among the trees, their dark tents could be partially seen.

“Lucky beggars!” murmured Dion, as he threw them a few small coins, while Rosamund smiled at them and waved her hand in answer to their greetings.  “I believe it’s the ideal life to dwell in the tents.”

“It seems so to-day.”

“Won’t it to-morrow?  Won’t it when we are in London?”

“Perhaps more than ever then.”

Was she gently evading an answer?  They had reached the brow of the hill and put their horses to a canter.  The white dust settled over them.  They were like millers on horseback as they left the pine woods behind them.  But the touch of the dust was as the touch of nature upon their faces and hands.  They would not have been free of it as they rode towards Athens, and came to the region of the vineyards, of the olive groves and the cypresses.  Now and then they passed