ramshackle cafes made of boards roughly nailed together anyhow, with a straggle of vine sprawling over them, and the earth for a flooring.  Tables were set out before them, or in their shadows; a few bottles were visible within; on benches or stools were grouped Greeks, old and young, busily talking, no doubt about politics.  Carts occasionally passed by the riders, sending out dust to mingle with theirs.  Turkeys gobbled at them, dogs barked in front of one-storied houses.  They saw peasants sitting sideways on pattering donkeys, and now and then a man on horseback.  By thin runlets of water were women, chattering as they washed the clothes of their households.  Then again, the horses came into the bright and solitary places where the cheerful loneliness of Greece held sway.

And so, at last they cantered into the outskirts of Athens when the evening was falling.  Another day had slipped from them.  But both felt it was a day which they had known very well, had realized with an unusual fulness.

“It’s been a day of days!” Dion said that evening.

And Rosamund nodded assent.

A child had been in that day, and, with a child’s irresistible might, had altered everything for them.  Now Dion knew how Rosamund would be with a child of her own, and Rosamund knew that Dion loved her more deeply because he had seen her with a child.  A little messenger had come to them over the sun-dried plain of Marathon bearing a gift of knowledge.

The next day they spent quietly.  In the morning they visited the National Museum, and in the late afternoon they returned to the Acropolis.

In the Museum Rosamund was fascinated by the tombs.  She, who always seemed so remote from sorrow, who, to Dion, was the personification of vitality and joyousness, was deeply moved by the record of death, by the wonderfully restrained, and yet wonderfully frank, suggestion of the grief of those who, centuries ago, had mingled their dust with the dust of the relations, the lovers, the friends, whom they had mourned for.

“What a lesson this is for me!” she murmured at last, after standing for a long while wrapped in silence and contemplation.

“Why for you, specially?” he asked.

She looked up at him.  There were tears in her eyes.  He believed she was hesitating, undecided whether to let him into a new chamber of her being, or whether to close a half-opened door against him.

“It’s very difficult to submit, I think, for some of us,” she answered, after a pause, slowly.  “Those old Greeks must have known how to do it.”

“To submit to sorrow?”

“Yes, to a great sorrow.  Such a thing is like an attack in the dark.  If I am attacked I want to strike back and hurt.”

“But whom could you reasonably hurt on account of a death that came in the course of nature?  That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

After a slight hesitation she said: