“Your sin!” he said.  “As if——­” He was silent.

Zante seemed sleeping in the distance of the Ionian Sea, far away as the dream from which one has waked, touched with a dream’s mystic remoteness.  The great plain, stretching to mountains and sea, vast and green and lonely—­but with the loneliness that smiles, desiring nothing else—­seemed uninhabited.  Perhaps there were men in it, laboring among the vineyards or toiling among the crops, women bending over the earth by which they lived, or washing clothes on the banks of the river.  Rosamund did not look for them and did not see them.  In the green landscape, over which from a distance the mountains kept their quiet and deeply reserved watch, she detected no movement.  Even the silver of the river seemed immobile, as if its journeyings were now stilled by an afternoon spell.

“It’s as empty as the plain of Marathon, but how much greater!” she said at last.

“At Marathon there was the child.”

“Yes, and here there’s not even a child.”

She sighed.

“I wonder what one would learn to be if one lived on the hill of Drouva?” she said.

“It will be much more beautiful at sunset.  We are looking due west.  Soon we shall have the moon rising behind us.”

“What memories I shall carry away!”

“And I.”

“You were here before alone?”

“Yes.  I walked up from the village just before sunset after a long day among the ruins.  I—­I didn’t know then of your existence.  That seems strange.”

But she was gazing at the view, and now with an earnestness in which there seemed to him to be a hint of effort, as if she were, perhaps, urging imagination to take her away and to make her one with that on which she looked.  It struck him just then that, since they had been married, she had changed a good deal, or developed.  A new dreaminess had been added to her power and her buoyancy which, at times, made her very different from the radiant girl he had won.

“The Island of Zante!” she said once more, with a last look at the sea, as they turned away in answer to the grave summons of Achilles.  “Ah, what those miss who never travel!”

“And yet I remember your saying once that you had very little of the normal in you, and even something about the cat’s instinct.”

“Probably I meant the cat’s instinct to say nasty things.  Every woman—­”

“No, what you meant—­”

He began actually to explain, but her “Puss, Puss, Puss!” stopped him.  Her dream was over and her laugh rang out infectiously as they returned to the tent.

The tea was fairly bad, but she defended its merits with energy, and munched biscuits with an excellent appetite.  Afterwards she smoked a cigarette and Dion his pipe, sitting on the ground and leaning against the tent wall.  In vain Achilles drew her attention to the chairs.  Rosamund stretched out her long limbs luxuriously and shook her head.