And she ran on, laughing at herself, reveling in her whimsical pretense of conceit till dinner was over.

“Now a cigarette!  Never have I enjoyed any meal so much as this!  It’s only out of doors that one gets hold of the real joie de vivre.”

“You’re never without it, thank God,” returned Dion, striking a match for her.

So still was the evening that the flame burned steadily even upon that height facing immensities.  Rosamund leaned to it with the cigarette between her lips.  Her face was browned to the sun.  She looked rather like a splendid blonde gipsy, with loose yellow hair and the careless eyes of those who dwell under smiling heavens.  She sent out a puff of cigarette smoke, directing it with ardor to the moon which now rode high above them.

“I’d like to catch up nature in my arms to-night,” she said.  “Come, Dion, let’s go a little way.”

She was up, and put her arm through his like a comrade.  He squeezed her arm against his side and, strolling there in the night on the edge of the hill, she talked at first with almost tumultuous energy, with an energy as of an Amazon who cared for the things of the soul as much as for the things of the body.  To-night her body and soul seemed on the same high level of intensity.

At first she talked of the present, of their life in Greece and of what it had meant to her, what it had done for her; and then, always with her arm through Dion’s, she began to talk of the future.

“We’ve got to go away from all this, but let us carry it with us; you know, as one can carry things that one has really gathered up, really got hold of.  It will mean a lot to us afterwards in England, in our regular humdrum life.  Not that life’s ever humdrum.  We must take Drouva to England, and Marathon, and the view from the Acropolis, and the columns of the Parthenon above all those, and the tombs.”

“But they’re sad.”

“We must take them.  I’m quite sure the way to make life splendid, noble, what it is meant to be to each of us, is to press close against one’s heart all that is sent to one, the sorrows as well as the joys.  Everything one tries to keep at arm’s length hurts one.”

“Sins?”

“Sins, Dion?  I said what is sent to us.”

“Don’t you think——?”

“Sins are never sent to us, we always have to go and fetch them.  It’s like that poor old chemist going round the corner in the fog with a jug for what is ruining his life.”

“What poor old chemist?” he asked.

“A great friend of mine in London—­Mr. Thrush.  You shall know him some day.  Oh—­but London!  Now, Dion, can we, you and I, live perpetually in London after all this?”

“Well, dearest, I must stick close to business.”

“I know that.  And we’ve got the little house.  But later on?”

“And your singing, your traveling all over the place with a maid!”

“I wonder if I shall.  To-night I don’t feel as if I shall.”