She stood still abruptly, and was silent for a minute.

“Don’t you think,” she said, in a different and less exuberant voice, and with a changed and less physical manner—­“don’t you think sometimes, in exceptional hours, one can feel what is to come, what is laid up for one?  I do.  This is an exceptional hour.  We are on the heights and it’s very wonderful.  Well, perhaps to-night we can feel what is coming.  Let’s try.”

“How?”

“Let’s just be quiet, and give ourselves up to the hill of Drouva, and Greece, and the night, and—­and what surrounds and permeates us and all this.”

With a big and noble gesture she indicated the sleeping world far below them, breathless under the moon; the imperceptible valleys merged in the great plain through which the river, silver once more, moved unsleeping between its low-lying banks to the sea; the ranges of mountains which held themselves apart in the night, a great company, reserved and almost austere, yet trodden with confidence by the feet of those fairies who haunt the ancient lands; the sea which drew down the moon as a lover draws down his mistress; Zante riding the sea like a shadow in harbor.

And they were silent.  Dion had a sensation of consciously giving himself, almost as a bather, to the sea.  Did he feel what was coming to him and to this girl at his side, who was part of him, and yet who was alone, whose arm clasped his, yet whose soul dwelt far off in its own remoteness?  Would the years draw them closer and closer together, knit them together, through greater knowledge, through custom, through shared joys and beliefs, through common beliefs, through children, till they were as branches growing out of one stem firmly rooted?

He gave himself and gave himself, or tried to give himself in the silence.  Yet he could not have said truly that any mystical knowledge came to him.  Only one thing he seemed strangely to know, that they would never have children.  The sleeping world and the sea, and, as Rosamund had said, “what surrounds and permeates us and all this” seemed to permit him mysteriously to get at that one bit of foreknowledge.  Something seemed to say to him, “You will be the father of one child.”  And yet, when he came to think of it, he realized how probable, how indeed almost certain it was that the silent voice issued from within himself.  Rosamund and he had talked about a child, a boy, had begun almost to sketch out mental plans for that boy’s upbringing; they had never talked about children.  He believed that he had penetrated to the secret of the voice.  He said to himself, “All that sort of thing comes out of one’s self.  It doesn’t reach one from the outside.”  And yet, when he looked out over the world, which seemed wrapped in ethereal garments, garments woven by spirit on looms no hand of woman or man might ever touch, he was vaguely conscious that all within him which was of any real value was there too.  Surely he did not possess.  Rather was he possessed of.