He looked at Rosamund at last.

“Have you got anything?”

But she did not answer him.  There was a great stillness in her big eyes.  All the vital exuberance of body and spirit mingled together had vanished from her abruptly.  Nothing of the Amazon who had captured the heart of Dirmikis remained.  As Dion looked at her now, he simply could not see the beautiful schoolgirl of sixteen, the blonde gipsy who had bent forward, cigarette in mouth, to his match, who had leaned back and blown rings to the moon above Drouva.  Had she ever set the butt of a gun against her shoulder?  Something in this woman’s eyes made him suddenly feel as if he ought to leave her alone.  Yet her arm still lay on his, and she was his.

Against the silver of the moon the twisted trunks of the two small olive trees showed black and significant.  The red of the dying camp-fire glowed not far from the tent.  Dogs were barking in the hamlet of Drouva.  She neither saw details nor heard ugly sounds in the night.  He knew that.  And the rest?  It seemed to him that something of her, the spirit of her, perhaps, or some part of it with which his had never yet had any close contact, was awake and at work in the night.  But though he held her arm in his she was a long way from him.  And there came to him this thought: 

“I felt as if I ought to leave her alone.  But she has left me alone.”

Almost mechanically, and slowly, he straightened his arm, thus letting hers slip.  She did not seem to notice his action.  She gazed out towards Zante over a world that now looked very mystical.  In the daylight it had been a green pastoral.  Now there was over it, and even surely in it, a dim whiteness, a something pure and hushed, like the sound, remote and curiously final, of a quiet sleeper.

That night, when they went to bed, Rosamund was full of the delight of a new experience.  She insisted that the flap of the tent should not be kept shut down.  She had never slept in a tent before, and was resolved to look out and see the stars from her pillow.

“And my olive tree,” she added.

Obediently, as soon as she was in her camp-bed, Dion lifted the flap.  A candle was still burning, set on a chair between the two beds.  As the moonlight came in, Rosamund lifted herself on one arm, leaned over and blew it out.

“How horrible moonlight makes candlelight,” she said.

Dion, in his pyjamas, was outside fastening back the flap, his bare feet on the short dry grass.

“I can see the Pleiades!” she added earnestly.

“There!” said Dion.

He looked up at the sky.

“The Pleiades, the Great Bear, Mars.”

“Oh!” she drew in her breath.  “A shooting star!”

She pressed her lips together and half-shut her eyes.  By her contracted forehead Dion saw that she was wishing almost fiercely.  He believed he read her wish.  He had not seen the traveling star, and did not try to wish with her, lest he should cross the path of the Fates and throw his shadow on her desire.