Left alone, Dion lifted the lunch-pannier from his shoulder and laid it down on the ground.  Then he sat down under one of the pine trees.  A wild olive grew very near it.  He thought of the crown of wild olive which the victors received in days when the valley resounded with voices and the trampling of the feet of horses.  He took off his hat and laid it beside him on the ground by the lunch-pannier.  One of the men in the river cried out to his companion.  Sheep-bells sounded softly down the valley.  Some peasants went by with a small train of donkeys on a path which wound away at the foot of the hill of Kronos.

Dion was being unselfish.  In staying where he was, beyond the outer door of the house of Hermes, he was taking the first firm step on a path which might lead him on very far.  He had slept in the dawn when Rosamund slipped out of the tent, but till the stars waned he had been awake, and in the white light of the moon he had seen the beginning of the path.  Men were said to be selfish.  People, especially women, often talked as if selfishness were bred in the very fiber of men, as if it were ineradicable, and must be accepted by women.  He meant to prove to one woman that even a man could be unselfish, moved by something greater than himself.  Up there on Drouva he had definitely dedicated himself to Rosamund.  His acute pain when, coming back to the place where he had left her by the tent before sunset, he had not found her, his sense almost of smoldering anger, had startled him.  In the night he had thought things over, and then he had come to the beginning of the path.  A really great love, if it is to be worthy to carry the torch, must tread in the way of unselfishness.  He would conform to the needs, doubtless imperious, of Rosamund’s nature, even when they conflicted with his.

So now he sat outside under the pine tree, and she was within alone.  A first step was taken on the path.

Would she presently come through the hall of the Victory to call him in?

He heard the guardian cough in the vestibule of the Emperors; the cough was that of a man securely alone with his bodily manifestations.  The train of peasants had vanished.  Still the sheep-bells sounded, but the chime seemed to come to him now from a greater distance.

The morning was wearing on.  When would she come back to him from the secret of Olympia?

He heard again above his head the eternities whispering in the pine branches.  The calmness and heat of the valley mingled together, and rose to him, and wanted to take him to themselves.  But he was detached from them, terribly detached by his virtue—­his virtue, which involved him in a struggle, pushed them off.

Surely an hour had passed, perhaps even more.  He began to tingle with impatience.  The sound of the sheep-bells had died away beyond the colonnade of the echoes.  A living silence was now about him.

At last he put on his hat and got up.  The Hermes was proving his power too mercilessly, was stealing the hours like a thief at work in the dark.  The knowledge that Rosamund was his own for life did not help Dion at all at this moment.  He had planned out this day as if they were never to have another.  Their time in Greece was nearly over, and they could not linger for very long anywhere.  Anyhow, just this day, once gone, could never be recaptured.