“I wonder what they catch here,” he said.  “There’s not much water.”

Rosamund took up the remark with her usual readiness and sympathetic cordiality, and soon they were chattering again much as usual.

The great heat of the hour after noontide found them lunching among the ruins of Nero’s house.  By this time the spell of the place had fast hold of them both.  Nature had long since taken the ruins to her gentle breast; she took Rosamund and Dion with them.  In her green lap she sheltered them; with her green hills and her groves of pine trees she wrapped them round; with her tall grasses, her bushes, her wild flowers and her leaves she caught at and caressed them.  A jackal whined in its lair near the huge limestone blocks of the temple of Zeus.  Green lizards basked on the pavements which still showed the little ruts constructed to save the feet of contending athletes from slipping.  All along the green valley the birds flew and sang; blackberry bushes climbed over the broken walls of the mansion of Nero, and red and white daisies and silvery grasses grew in every cranny where the kindly earth found a foothold.

“Look at those butterflies, Dion!” Rosamund said.

Two snow-white butterflies, wandering among the ruins, had found their way to the house of Nero, and seemed inclined to make it their home.  Keeping close together, as if guided by some sweet and whimsical purpose, they flew from stone to stone, from daisy to daisy, often alighting, as if bent on a thorough investigation of this ancient precinct, then fluttering forward again, with quivering wings, not quite satisfied, in an airy search for the thing or place desired.  Several times they seemed about to abandon the ruins of Nero’s house, but, though they fluttered away, they always returned.  And at last they alighted side by side on a piece of uneven wall, and rested, as if asleep in the sun, with folded wings.

“That’s the finishing touch,” said Rosamund.  “White butterflies asleep in the house of Nero.”

She looked round over the ruins, poetic and beautiful in their prostration, as if they had fallen to kiss the vale which, in return, had folded them in an eternal embrace.

“Don’t take me to Delphi this time, Dion; don’t take me anywhere else,” she said.

“I was thinking only to-day that our time’s very short now.  We lingered so long in Athens.”

“We’ll say our good-by to Greece from the Acropolis.  That’s—­of course!  The grandeur and wonder are there.  But the dream of Greece—­that’s here.  This is a shrine.”

“For Pan?”

“Oh no, not for Pan, though I dare say he often comes here.”

From the Kronos Hill, covered with little pines, came the mystical voice of the breeze, speaking to them in long and remote murmurs.

“That’s the most exquisite sound in the world,” Rosamund continued.  “But it has nothing to do with Pan.  You remember that day we went into the Russian church in Athens, Dion?”