“Yes.”

“There was the same sort of sound in those Russian voices when they were singing very softly.  It could never come from a Pagan world.”

“You find belief behind it?”

“No—­knowledge.”

He did not ask her to define exactly what she meant.  It was not an hour for definition, but for dreaming, and he was happy again; the cloud of the morning had passed away; he had his love with untroubled eyes among the ruins.  Thinking of that, realizing that with a sudden intensity, he took her warm hand from the warm stone on which it was resting, and held it closely in his.

“Oh, Rosamund, shall I ever have another hour as happy as this?” he said.

A little way off, in that long meadow in the breast of which the Stadium lay hidden, the sheep-bells sounded almost pathetically; a flock was there happily at pasture.

“It’s as if all the green doors were closing upon us to keep us in Elis forever, isn’t it?” she said.  “But——­”

She looked at him with a sort of smiling reproach: 

“You wouldn’t be allowed to stay.”

“Why not?”

“You committed a crime this morning.  Nature’s taken possession of Olympia, and you struck at her.”

“D’you know why I did that?”

“No.”

But she did not again ask him why, and he never told her.  When the heat had lessened a little, they wandered once more through that garden of ruins, where scarcely a column is standing, where convulsions of nature have helped the hands of man to overthrow man’s work, and where nature has healed every wound, and made every scar tender and beautiful.  And presently Rosamund said: 

“I want to know exactly where Hermes was found.”

“Come, and I’ll show you.”

He led her on among the wild flowers and the grasses, till they came to the clearly marked base of the Heraeon, the most ancient known temple of Greece.  Two of its columns were standing, tremendously massive Doric columns of a warm golden-brown color.

“The Hermes was found in this temple.  It stood between two of the columns, but I believe it was lying down when it was found.”

“It’s difficult to imagine him between such columns as these.”

“Yet you love Doric.”

“Yes, but I don’t know——­”

She looked at the columns, even put her hands on them as if trying to clasp them.

“It must have been right.  The Greeks knew.  Strength and grace, power and delicacy, that’s the bodily ideal.  So the Hermes stood actually here.”

She looked all round, she listened to the distant sheep-bells, she drew into her nostrils the green scents of the valley.

“And left his influence here for ever,” she added.  “His quiet influence.”

“Let me come to see him with you on the way home.”

And this time she said, “Yes.”

At a little after four they left the sweet valley, and, passing over the river ascended the hill to the Museum.  The door was open, and the guardian was sitting profoundly asleep in the vestibule of the Emperors.