They stayed on for a week at Drouva.  Each evening Rosamund shot with the boy of the wilderness, and they ate any birds that fell, at their evening meal.  The nights were given to the stars till sleep came.  And all the days were dedicated to Hermes, the child, and the sweet green valley which served as a casket for the perfect jewel which the earth had given up after centuries of possession.  Since Rosamund had told the dear secret of her heart, what she was trying to learn, Dion was able to see her go in alone to the inner chamber without any secret jealousy or any impatience.  The given confidence had done its blessed work swiftly and surely; the spring behind the action, revealed so simply, was respected, was almost loved by Dion.  Often he sat among the ruins alone, smoking his pipe; or he wandered away after the call of the sheep-bells, passing between the ruined walls overgrown with brambles and grasses and mosses, shaded here and there by a solitary tree, and under the low arch of the Athletes’ entrance into the great green space where the contests had been held.  Here he found the wearers of music feeding peacefully, attended by a dreaming boy.  With the Two in the Garden of Eden there were happy animals.  The sheep-bells ringing tranquilly in his ears made Eden more real to him, and also more like something in one of the happy dreams of a man.

A world that had risen to great heights of emotion in this valley was dead, but that did not sadden him.  He found it impossible to be sad in Olympia, because his own life was so happy.

A delicious egoism, the birthright of his youth, had him safe in its grasp.  But sometimes, when Rosamund was alone in the room of the Hermes, learning her lesson, and he was among the ruins, or walking above the buried Stadium where the flocks were at pasture, he recalled the great contests of the Athletes of ancient Greece; the foot-races which were the original competitions at the games, the races in armor, the long jumps, the wrestling matches, the discus and dart-throwing, the boxing and the brutal pankration.  And he remembered that at the Olympic Games there were races for boys, for quite young boys.  A boy had won at Olympia who was only twelve years old.  When Dion recalled that fact one golden afternoon, it seemed to him that perhaps his lesson was to be learnt among the feeding sheep in the valley, rather even than on the hill where the Hermes dwelt.  The father surely shapes one part of the sacred clay of youth, while on the other part, with a greater softness, a perhaps subtler care, the mother works.

He would try to make his boy sturdy and strong and courageous, swift to the race of life; he would train his boy to be a victor, to be a boy champion among other boys.  Her son must not fail to win the crown of wild olive.  And when he was a man——!  But at that point in his dreams of the future Dion always pulled up.  He could not see Rosamund as the mother of a man, could not see Rosamund old.