Achilles brushed the new hat softly, turning it on his supple wrist with gentle pride.  He took out the music-roll from the drawer and unrolled it, holding it in light fingers.  He would carry it back to Betty Harris, and he would stay for a while and talk with her of his beloved Athens.  Outside the sun gleamed.  The breeze came fresh from the lake.  As he made his way up the long drive of the Lake Shore, the water dimpled in the June sun, and little waves lapped the great stones, touching the ear with quiet sound.  It was a clear, fresh day, with the hint of coming summer in the air.  To the left, stone castles lifted themselves sombrely in the soft day.  Grim or flaunting, they faced the lake—­castles from Germany, castles from France and castles from Spain.  Achilles eyed them with a little smile as his swift, thin feet traversed the long stones.  There were turrets and towers and battlements frowning upon the peaceful, workaday lake.  Minarets and flowers in stone, and heavy marble blocks that gripped the earth.  Suddenly Achilles’s foot slackened its swift pace.  His eye dropped to the silver tag on the music-roll in his hand, and lifted itself again to a gleaming red-brown house at the left.  It rose with a kind of lightness from the earth, standing poised upon the shore of the lake, like some alert, swift creature caught in flight, brought to bay by the rush of waters.  Achilles looked at it with gentle eyes, a swift pleasure lighting his glance.  It was a beautiful structure.  Its red-brown front and pointed, lifting roof had hardly a Greek line or hint; but the spirit that built the Parthenon was in it—­facing the rippling lake.  He moved softly across the smooth roadway and leaned against the parapet of stone that guarded the water, studying the line and colour of the house that faced him.

The man who planned it had loved it, and as it rose there in the light it was perfect in every detail as it had been conceived—­with one little exception.  On either side the doorway crouched massive grey-pink lions wrought in stone, the heavy outspread paws and firm-set haunches resting at royal ease.  In the original plan these lions had not appeared.  But in their place had been two steers—­wide-flanked and short-horned, with lifted heads and nostrils snuffling free—­something crude, brusque, perhaps, but full of power and quick onslaught.  The house that rose behind them had been born of the same thought.  Its pointed gable and its facades, its lifted front, had the same look of challenge; the light, firm-planted hoofs, the springing head, were all there—­in the soft, red stone running to brown in the flanks.

The stock-yard owner and his wife had liked the design—­with no suspicion of the symbol undergirding it.  The man had liked it all—­steers and red-brown stone and all—­but the wife had objected.  She had travelled far, and she had seen, on a certain building in Rome, two lions guarding a ducal entrance.