h so long before the Greeks! And here.
This courtly train looking on at the games. What do you say to the
women!'

'Why, they had got as far as flouncing their gowns and puffing their
sleeves! Their hair!'--'Dear me, they must have had a M. Raoul to ondule
and dress it.' 'Amazing!--was there ever anything so modern dug out of
the earth before?' 'No, nothing like it!' he said, holding the pictures
up again between the glass and his kindling eye. 'Ce sont vraiment des
Parisiennes!'

Over his shoulder the modern woman looked long at that strange company.
'It is nothing less than uncanny,' she said at last. 'It makes one
vaguely wretched.'

'What does?'

'To realize that so long ago the world had got so far. Why couldn't
people like these go further still? Why didn't their sons hold fast what
so great a race had won?'

'These things go in cycles.'

'Isn't that a phrase?'--the woman mused--'to cover our ignorance of how
things go--and why? Why should we be so content to go the old way to
destruction? If I were "the English" of this splendid specimen of a
Cretan, I would at least find a new way to perdition.'

'Perhaps we shall!'

They sat trying from the accounts of Lord Borrodaile's archaeological
friends to reconstruct something of that vanished world. It was a game
they had played at before, with Etruscan vases and ivories from
Ephesus--the man bringing to it his learning and his wit, the woman her
supple imagination and a passion of interest in the great romance of the
Pilgrimage of Man.

But to-day she bore a less light-hearted part--'It all came to an end!'
she repeated.

'Well, so shall we.'

'But--we--_you_ will leave your like behind to "hold fast to the clue,"
as you said a little while ago.'

'Till the turn of the wheel carries the English down. Then somewhere
else on our uneasy earth men will begin again----'

'----the fruitless round! But it's horrible--the waste of effort in the
world! It's worse than horrible. It's insane.' She looked up suddenly
into his face. 'You are wise. Tell me what you think the story of the
world means, with its successive clutches at civilization--all those
histories of slow and painful building--by Ganges and by Nile and in the
Isles of Greece.'

'It's a part of the universal rhythm that all things move to--Nature's
way,' he answered.

'Or was it because of some offence against one of her high laws that she
wiped the old experiments out? What if the meaning of h