as if to
escape them, and was glad to be diverted by one or two carryalls and
char-a-bancs filled with gayly dressed pleasure parties--evidently
visitors to Hymettus--which passed him on the road. Here were the first
signs of change. He recalled the train of pack-mules of the old days,
the file of pole-and-basket carrying Chinese, the squaw with the papoose
strapped to her shoulder, or the wandering and foot-sore prospector, who
were the only wayfarers he used to meet. He contrasted their halts and
friendly greetings with the insolent curiosity or undisguised contempt
of the carriage folk, and smiled as he thought of the warning of the
blacksmith. But this did not long divert him; he found himself again
returning to his previous thought. Indeed, the face of a young girl in
one of the carriages had quite startled him with its resemblance to an
old memory of his lost love as he saw her,--her frail, pale elegance
encompassed in laces as she leaned back in her drive through Fifth
Avenue, with eyes that lit up and became transfigured only as he
passed. He tried to think of his useless quest in search of her last
resting-place abroad; how he had been baffled by the opposition of her
surviving relations, already incensed by the thought that her decline
had been the effect of her hopeless passion. He tried to recall the few
frigid lines that reconveyed to him the last letter he had sent her,
with the announcement of her death and the hope that "his persecutions"
would now cease. A wild idea had sometimes come to him out of the very
insufficiency of his knowledge of this climax, but he had always put
it aside as a precursor of that madness which might end his ceaseless
thought. And now it was returning to him, here, thousands of miles away
from where she was peacefully sleeping, and even filling him with the
vigor of youthful hope.

The brief mountain twilight was giving way now to the radiance of the
rising moon. He endeavored to fix his thoughts upon his partners who
were to meet him at Hymettus after these long years of separation.

Hymettus! He recalled now the odd coincidence that he had mischievously
used as a gag to his questioning fellow traveler; but now he had really
come from a villa near Athens to find his old house thus classically
rechristened after it, and thought of it with a gravity he had not felt
before. He wondered who had named it. There was no suggestion of the
soft, sensuous elegance of the land he had l