ll boy would be going up to Oxford, and
would, perhaps, be turning out alarmingly learned.

Rosamund the mother of a young man!

But Dion shied away from that. He could imagine her as the mother of a
child, beautiful mother of a child almost as beautiful; but he could not
conceive of her as the "mater" of a person with a mustache.

Their youth, their youth--must it go?

Again she moved slightly above him. The twigs crackled, making an almost
irritable music of dryness. Again the lowing of cattle came over that
old battlefield from the edge of the sea. And just then, at that very
moment, Dion knew that his great love could not stand still, that, like
all great things, it must progress. And the cry, that intense human cry,
"Whither?" echoed in the deep places of his soul. Whither were he and
his great love going? To what end were they journeying? For a moment
sadness invaded him, the sadness of one who thinks and is very ignorant.
Why cannot a man think deeply without thinking of an end? "All things
come to an end!" That cruel saying went through his mind like footsteps
echoing on iron, and a sense of fear encompassed him. There is something
terrible in a great love, set in the little life of a man like a vast
light in a tiny attic.

Did Rosamund ever have such thoughts? Dion longed to ask her. Was she
sleeping perhaps now? She was lying very still. If they ever had a child
its coming would mark a great step onwards along the road, the closing
of a very beautiful chapter in their book of life. It would be over,
their loneliness in love, man and woman in solitude. Even the sexual tie
would be changed. All the world would be changed.

He lay flat on the ground, stretched out, his elbows firmly planted, his
chin in his palms, his face set towards the plain and the sea.

What he looked at seemed gently to chide him. There were such a
brightness and simplicity and such a delicious freedom from all
complication in this Grecian landscape edged by the wide frankness of
the sea that he felt reassured. Edging the mound there were wild aloes
and the wild oleander. A river intersected the plain which in many
places was tawny yellow. Along the river bank grew tall reeds, sedges
and rushes. Beyond the plain, and beyond the blue waters, rose the
Island of Euboea, and ranges of mountains, those mountains of Greece
which are so characteristic in their unpretentious bareness, which
neither overwhelm nor entice, but which are unfaili