of blue beyond them. In these moments,
half-unconsciously, they were telling memory to lay in its provision
for the future. Perhaps they would never come back; never again would
Rosamund rest in her brushwood chamber, never again would Dion hear the
dry music above him, and feel the growth of his love, the urgency of
its progress just as he had felt them that day. They might be intensely
happy, but exactly the same happiness would probably not be theirs again
through all the years that were coming. The little boy and his dog had
doubtless gone out of their lives for ever. Their good-by to Marathon
might well be final. They looked back again and again, till the blue
of the sea was lost to them. Then they rode on, faster. The horses
knew they were going homeward, and showed a new liveliness, sharing the
friskiness of the little graceful trees about them. Now and then the
riders saw some dusty peasants--brown and sun-dried men wearing the
fustanella, and shoes with turned-up toes ornamented with big black
tassels; women with dingy handkerchiefs tied over their heads;
children who looked almost like the spawn of the sun in their healthy,
bright-eyed brownness. And these people had cheerful faces. Their rustic
lot seemed enviable. Who would not shed his sorrows under these pine
trees, in the country where the solitudes radiated happiness, and even
bareness was like music? Here was none of the heavy and exotic passion,
none of the lustrous and almost morbid romance of the true and distant
East, drowsy with voluptuous memories. That setting was not for
Rosamund. Here were a lightness, a purity and sweetness of Arcadia, and
people who looked both intelligent and simple.

At a turn of the road they met some Vlachs--rascally wanderers, lean as
greyhounds, chicken-stealers and robbers in the night, yet with a sort
of consecration of careless cheerfulness upon them. They called out.
In their cries there was the sound of a lively malice. Their brown feet
stirred up the dust and set it dancing in the sunshine, a symbol surely
of their wayward, unfettered spirits. A little way off, on a slope among
the trees, their dark tents could be partially seen.

"Lucky beggars!" murmured Dion, as he threw them a few small coins,
while Rosamund smiled at them and waved her hand in answer to their
greetings. "I believe it's the ideal life to dwell in the tents."

"It seems so to-day."

"Won't it to-morrow? Won't it when we are in London?"

"