Perhaps more than ever then."

Was she gently evading an answer? They had reached the brow of the hill
and put their horses to a canter. The white dust settled over them. They
were like millers on horseback as they left the pine woods behind them.
But the touch of the dust was as the touch of nature upon their faces
and hands. They would not have been free of it as they rode towards
Athens, and came to the region of the vineyards, of the olive groves and
the cypresses. Now and then they passed ramshackle cafes made of boards
roughly nailed together anyhow, with a straggle of vine sprawling over
them, and the earth for a flooring. Tables were set out before them,
or in their shadows; a few bottles were visible within; on benches or
stools were grouped Greeks, old and young, busily talking, no doubt
about politics. Carts occasionally passed by the riders, sending out
dust to mingle with theirs. Turkeys gobbled at them, dogs barked in
front of one-storied houses. They saw peasants sitting sideways on
pattering donkeys, and now and then a man on horseback. By thin runlets
of water were women, chattering as they washed the clothes of their
households. Then again, the horses came into the bright and solitary
places where the cheerful loneliness of Greece held sway.

And so, at last they cantered into the outskirts of Athens when the
evening was falling. Another day had slipped from them. But both felt it
was a day which they had known very well, had realized with an unusual
fulness.

"It's been a day of days!" Dion said that evening.

And Rosamund nodded assent.

A child had been in that day, and, with a child's irresistible might,
had altered everything for them. Now Dion knew how Rosamund would be
with a child of her own, and Rosamund knew that Dion loved her more
deeply because he had seen her with a child. A little messenger had
come to them over the sun-dried plain of Marathon bearing a gift of
knowledge.

The next day they spent quietly. In the morning they visited the
National Museum, and in the late afternoon they returned to the
Acropolis.

In the Museum Rosamund was fascinated by the tombs. She, who always
seemed so remote from sorrow, who, to Dion, was the personification of
vitality and joyousness, was deeply moved by the record of death, by
the wonderfully restrained, and yet wonderfully frank, suggestion of the
grief of those who, centuries ago, had mingled their dust with the dust
of the relations, the