rtunately!"

"Don't be ridiculous. Look here, Dion, you go off for a minute, and
leave him with me. I think you get on his nerves."

"Well, I'm----!"

But he went. He left the two figures together, and presently saw them
both from a distance against the vastness of the gold. Bushes and
shrubs, and two or three giant pine trees, between the summit of Drouva
and the plain, showed black, and the figures of woman and child were
almost ebon. Dion watched them. He could not see any features. The
two were now like carved things which could move, and only by their
movements could they tell him anything. The gun over the boy's shoulder
was like a long finger pointing to the west where a redness was creeping
among the gold. The great moon climbed above Drouva. Bluish-gray smoke
came from the camp-fire at a little distance. It ascended without
wavering straight up in the windless evening. Far down in the hidden
valley, behind Dion and below the small village, shadows were stealing
through quiet Elis, shadows were coming to shroud the secret that was
held in the shrine of Olympia. A slight sound of bells stole up on the
stillness from somewhere below, somewhere not far from those two ebon
figures. And this sound, suggestive of moving animals coming from
pasture to protected places for the night, put a heart in the breast of
this pastoral. Thin was the sound and delicate, fit music for Greece
in the fragile evening. As Dion listened to it, he looked at that black
finger below him pointing to the redness in the west. Then he remembered
it was a gun, and, for an instant, looking at the red, he thought of the
color of fresh blood.

At this moment the tall figure, Rosamund, took hold of the gun, and the
two figures moved away slowly down the winding track in the hill, and
were hidden at a turning of the path.

Almost directly a third shot rang out. The young dweller in the
wilderness was allowing Rosamund to give a taste of her skill with the
gun.

CHAPTER VI

Rosamund came back to the camp that evening with Dirmikis,--so the boy
of the wilderness was called,--and five quail, three of them to her gun.
She was radiant, and indeed had an air almost of triumph. Her eyes
were sparkling, her cheeks were glowing; she looked like a beautiful
schoolgirl as she walked in over the plateau with the sunset flushing
scarlet behind her, and the big moon coming to meet her. Dirmikis, at
her side, carried the quail upside down in his brown