emember that day we went into the
Russian church in Athens, Dion?"

"Yes."

"There was the same sort of sound in those Russian voices when they were
singing very softly. It could never come from a Pagan world."

"You find belief behind it?"

"No--knowledge."

He did not ask her to define exactly what she meant. It was not an hour
for definition, but for dreaming, and he was happy again; the cloud of
the morning had passed away; he had his love with untroubled eyes among
the ruins. Thinking of that, realizing that with a sudden intensity, he
took her warm hand from the warm stone on which it was resting, and held
it closely in his.

"Oh, Rosamund, shall I ever have another hour as happy as this?" he
said.

A little way off, in that long meadow in the breast of which the Stadium
lay hidden, the sheep-bells sounded almost pathetically; a flock was
there happily at pasture.

"It's as if all the green doors were closing upon us to keep us in Elis
forever, isn't it?" she said. "But----"

She looked at him with a sort of smiling reproach:

"You wouldn't be allowed to stay."

"Why not?"

"You committed a crime this morning. Nature's taken possession of
Olympia, and you struck at her."

"D'you know why I did that?"

"No."

But she did not again ask him why, and he never told her. When the heat
had lessened a little, they wandered once more through that garden of
ruins, where scarcely a column is standing, where convulsions of nature
have helped the hands of man to overthrow man's work, and where nature
has healed every wound, and made every scar tender and beautiful. And
presently Rosamund said:

"I want to know exactly where Hermes was found."

"Come, and I'll show you."

He led her on among the wild flowers and the grasses, till they came to
the clearly marked base of the Heraeon, the most ancient known temple
of Greece. Two of its columns were standing, tremendously massive Doric
columns of a warm golden-brown color.

"The Hermes was found in this temple. It stood between two of the
columns, but I believe it was lying down when it was found."

"It's difficult to imagine him between such columns as these."

"Yet you love Doric."

"Yes, but I don't know----"

She looked at the columns, even put her hands on them as if trying to
clasp them.

"It must have been right. The Greeks knew. Strength and grace, power and
delicacy, that's the bodily ideal. So the Hermes stood actually here."

She looke