Dion
more full of peace even than before, but the peace was like something
almost tangible. It troubled him a little because he felt that the
Hermes, the child and Rosamund were of it, while he was not. They were
surrounded by the atmosphere necessary to them, and to which they were
mysteriously accustomed, while he was for the first time in such an
atmosphere. He felt separated from Rosamund by a gulf, perhaps very
narrow, but probably very deep.

Over Elis the twilight was falling, a green twilight sylvan and very
ethereal, tremulous in its delicate beauty. It stole through the green
doors, and down through the murmuring pine trees; it crossed the shallow
river, and made its way to the garden of ruins where once the Hermes had
stood between Doric Columns in the Heraeon. Through the colonnade of the
echoes it passed, and under the arch of the Athletes. Over the crude and
almost terrible strength of the ruins of the temple of Zeus it let its
green garments trail down, as it felt its way softly but surely to the
buried Stadium where once a boy of twelve had won the crown of wild
olive. The sheep-bells were ringing softly; the flocks were going
homeward from pasture. They were making their way up the valley now at
the base of the Kronos Hill, and the chime of their little bells mingled
with the wide whispering of the eternities among the summits of the pine
trees. Music of earth mingled with the music from a distance that knew
what the twilight knew.

The tall oblong of the Museum doorway on the hill framed a tiny picture
of Elis, bathed in green and tremulous light; a small section of
hillside, a fragment of empty, poetic country--Pan's world rather hinted
at than revealed--a suggestion of evening sky, remote, with infinity
lost in its distance. But there was no branch of wild olive flickering
across the picture.

Rosamund missed it as she looked from the room of the Hermes out to the
whispering evening and the quiet vale of Olympia. But she did not say
so to Dion. He thought of it too, as he looked at her, and he tried to
forget it. The picture framed by the doorway strangely grew dimmer and
yet more full of greenish light; the country of Pan was fading in light.
Presently details were entirely lost. Only an oblong of green, now
almost emerald, light showed from the chamber of the Hermes. And in that
chamber the two marble figures were gradually fading; the athletic, yet
miraculously graceful, messenger of the gods w