d purely. That day she had acknowledged that she had divined
it. Was that, perhaps, her real, her instinctive reason for marrying
him? But a man wants to be married for one thing only, because the
woman longs for him. And Dion was just an ordinary man with very strong
feelings.

"Let's take one more stroll before we go down," he said.

"Yes, to the maidens," she answered.

Her voice sounded relieved. She pushed her arm gently through his as
they moved away, and he felt all his body thrill. The mystery of love
was almost painful to him at that moment. He realized that a great love
might grow to have an affinity with a disease. "I must be careful. I
must take great care with this love of mine," he thought.

They went slowly over the slabs of marble and the gray rocks and passed
before the west front of the Parthenon. Dion felt slight resistance in
Rosamund's arm, and stopped. In the changing light the marble was full
of warm color, was in places mysterious and translucent almost as amber.
The immense power, the gigantic calm of the temple, a sort of still
breathing of Eternity upon Time, confronted a glory which was beginning
to change in the face of its changelessness. Soon the seas that held
their dream under the precipices of Sunion, and along the shores of
Aegina, where the tall shepherd boys in their fleeces of white lead home
the flocks in the twilight, would lose the wonder of their shining, and
the skies the rapture of their diffused light. In the quietly austere
Attic Plain, through the whispering groves of Academe, and along the
sacred way to Eleusis, a very delicate vagueness was beginning to
travel, like a wanderer setting forth to greet the coming of the night.
The ranges of hills and mountains, Hymettos and Pentelicus, Parnes
stretching to the far distance, Mount Corydallus, the peak of Salamis,
the exquisitely long mountains of Trigania--"the greyhounds of their
tribe," Rosamund loved to call them--were changing almost from moment
to moment, becoming a little softer, a little more tender, putting off
their distinct hues of the day for the colors of sleep and forgetting.
But the great Doric columns fronting them, the core of the heart of this
evening splendor, seemed not to defy, but to ignore, all the processes
of change. In its ruin the Parthenon seemed to say, "I have not
changed." And it was true. For the same soul which had confronted
Pericles confronted the two lovers who now stood at the foot of th