thinking that too," he agreed. "Yes, Rose, the
thought went through my mind that a great love, such as mine for you,
might become almost a disease if one didn't watch it, hold it in."

"If it ever did become like that, do you know what would happen?"

"What, Rose?"

"Instead of rejoicing in it I should shrink from it."

"That's enough for me!"

He spoke gaily, confidently.

"Besides, I don't really believe I'm a man to love like that. I
only imagined I might for a moment, perhaps because it was twilight.
Imaginings come with the twilight."

"I could never bear to think, if a child came, that you didn't want it,
that you wished it out of the way."

"I never should. But I expect lots of young married people have queer
thoughts and feelings which they keep entirely to themselves--I blurted
mine out. You've got a dangerously sincere husband, Rose. The whole
matter lies in your own hands. If we ever have a child, love it, but
don't love it more than me."

"I should love it so differently! How could maternal love interfere with
the love of woman for man?"

"No, I don't suppose it could."

"Of course it never could."

"Then that's settled. Where shall we go to get out of the wind? It seems
to be rising."

After searching for a place of shelter in vain they eventually took
refuge in the Parthenon, under the shadow of the great western wall.
Perhaps in consequence of the wind the Acropolis was entirely deserted.
Only the guardians were hidden somewhere, behind columns, in the Porch
of the Museum, under the roof of their little dwelling at the foot of
the marble staircase which leads up to the Propylae. The huge wall of
the Parthenon kept off the wind from the sea, and as Rosamund and Dion
no longer saw the whirling dust clouds in the plain they had, for the
moment, almost an illusion of peace. They sat down on the guardian's
bench, just beneath some faint fragments of paintings which dated
from the time when the temple was made use of as a church by Greek
Christians; and immediately Rosamund went on talking about the child.
She spoke very quietly and earnestly, with the greatest simplicity, and
by degrees Dion came to see her as a mother, to feel that perhaps only
as a mother could she fulfil herself. The whole of her beauty would
never be revealed unless she were seen with a child of her own. Hitherto
he had thought of her chiefly in relation to himself, as the girl he
longed to win, then as the girl he most w