ay on the marble at their feet.

"It's going to be fine," Dion said. "Let's be active for once. The wind
has made me restless. Suppose we get a couple of horses and ride out to
the convent of Daphni!"

She got up at once.

"Yes. I've brought my habit, and haven't had it on once."

As they left the Great Temple she looked up at the mighty columns and
said;

"Doric! If we have a boy let us bring him up to be Doric."

"Yes, Rosamund," he said quietly and strongly. "We will."

Afterward he believed that it was then, and only then, that he caught
something of her deep longing to have a child. He began to see how a
man's child might influence him and affect his life, might even send him
upwards by innocently looking up to him. It would be bad, very bad, to
fail as a husband, but, by Jove! it would be one of the great tragedies
to fail as a father. Mentally Dion measured the respective heights
of himself and a very small boy; saw the boy's trusting eyes looking,
almost peering, up at him. Such eyes could change, could become very
attentive. "It wouldn't do to be adversely criticized by your boy," he
thought. And one day he said to Rosamund, but in almost a casual way:

"If we ever do have a boy, Rose, and want him to be Doric, we shall have
to start in by being Doric ourselves, eh?"

"Yes," she answered, "I've thought that, too."

"D'you think I could ever learn to be that?"

"I know you could. You are on the way already, I think. I noticed
in London that you were never influenced by all the affectations and
absurdities, or worse, that seem to have taken hold of so many people
lately."

"There has been a wave of something rather beastly passing over London
certainly. But I almost wonder you knew it."

"Why?"

"Can your eyes see anything that isn't good?"

"Yes. But I don't want ever to look long on what I hate."

"You aren't afraid you might cease from hating it!"

"Oh, no. But I believe in feeding always on wholesome food."

"Modern London doesn't."

"I shall never be modern, I'm afraid," she said, half laughing, and with
a soft touch of apparently genuine deprecation.

"Be eternal, that's better!" he almost whispered. "Listen to that
nightingale. It's singing a song of all the ages. You have a message
like that for me."

They had strolled out after dinner in the warm May night, and had walked
a little way up the steep flank of Lycabettos till they reached a wooden
bench near which were a few small