was pain somewhere at the back
of its ecstasy. He looked down at the soft lights of little Athens, and
suddenly knew that much sorrow lay in the shadows of all the cities of
the earth. There was surely a great reserve in the girl who had given
herself to him. That was natural, perhaps. But to-night he felt that she
was aware of this reserve and was consciously guarding it like a sacred
thing. Presently they got up and went slowly down the hill.

"Suppose you had never married," he said, as they drew near to the city,
"how would you have lived, do you think?"

"Perhaps for my singing, at first," she answered.

"And afterwards?"

"Afterwards? Very quietly, I think."

"You won't tell me."

"I don't know for certain, and what does it matter? I have married. If I
hadn't, perhaps I should have been very selfish and thought myself very
self-sacrificing."

"I wonder in what way selfish."

"There are so many ways. I heard a sermon once on a foggy night in
London."

"Ah--that evening I called on you."

"I didn't say so. It made me understand egoism better than I had
understood it before. Perhaps it's the unpardonable sin."

"Then it could never be your sin."

"Hush!"

They no longer heard the nightingale. The voices and the houses of
Athens were about them.

As the days slipped by, Dion felt that Rosamund and he grew closer
together. He knew, though he could not perhaps have said how, that he
would be the only man in her intimate life. Even if he died she would
never--he felt sure of this--yield herself to another man. The tie
between them was to her a bond for eternity. Her body would never be
given twice. That he knew. But sometimes he asked himself whether her
whole soul would ever be given even once. The insatiable greed of a
great and exclusive love was alive within him, needing always something
more than it had. At first, after their marriage, he had not been aware
of this greed, had not realized that nothing great is content to
remain just as it is at a given moment. His love had to progress, and
gradually, in Greece, he became conscious of this fact.

His inner certainty, quite unshakable, that Rosamund would never belong
to another man in the physical sense made jealousy of an ordinary kind
impossible to him. The lowness, the hideous vulgarity of the jealousy
which tortures the writhing flesh would never be his. Yet he wanted more
than he had sometimes, stretched out arms to something which did not