toric past. They just
let the land and its memories take them. As, sitting on the warm ground
among the wild myrtle bushes, they looked across the emerald green
unruffled waters to Salamis, that very long isle with its calm gray and
orange hills and its indented shores, perhaps for a moment they talked
of the Queen of Halicarnassus, and of the deception of Xerxes watching
from his throne on Mount Aegaleos. But the waters were now so solitary,
the peace about them was so profound, that the memory of battles soon
faded away in the sunshine. Terror and death had been here once. A queen
had destroyed her own people in that jeweled sea, a king had fled from
those delicate mountains. But now sea and land were for lovers. A fly
with shining wings journeyed among the leaves of the myrtles, a beetle
crept over the hot sandy ground leaving a minute pattern behind it;
and Rosamund and Dion forgot all about Artemisia, as they brooded,
wide-eyed, over the activities of the dwellers in the waste. At such
moments they realized the magic of life, as they had never realized it
in the turmoil of London. The insect with its wings that caught the
sun, the intent and preoccupied little traveler whose course could be
deflected by a twig, revealed the wonder that is lost and forgotten in
the crowded highways of men.

It was when they were at Marathon that Rosamund told Dion she loved
Greece partly because of its emptiness. The country was not only rather
bare of vegetation, despite its groves of glorious old olives, its woods
of oaks round Tatoi, its delicious curly forests of yellow-green pines,
which looked, Rosamund declared, as if they had just had their dainty
heads perfectly dressed by an accomplished coiffeur, it was also almost
strangely bare of men.

"Where are the Greeks?" Rosamund had often asked during their first few
rides, as they cantered on and on, scarcely ever meeting a human being.

"In the towns to be sure!" Dion had answered.

"And where are the towns?"

"Ah! That's more than I can tell you!" he had said, laughing.

To one hitherto accustomed to England, the emptiness of the country,
even quite near to Athens, was at first surprising. Soon it became
enchanting.

"This is a country I can thoroughly trust," Rosamund declared at
Marathon.

Dion had just finished hobbling the two horses, and now lifted himself
up. His brown face was flushed from bending. His thin riding-clothes
were white with dust, which he beat of