of the groves which sheltered the course of the Kephisos contrasted strongly with the flying pallors and seemed at enmity with them.  The sky was milky white and gray, broken up in places by clouds of fantastic shapes, along the ruffled edges of which ran thin gleams of sunshine like things half timorous and ashamed.  Upon the flat shores near Phaleron the purple seas broke in spray, and the salty drops were caught up by the wind and mingled with the hurrying grains of dust.  It was not exactly a sad day, but there was an uneasiness abroad.  The delicate calm of Greece was disturbed.  Nevertheless Dion was feeling gay and light-hearted, inclined to enjoy everything the world about him offered to him.  Even the restlessness beneath and around them accorded with his springing spirits.  The whirling spirals of dust suggested to him the gaiety of a dance.  The voice of the wind was a joyous music in his ears.

“How dare you?” he repeated with a happy pretense of indignation.

“Because I think you were almost morbid yesterday.”

“I?  When?”

“When we spoke of the possibility of our some day having a child.”

“I had a moment of 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