d. "I'm willing it to come
to us."

"What--the guardian of the cattle?"

"Guardian of the ----! It's a child!"

"How do you know?"

"I do know. Now you're not to frighten it."

"Of course not!"

He lay very still, his chin in his palms, watching the on-comers. How
had she known? And then, seeing suddenly through her eyes, he knew that
of course it was a child, that it could not be anything else. All its
movements now proclaimed to him its childishness, and he watched it with
a sort of fascination.

For he had never seen Rosamund with a child. That would be for him a new
experience with something, perhaps, prophetic in it.

Child and animal approached steadily, keeping an undeviating course, and
presently Dion saw a very small, but sturdy, Greek boy of perhaps ten
years old, wearing a collarless shirt, open at a deep brown throat,
leggings of some thin material, boots, and a funny little patched brown
coat and pointed hood made all in one, and hanging down with a fulness
almost of skirts about the small determined legs. The accompanying dog
was a very sympathetic, blunt-nosed, round-headed, curly-coated type,
whose whiteness, which positively invited the stroking hand, was broken
by two great black blotches set all askew on the back, and by a black
patch which ringed the left eye and completely smothered the cocked-up
left ear. The child carried a stick, which nearly reached to his
shoulder, and which ended in a long and narrow crook. The happy dog,
like its master, had no collar.

When these two reached the foot of the tumulus they stood still and
stared upwards. The dog uttered a short gruff bark, looked at the boy,
wagged a fat tail, barked again, abruptly depressed the fore part of its
body till its chin was against the ground between its paws, then jumped
into the air with a sudden demeanor of ludicrously young, and rather
uncouth, waggishness, which made Dion laugh.

The small boy replied with a smile almost as sturdy as his legs, which
he now permitted to convey him with decisive firmness through the wild
aloes and oleanders to the summit of the tumulus. He stood before Dion,
holding his crooked staff tightly in his right hand, but his large dark
eyes were directed upwards. Evidently his attention was not to be
given to Dion. His dog, on the contrary, after a stare and two muffled
attempts at a menacing bark, came to make friends with Dion in a way
devoid of all dignity, full of curves, wrigglings, ta