pon them, their love of physical exercise asserted itself. They began
to take long rides on horseback, carrying food in their saddle-bags. The
gently wild charm of Greece laid its spell upon them. They both loved
Athens, but now they began to love, too, escaping from Athens.

Directly they were out of the city they were in a freedom that appealed
to the gipsy in both. Dion's strong boyishness, which had never yet
been cast off, was met and countered by the best of good fellowship
in Rosamund. Though she could be very serious, and even what he called
"strange," she was never depressed or sad. Her good spirits were
unfailing and infectious. She reveled in a "jaunt" or a "day out," and
her physical strength kept fatigue far from her. She could ride for many
hours without losing her freshness and zest. Every little episode of the
wayside interested and entertained her. Everything comic made her laugh.
She showed an ardor almost like an intelligent child's in getting to
understand all she saw. Scenery, buildings, animal life, people, every
offering of Greece was eagerly accepted, examined and discussed by her.
She was the perfect comrade for the wilds. Their common joy in the wilds
drew her and Dion more closely together. Never before had Rosamund been
quite away from civilization, from the hitherto easily borne trammels of
modern complicated life. She "found herself" in the adventure. The pure
remoteness of Greece came to her like natal air. She breathed it in with
a sort of rapture. It was as Dion had said. She was not merely in, she
was of, Greece.

They rode one day to Eleusis; on another day to Tatoi, buried in
oak-woods on the slope of Parnes; on another through noisy and mongrel
Piraeus, and over undulating wrinkled ground, burnt up by the sun and
covered with low scrub and bushes of myrtle, to the shore of the gulf
opposite to Salamis; on yet another to Marathon, where they lunched on
the famous mound beneath which the bodies of the Athenians who fell in
the battle were buried. They took no companion with them. Dion carried
a revolver in his hip pocket, but never had reason to show or to use
it. When they dismounted they tethered the horses to a bush or tree, or
sometimes hobbled their forelegs, and turned them loose for a while.

Such days were pure joy to them both. In them they went back to the
early world. They did not make the hard and self-conscious imaginative
effort of the prig to hurl themselves into an his