“Look at the sea and the mountains of Trigania, those far-off mountains”—he pointed—“and the outpost of Hydra.”
She looked and said nothing. Then he read to her these lines of the young diplomat-poet:
“A crescent sail upon the sea,
So calm and fair and ripple free
You wonder storms can ever be;
A shore with deep indented bays,
And o’er the gleaming water-ways
A glimpse of Islands in the haze;
A face bronzed dark to red and gold,
With mountain eyes that seem to hold
The freshness of the world of old;
A shepherd’s crook, a coat of fleece,
A grazing flock;—the sense of peace,
The long sweet silence,—this is Greece!”
Rosamund gazed before her at Greece in the evening light.
“‘The freshness of the world of old,’” she repeated, and her voice had a thrill in it. “‘The sense of peace, the long sweet silence,—this is Greece.’ If there was music with the music of those words I should love to sing them.”
“And how you could sing them. Like no other.”
“At any rate my heart would be in them. ‘The freshness of the world of old—the sense of peace, the long sweet silence.’”
She was standing now near the edge of the sacred rock, looking out over the tawny plain flanked by gray Hymettos, and away to the sea. There were no voices rising from below. There was no sound of traffic on the white road which wound away down the slope to the hidden city. Her contralto voice lingered on the words; her lips drew them out softly, lengthening the sounds they loved.
“Freshness, that which belonged to the early world, long sweet silence, peace. Oh, Dion, if you know how something in me cares for freshness and for peace!”
Her glad energies were strangely stilled; yet there was a kind of force in her stillness, the force that is in all deep truths of whatever nature they may be. He felt that he was near to perhaps the most essential part of her, to that which was perhaps more truly her than even the radiant and buoyant humanity by means of which she drew people to her.