And he turned to her his brown face, bright this morning with good spirits, his dark eyes sparkling with hopefulness and energy.
It was a pale morning, such as often comes to Athens even at the edge of the summer. They were standing on the little terrace near to the Acropolis Museum, looking down over the city and to helmet-shaped Lycabettos. The wind, too fond of the Attic Plain, was blowing, not wildly, but with sufficient force to send the dust whirling in light clouds over the pale houses and the little Byzantine churches. Long and narrow rivulets of dust marked the positions of the few roads which stretched out along the plain. The darkness 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.”