“Rosamund!” he murmured, looking upward to his roof, which was her floor.
“Hush!” came down to him through the brushwood. “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.