PART II--EVE

I

After spending nearly two years in exile, Julian was once more upon his way to Herakleion.

On deck, brooding upon a great coil of rope, his head bare to the winds, absorbed and concentrated, he disregarded all his surroundings in favour of the ever equi-distant horizon. He seemed to be entranced by its promise. He seemed, moreover, to form part of the ship on which he travelled; part of it, crouching as he did always at the prow, as a figurehead forms part; part of the adventure, the winged gallantry, the eager onward spirit indissoluble from the voyage of a ship in the midst of waters from which no land is visible. The loneliness--for there is no loneliness to equal the loneliness of the sea--the strife of the wind, the generosity of the expanse, the pure cleanliness of the nights and days, met and matched his mood. At moments, feeling himself unconquerable, he tasted the full, rare, glory of youth and anticipation. He did not know which he preferred: the days full of sunlight on the wide blue sea, or the nights when the breeze was fresher against his face, and the road more mysterious, under a young moon that lit the ridges of the waves and travelled slowly past, overhead, across the long black lines of cordage and rigging. He knew only that he was happy as he had never been happy in his life.

His fellow-passengers had watched him when he joined the ship at Brindisi, and a murmur had run amongst them, 'Julian Davenant--son of those rich Davenants of Herakleion, you know--great wine-growers--they own a whole archipelago'; some one had disseminated the information even as Julian came up the gangway, in faded old gray flannels, hatless, in a rage with his porter, who appeared to be terrified out of all proportion. Then, suddenly, he had lost all interest in his luggage, tossed some money to the porter, and, walking for'ard, had thrown himself down on the heap of ropes and stared straight in front of him to sea, straining his eyes forward to where Greece might lie.

From here he had scarcely stirred. The people who watched him, benevolent and amused, thought him very young. They saw that he relieved the intensity of his vigil with absurd and childlike games that he played by himself, hiding and springing out at the sailors, and laughing immoderately when he had succeeded in startling them--he fraternised with the sailors, though with no one else--or when he saw somebody trip over a ring in the deck. His humour, like his body, seemed to be built on large and simple lines.... In the mornings he ran round and round the decks in rubber-soled shoes. Then again he flung himself down and continued with unseeing eyes to stare at the curve of the horizon.

Not wholly by design, he had remained absent from Herakleion for nearly two years. The standards and systems of life on that remote and beautiful seaboard had not faded for him, this time, with their usual astonishing rapidity; he had rather laid them aside carefully and deliberately, classified against the hour when he should take them from their wrappings; he postponed the consideration of the mission which had presented itself to him, and crushed down the recollection of what had been, perhaps, the most intoxicating of all moments--more intoxicating even, because more unexpected, than the insidious flattery of Eve--the moment when Paul had said to him beneath the fragmentary frescoes of the life of Saint Benedict, in a surprised voice, forced into admission,--

'You have the quality of leadership. You have it. You have the secret. The people will fawn to the hand that chastens.'

Paul, his tutor and preceptor, from whom he had first learnt, so imperceptibly that he scarcely recognised the teaching as a lesson, of the Islands and their problems both human and political, Paul had spoken these words to him, renouncing the authority of the master, stepping aside to admit the accession of the pupil. From the position of a regent, he had abased himself to that of a Prime Minister. Julian had accepted the acknowledgement with a momentary dizziness. In later moments of doubt, the words had flamed for him, bright with reassurance. And then he had banished them with the rest. That world of romance had been replaced by the world of healthy and prosaic things. The letters he periodically received from Eve irritated him because of their reminder of an existence he preferred to regard, for the moment, as in abeyance.

'And so you are gone: _veni, vidi, vici_. You were well started on your career of devastation! You hadn't done badly, all things considered. Herakleion has heaved an "Ouf!" of relief. You, unimpressionable? _Allons donc!_ You, apathetic? You, placid, unemotional, unawakened? _Tu te payes ma tête!_

'Ah, the limitless ambition I have for you!

'I want you to rule, conquer, shatter, demolish.

'Haul down the simpering gods, the pampered gods, and put yourself in their place. It is in your power.

'Why not? You have _le feu sacré_. Stagnation is death, death. Burn their temples with fire, and trample their altars to dust.'

This letter, scrawled in pencil on a sheet of torn foolscap, followed him to England immediately after his departure. Then a silence of six months. Then he read, written on spacious yellow writing-paper, with the monogram E.D. embossed in a triangle of mother-of-pearl, vivid and extravagant as Eve herself--

They are trying to catch me, Julian! I come quite near, quite near, and they hold very quiet their hand with the crumbs in it. I see the other hand stealing round to close upon me--then there's a flutter--_un battement d'ailes--l'oiseau s'est de nouveau dérobé!_ They remain gazing after me, with their mouths wide open. They look so silly. And they haven't robbed me of one plume--not a single plume.

'Julian! Why this mania for capture? this wanting to take from me my most treasured possession--liberty? When I want to give, I'll give freely--largesse with both hands, showers of gold and flowers and precious stones--(don't say I'm not conceited!) but I'll never give my liberty, and I'll never allow it to be forced away from me. I should feel a traitor. I couldn't walk through a forest and hear the wind in the trees. I couldn't listen to music. (Ah, Julian! This afternoon I steeped myself in music; Grieg, elf-like, mischievous, imaginative, romantic, so Latin sometimes in spite of his Northern blood. You would love Grieg, Julian. In the fairyland of music, Grieg plays gnome to Debussy's magician.... Then "Khovantchina," of all music the most sublime, the most perverse, the most _bariolé_, the most abandoned, and the most desolate.) I could have no comradeship with a free and inspired company. I should have betrayed their secrets, bartered away their mysteries....'

He had wondered then whether she were happy. He had visualised her, turbulent, defiant; courting danger and then childishly frightened when danger overtook her; deliciously forthcoming, inventive, enthusiastic, but always at heart withdrawn; she expressed herself truly when she said that the bird fluttered away from the hand that would have closed over it. He knew that she lived constantly, from choice, in a storm of trouble and excitement. Yet he read between the lines of her letters a certain dissatisfaction, a straining after something as yet unattained. He knew that her heart was not in what she described as 'my little round of complacent amourettes.'

The phrase had awoken him with a smile of amusement to the fact that she was no longer a child. He felt some curiosity to see her again under the altered and advanced conditions of her life, yet, lazy and diffident, he shrank from the storm of adventure and responsibility which he knew would at once assail him. The indolence he felt sprang largely from the certainty that he could, at any moment of his choice, stretch out his hand to gather up again the threads that he had relinquished. He had surveyed Herakleion, that other world, from the distance and security of England. He had the conviction that it awaited him, and this conviction bore with it a strangely proprietary sense in which Eve was included. He had listened with amusement and tolerance to the accounts of her exploits, his sleepy eyes bent upon his informant with a quiet patience, as a man who listens to a familiar recital. He had dwelt very often upon the possibility of his return to Herakleion, but, without a full or even a partial knowledge of his motives, postponed it. Yet all the while his life was a service, a dedication.

Then the letters which he received began to mention the forthcoming elections; a faint stir of excitement pervaded his correspondence; Eve, detesting politics, made no reference, but his father's rare notes betrayed an impatient and irritable anxiety; the indications grew, culminating in a darkly allusive letter which, although anonymous, he took to be from Grbits, and finally in a document which was a triumph of illiterate dignity, signed by Kato, Tsigaridis, Zapantiotis, and a double column of names that broke like a flight of exotic birds into the mellow enclosure of the Cathedral garden where it found him.

Conscious of his ripened and protracted strength, he took ship for Greece.

He had sent no word to announce his coming. A sardonic smile lifted one corner of his mouth as he foresaw the satisfaction of taking Eve by surprise. A standing joke between them (discovered and created, of course, by her, the inventive) was the invariable unexpectedness of his arrivals. He would find her altered, grown. An unreasoning fury possessed him, a jealous rage, not directed against any human being, but against Time itself, that it should lay hands upon Eve, his Eve, during his absence; taking, as it were, advantage while his back was turned. And though he had often professed to himself a lazy indifference to her devotion to him, Julian, he found intolerable the thought that that devotion might have been transferred elsewhere. He rose and strode thunderously down the deck, and one of his fellow-travellers, watching, whistled to himself and thought,--

'That boy has an ugly temper.'

Then the voyage became a dream to Julian; tiny islands, quite rosy in the sunlight, stained the sea here and there only a few miles distant, and along the green sea the ship drew a white, lacy wake, broad and straight, that ever closed behind her like an obliterated path, leaving the way of retreat trackless and unavailable. One day he realised that the long, mountainous line which he had taken for a cloud-bank, was in point of fact the coast. That evening, a sailor told him, they were due to make Herakleion. He grew resentful of the apathy of passengers and crew. The coast-line became more and more distinct. Presently they were passing Aphros, and only eight miles lay between the ship and the shore. The foam that gave it its name was breaking upon the rocks of the island....

After that a gap occurred in his memory, and the scene slipped suddenly to the big frescoed drawing-room of his father's house in the _platia_, where the peace and anticipation of his voyage were replaced by the gaiety of voices, the blatancy of lights, and the strident energy of three violins and a piano. He had walked up from the pier after the innumerable delays of landing; it was then eleven o'clock at night, and as he crossed the _platia_ and heard the music coming from the lighted and open windows of his father's house, he paused in the shadows, aware of the life that had gone on for over a year without him.

'And why is that surprising? I'm an astounding egotist,' he muttered.

He was still in his habitual gray flannels, but he would not go to his room to change. He was standing in the doorway of the drawing-room on the first floor, smiling gently at finding himself still unnoticed, and looking for Eve. She was sitting at the far end of the room between two men, and behind her the painted monkeys grimaced on the wall, swinging by hands and tails from the branches of the unconvincing trees. He saw her as seated in the midst of that ethereal and romantic landscape.

Skirting the walls, he made his way round to her, and in the angle he paused, and observed her. She was unconscious of his presence. Young Christopoulos bent towards her, and she was smiling into his eyes.... In eighteen months she had perfected her art.

Julian drew nearer, critically, possessively, and sarcastically observing her still, swift to grasp the essential difference. She, who had been a child when he had left her, was now a woman. The strangeness of her face had come to its own in the fullness of years, and the provocative mystery of her person, that withheld even more than it betrayed, now justified itself likewise. There seemed to be a reason for the red lips and ironical eyes that had been so incongruous, so almost offensive, in the face of the child. An immense fan of orange feathers drooped from her hand. Her hair waved turbulently round her brows, and seemed to cast a shadow over her eyes.

He stood suddenly before her.

For an instant she gazed up at him, her lips parted, her breath arrested. He laughed easily, pleased to have bettered her at her own game of melodrama. He saw that she was really at a loss, clutching at her wits, at her recollection of him, trying desperately to fling a bridge across the gulf of those momentous months. She floundered helplessly in the abrupt renewal of their relations. Seeing this, he felt an arrogant exhilaration at the discomfiture which he had produced. She had awoken in him, without a word spoken, the tyrannical spirit of conquest which she induced in all men.

Then she was saved by the intervention of the room; first by Christopoulos shaking Julian's hand, then by dancers crowding round with exclamations of welcome and surprise. Mr Davenant himself was brought, and Julian stood confused and smiling, but almost silent, among the volubility of the guests. He was providing a sensation for lives greedy of sensation. He heard Madame Lafarge, smiling benevolently at him behind her lorgnon, say to Don Rodrigo Valdez,--

'_C'est un original que ce garçon._'

They were all there, futile and vociferous. The few new-comers were left painfully out in the cold. They were all there: the fat Danish Excellency, her yellow hair fuzzing round her pink face; Condesa Valdez, painted like a courtesan; Armand, languid, with his magnolia-like complexion; Madame Delahaye, enterprising and equivocal; Julie Lafarge, thin and brown, timidly smiling; Panaïoannou in his sky-blue uniform; the four sisters Christopoulos, well to the front. These, and all the others. He felt that, at whatever moment during the last eighteen months he had timed his return, he would have found them just the same, complete, none missing, the same words upon their lips. He accepted them now, since he had surrendered to Herakleion, but as for their reality as human beings, with the possible exceptions of Grbits the giant, crashing his way to Julian through people like an elephant pushing through a forest, and of the Persian Minister, hovering on the outskirts of the group with the gentle smile still playing round his mouth, they might as well have been cut out of cardboard. Eve had gone; he could see her nowhere. Alexander, presumably, had gone with her.

Captured at last by the Danish Excellency, Julian had a stream of gossip poured into his ears. He had been in exile for so long, he must be thirsty for news. A new English Minister had arrived, but he was said to be unsociable. He had been expected at the races on the previous Sunday, but had failed to put in an appearance. Armand had had an affair with Madame Delahaye. At a dinner-party last week, Rafaele, the Councillor of the Italian Legation, had not been given his proper place. The Russian Minister, who was the doyen of the _corps diplomatique_, had promised to look into the matter with the Chef du Protocole. Once etiquette was allowed to become lax.... The season had been very gay. Comparatively few political troubles. She disliked political troubles. She--confidentially--preferred personalities. But then she was only a woman, and foolish. She knew that she was foolish. But she had a good heart. She was not clever, like his cousin Eve.

Eve? A note of hostility and reserve crept into her expansiveness. Eve was, of course, very charming, though not beautiful. She could not be called beautiful; her mouth was too large and too red. It was almost improper to have so red a mouth; not quite _comme il faut_ in so young a girl. Still, she was undeniably successful. Men liked to be amused, and Eve, when she was not sulky, could be very amusing. Her imitations were proverbial in Herakleion. Imitation was, however, an unkindly form of entertainment. It was perhaps a pity that Eve was so _moqueuse_. Nothing was sacred to her, not even things which were really beautiful and touching--patriotism, or moonlight, or art--even Greek art. It was not that she, Mabel Thyregod, disapproved of wit; she had even some small reputation for wit herself; no; but she held that there were certain subjects to which the application of wit was unsuitable. Love, for instance. Love was the most beautiful, the most sacred thing upon earth, yet Eve--a child, a chit--had no veneration either for love in the abstract or for its devotees in the flesh. She wasted the love that was offered her. She could have no heart, no temperament. She was perhaps fortunate. She, Mabel Thyregod, had always suffered from having too warm a temperament.

A struggle ensued between them, Fru Thyregod trying to force the personal note, and Julian opposing himself to its intrusion. He liked her too much to respond to her blatant advances. He wondered, with a brotherly interest, whether Eve were less crude in her methods.

The thought of Eve sent him instantly in her pursuit, leaving Fru Thyregod very much astonished and annoyed in the ball-room. He found Eve with a man he did not know sitting in her father's business-room. She was lying back in a chair, listless and absent-minded, while her companion argued with vehemence and exasperation. She exclaimed,--

'Julian again! another surprise appearance! Have you been wearing a cap of invisibility?'

Seeing that her companion remained silent in uncertainty, she murmured an introduction,--

'Do you know my cousin Julian? Prince Ardalion Miloradovitch.'

The Russian bowed with a bad grace, seeing that he must yield his place to Julian. When he had gone, unwillingly tactful and full of resentment, she twitted her cousin,--

'Implacable as always, when you want your own way! I notice you have neither outgrown your tyrannical selfishness nor left it behind in England.'

'I have never seen that man before; who is he?'

'A Russian. Not unattractive. I am engaged to him,' she replied negligently.

'You are going to marry him?'

She shrugged.

'Perhaps, ultimately. More probably not.'

'And what will he do if you throw him over?' Julian asked with a certain curiosity.

'Oh, he has a fine _je-m'en-fichisme_; he'll shrug his shoulders, kiss the tips of my fingers, and die gambling,' she answered.

When Eve said that, Julian thought that he saw the whole of Miloradovitch, whom he did not know, quite clearly; she had lit him up.

They talked then of a great many things, extraneous to themselves, but all the while they observed one another narrowly. She found nothing actually new in him, only an immense development along the old, careless, impersonal lines. In appearance he was as untidy as ever; large, slack-limbed, rough-headed. He, however, found much that was new in her; new, that is, to his more experienced observation, but which, hitherto, in its latent form had slept undiscovered by his boyish eyes. His roaming glance took in the deliberate poise and provocative aloofness of her self-possession, the warm roundness of her throat and arms, the little _mouche_ at the corner of her mouth, her little graceful hands, and white skin that here and there, in the shadows, gleamed faintly gold, as though a veneer of amber had been brushed over the white; the pervading sensuousness that glowed from her like the actual warmth of a slumbering fire. He found himself banishing the thought of Miloradovitch....

'Have you changed?' he said abruptly. 'Look at me.'

She raised her eyes, with the assurance of one well-accustomed to personal remarks; a slow smile crept over her lips.

'Well, your verdict?'

'You are older, and your hair is brushed back.'

'Is that all?'

'Do you expect me to say that you are pretty?'

'Oh, no,' she said, snapping her fingers, 'I never expect compliments from you, Julian. On the other hand, let me pay you one. Your arrival, this evening, has been a triumph. Most artistic. Let me congratulate you. You know of old that I dislike being taken by surprise.'

'That's why I do it.'

'I know,' she said, with sudden humility, the marvellous organ of her voice sinking surprisingly into the rich luxuriance of its most sombre contralto.

He noted with a fresh enjoyment the deep tones that broke like a honeyed caress upon his unaccustomed ear. His imagination bore him away upon a flight of images that left him startled by their emphasis no less than by their fantasy. A cloak of black velvet, he thought to himself, as he continued to gaze unseeingly at her; a dusky voice, a gipsy among voices! the purple ripeness of a plum; the curve of a Southern cheek; the heart of red wine. All things seductive and insinuating. It matched her soft indolence, her exquisite subtlety, her slow, ironical smile.

'Your delicious vanity,' he said unexpectedly, and, putting out his hand he touched the hanging fold of silver net which was bound by a silver ribbon round one of her slender wrists.

II

Herakleion. The white town. The sun. The precipitate coast, and Mount Mylassa soaring into the sky. The distant slope of Greece. The low islands lying out in the jewelled sea. The diplomatic round, the calculations of gain, the continuous and plaintive music of the Islands, the dream of rescue, the ardent championship of the feebler cause, the strife against wealth and authority. The whole fabric of youth.... These were the things abruptly rediscovered and renewed.

The elections were to take place within four days of Julian's arrival. Father Paul, no doubt, could add to the store of information Kato had already given him. But Father Paul was not to be found in the little tavern he kept in the untidy village close to the gates of the Davenants' country house. Julian reined up before it, reading the familiar name, Xenodochion Olympos, above the door, and calling out to the men who were playing bowls along the little gravelled bowling alley to know where he might find the priest. They could not tell him, nor could the old islander Tsigaridis, who sat near the door, smoking a cigar, and dribbling between his fingers the beads of a bright green rosary.

'The _papá_ is often absent from us,' added Tsigaridis, and Julian caught the grave inflection of criticism in his tone.

The somnolent heat of the September afternoon lay over the squalid dusty village; in the whole length of its street no life stirred; the dogs slept; the pale pink and blue houses were closely shuttered, with an effect of flatness and desertion. Against the pink front of the tavern splashed the shadows of a great fig-tree, and upon its threshold, but on one side the tree had been cut back to prevent any shadows from falling across the bowling-alley. Julian rode on, enervated by the too intense heat and the glare, and, giving up his horse at his uncle's stables, wandered in the shade under the pergola of gourds at the bottom of the garden.

He saw Father Paul coming towards him across the grass between the lemon-trees; the priest walked slowly, his head bent, his hands clasped behind his back, a spare black figure among the golden fruit. So lean, so lank he appeared, his natural height accentuated by his square black cap; so sallow his bony face in contrast to his stringy red hair. Julian likened him to a long note of exclamation. He advanced unaware of Julian's presence, walking as though every shuffling step of his flat, broad-toed shoes were an accompaniment to some laborious and completed thought.

'Perhaps,' Julian reflected, watching him, 'by the time he reaches me he'll have arrived at his decision.'

He speculated amusedly as to the priest's difficulties: an insurgent member of the flock? a necessary repair to the church? Nothing, nothing outside Herakleion. A tiny life! A priest, a man who had forsworn man's birthright. The visible in exchange for the invisible world. A life concentrated and intense; tight-handed, a round little ball of a life. No range, no freedom. Village life under a microscope; familiar faces and familiar souls. Julian seemed to focus suddenly the rays of the whole world into a spot of light which was the village, and over which the priest's thin face was bent poring with a close, a strained expression of absorption, so that his benevolent purpose became almost a force of evil, prying and inquisitive, and from which the souls under his charge strove to writhe away in vain. To break the image, he called out aloud,--

'You were very deeply immersed in your thoughts, father?'

'Yes, yes,' Paul muttered. He took out his handkerchief to pass it over his face, which Julian now saw with surprise was touched into high lights by a thin perspiration.

'Is anything wrong?' he asked.

'Nothing wrong. Your father is very generous,' the priest added irrelevantly.

Julian, still under the spell, inquired as to his father's generosity.

'He has promised me a new iconostase,' said Paul, but he spoke from an immense distance, vagueness in his eyes, and with a trained, obedient tongue. 'The old iconostase is in a disgraceful state of dilapidation,' he continued, with a new, uncanny energy; 'when we cleaned out the panels we found them hung with bats at the back, and not only bats, but, do you know, Julian, the mice had nested there; the mice are a terrible plague in the church. I am obliged to keep the consecrated bread in a biscuit tin, and I do not like doing that; I like to keep it covered over with a linen cloth; but no, I cannot, all on account of the mice. I have set traps, and I had got a cat, but since she caught her foot in one of the traps she has gone away. I am having great trouble, great trouble with the mice.'

'I know,' said Julian, 'I used to have mice in my rooms at Oxford.'

'A plague!' cried Paul, still fiercely energetic, but utterly remote. 'One would wonder, if one were permitted to wonder, why He saw fit to create mice. I never caught any in my traps; only the cat's foot. And the boy who cleans the church ate the cheese. I have been very unfortunate--very unfortunate with the mice,' he added.

Would they never succeed in getting away from the topic? The garden was populated with mice, quick little gray objects darting across the path. And Paul, who continued to talk vehemently, with strange, abrupt gestures, was not really there at all.

'Nearly two years since you have been away,' he was saying. 'I expect you have seen a great deal; forgotten all about Paul? How do you find your father? Many people have died in the village; that was to be expected. I have been kept busy, funerals and christenings. I like a full life. And then I have the constant preoccupation of the church; the church, yes. I have been terribly concerned about the iconostase. I have blamed myself bitterly for my negligence. That, of course, was all due to the mice. A man was drowned off these rocks last week; a stranger. They say he had been losing in the casino. I have been into Herakleion once or twice, since you have been away. But it is too noisy. The trams, and the glare.... It would not seem noisy to you. You no doubt welcome the music of the world. You are young, and life for you contains no problems. But I am very happy; I should not like you to think I was not perfectly happy. Your father and your uncle are peculiarly considerate and generous men. Your uncle has promised to pay for the installation of the new iconostase and the removal of the old one. I forgot to tell you that. Completely perished, some of the panels.... And your aunt, a wonderful woman.'

Julian listened in amazement. The priest talked like a wound-up and crazy machine, and all the while Julian was convinced that he did not know a word he was saying. He had once been grave, earnest, scholarly, even wise.... He kept taking off and putting on his cap, to the wild disordering of his long hair.

'He's gone mad,' Julian thought in dismay.

Julian despaired of struggling out of the quicksands that sucked at their feet. He thought desperately that if the priest would come back, would recall his spirit to take control of his wits, all might be well. The tongue was babbling in an empty body while the spirit journeyed in unknown fields, finding there what excruciating torment? Who could tell! For the man was suffering, that was clear; he had been suffering as he walked across the grass, but he had suffered then in controlled silence, spirit and mind close-locked and allied in the taut effort of endurance; now, their alliance shattered by the sound of a human voice, the spirit had fled, sweeping with it the furies of agony, and leaving the mind bereaved, chattering emptily, noisily, in the attempt at concealment. He, Julian, was responsible for this revelation of the existence of an unguessed secret. He must repair the damage he had done.

'Father!' he said, interrupting, and he took the priest strongly by the wrist.

Their eyes met.

'Father!' Julian said again. He held the wrist with the tensest effort of his fingers, and the eyes with the tensest effort of his will. He saw the accentuated cavities of the priest's thin face, and the pinched lines of suffering at the corners of the mouth. Paul had been strong, energetic, masculine. Now his speech was random, and he quavered as a palsied old man. Even his personal cleanliness had, in a measure, deserted him; his soutane was stained, his hair lank and greasy. He confronted Julian with a scared and piteous cowardice, compelled, yet seeking escape, then as he slowly steadied himself under Julian's grip the succeeding emotions were reflected in his eyes: first shame; then a horrified grasping after his self-respect; finally, most touching of all, confidence and gratitude; and Julian, seeing the cycle completed and knowing that Paul was again master of himself, released the wrist and asked, in the most casual voice at his command, 'All right?' He had the sensation of having saved some one from falling.

Paul nodded without speaking. Then he began to ask Julian as to how he had employed the last eighteen months, and they talked for some time without reference to the unaccountable scene that had passed between them. Paul talked with his wonted gentleness and interest, the strangeness of his manner entirely vanished; Julian could have believed it a hallucination, but for the single trace left in the priest's disordered hair. Red strands hung abjectly down his back. Julian found his eyes drawn towards them in a horrible fascination, but, because he knew the scene must be buried unless Paul himself chose to revive it, he kept his glance turned away with conscious deliberation.

He was relieved when the priest left him.

'Gone to do his hair'--the phrase came to his mind as he saw the priest walk briskly away, tripping with the old familiar stumble over his soutane, and saw the long wisps faintly red on the black garment. 'Like a woman--exactly!' he uttered in revolt, clenching his hand at man's degradation. 'Like a woman, long hair, long skirt; ready to listen to other people's troubles. Unnatural existence; unnatural? it's unnatural to the point of viciousness. No wonder the man's mind is unhinged.'

He was really troubled about his friend, the more so that loyalty would keep him silent and allow him to ask no questions. He thought, however, that if Eve volunteered any remarks about Paul it would not be disloyal to listen. The afternoon was hot and still; Eve would be indoors. The traditions of his English life still clung to him sufficiently to make him chafe vaguely against the idleness of the days; he resented the concession to the climate. A demoralising place. A place where priests let their hair grow long, and went temporarily mad....

He walked in the patchy shade of the lemon-trees towards the house in a distressed and irascible frame of mind. He longed for action; his mind was never content to dwell long unoccupied. He longed for the strife the elections would bring. The house glared very white, and all the green shutters were closed; behind them, he knew, the windows would be closed too. Another contradiction. In England, when one wanted to keep a house cool, one opened the windows wide.

He crossed the veranda; the drawing-room was dim and empty. How absurd to paint sham flames on the ceiling in a climate where the last thing one wanted to remember was fire. He called,--

'Eve!'

Silence answered him. A book lying on the floor by the writing-table showed him that she had been in the room; no one else in that house would read Albert Samain. He picked it up and read disgustedly,--

'... Des roses! des roses encore! Je les adore à la souffrance. Elles ont la sombre attirance Des choses qui donnent la mort.'

'Nauseating!' he cried, flinging the book from him.

Certainly the book was Eve's. Certainly she had been in the room, for no one else would or could have drawn that mask of a faun on the blotting paper. He looked at it carelessly, then with admiration; what malicious humour she had put into those squinting eyes, that slanting mouth! He turned the blotting paper idly--how like Eve to draw on the blotting paper!--and came on other drawings: a demon, a fantastic castle, a half-obliterated sketch of himself. Once he found his name, in elaborate architectural lettering, repeated all over the page. Then he found a letter of which the three first words: 'Eternal, exasperating Eve!' and the last sentence, ' ... votre réveil qui doit être charmant dans le désordre fantaisiste de votre chambre,' made him shut the blotter in a scurry of discretion.

Here were all the vivid traces of her passage, but where was she? Loneliness and the lack of occupation oppressed him. He lounged away from the writing-table, out into the wide passage which ran all round the central court. He paused there, his hands in his pockets, and called again,--

'Eve!'

'Eve!' the echoing passage answered startlingly.

Presently another more tangible voice came to him as he stood staring disconsolately through the windows into the court.

'Were you calling Mith Eve, Mathter Julian? The'th rethting. Thall I tell her?'

He was pleased to see Nana, fat, stayless, slipshod, slovenly, benevolent. He kissed her, and told her she was fatter than ever.

'Glad I've come back, Nannie?'

'Why, yeth, thurely, Mathter Julian.'

Nana's demonstrations were always restrained, respectful. She habitually boasted that although life in the easy South might have induced her to relax her severity towards her figure, she had never allowed it to impair her manners.

'Can I go up to Eve's room, Nannie?'

'I thuppoth tho, my dear.'

'Nannie, you know, you ought to be an old negress.'

'Why, dear Lord! me black?'

'Yes; you'd be ever so much more suitable.'

He ran off to Eve's room upstairs, laughing, boyish again after his boredom and irritability. He had been in Eve's room many times before, but with his fingers on the door handle he paused. Again that strange vexation at her years had seized him.

He knocked.

Inside, the room was very dim; the furniture bulked large in the shadows. Scent, dusk, luxury lapped round him like warm water. He had an impression of soft, scattered garments, deep mirrors, chosen books, and many little bottles. Suddenly he was appalled by the insolence of his own intrusion--an unbeliever bursting into a shrine. He stood silent by the door. He heard a drowsy voice singing in a murmur an absurd childish rhyme,--

'Il était noir comme un corbeau, Ali, Ali, Ali, Alo, Macachebono, La Roustah, la Mougah, la Roustah, la Mougah, Allah!

'Il était de bonne famille, Sa mère élevait des chameaux, Macachebono....'

He discerned the bed, the filmy veils of the muslin mosquito curtains, falling apart from a baldaquin. The lazy voice, after a moment of silence, queried,--

'Nana?'

It was with an effort that he brought himself to utter,--

'No; Julian.'

With an upheaval of sheets he heard her sit upright in bed, and her exclamation,--

'Who said you might come in here?'

At that he laughed, quite naturally.

'Why not? I was bored. May I come and talk to you?'

He came round the corner of the screen and saw her sitting up, her hair tumbled and dark, her face indistinct, her shoulders emerging white from a foam of lace.

He sat down on the edge of her bed, the details of the room emerging slowly from the darkness; and she herself becoming more distinct as she watched him, her shadowy eyes half sarcastic, half resentful.

'Sybarite!' he said.

She only smiled in answer, and put out one hand towards him. It fell listlessly on to the sheets as though she had no energy to hold it up.

'You child,' he said, 'you make me feel coarse and vulgar beside you. Here am I, burning for battle, and there you lie, wasting time, wasting youth, half-asleep, luxurious, and quite unrepentant.'

'Surely even you must find it too hot for battle?'

'I don't find it too hot to wish that it weren't too hot. You, on the other hand, abandon yourself contentedly; you are pleased that it is too hot for you to do anything but glide voluptuously into a siesta in the middle of the day.'

'You haven't been here long, remember, Julian; you're still brisk from England. Only wait; Herakleion will overcome you.'

'Don't!' he cried out startlingly. 'Don't say it! It's prophetic. I shall struggle against it; I shall be the stronger.'

She only laughed murmurously into her pillows, but he was really stirred; he stood up and walked about the room, launching spasmodic phrases.

'You and Herakleion, you are all of a piece.--You shan't drag me down.--Not if I am to live here.--I know one loses one's sense of values here. I learnt that when I last went away to England. I've come back on my guard.--I'm determined to remain level-headed.--I refuse to be impressed by fantastic happenings....

'Why do you stop so abruptly?' Did her voice mock him?

He had stopped, remembering Paul. Already he had blundered against something he did not understand. An impulse came to him to confide in Eve; Eve lying there, quietly smiling with unexpressed but unmistakable irony; Eve so certain that, sooner or later, Herakleion would conquer him. He would confide in her. And then, as he hesitated, he knew suddenly that Eve was not trustworthy.

He began again walking about the room, betraying by no word that a moment of revelation, important and dramatic, had come and passed on the tick of a clock. Yet he knew he had crossed a line over which he could now never retrace his steps. He would never again regard Eve in quite the same light. He absorbed the alteration with remarkable rapidity into his conception of her. He supposed that the knowledge of her untrustworthiness had always lain dormant in him waiting for the test which should some day call it out; that was why he was so little impressed by what he had mistaken for new knowledge.

'Julian, sit down; how restless you are. And you look so enormous in this room, you frighten me.'

He sat down, closer to her than he had sat before, and began playing with her fingers.

'How soft your hand is. It is quite boneless,' he said, crushing it together; 'it's like a little pigeon. So you think Herakleion will beat me? I dare say you are right. Shall I tell you something? When I was on my way here, from England, I determined that I would allow myself to be beaten. I don't know why I had that moment of revolt just now. Because I am quite determined to let myself drift with the current, whether it carry me towards adventures or towards lotus-land.'

'Perhaps towards both.'

'Isn't that too much to hope?'

'Why? They are compatible. C'est le sort de la jeunesse.'

'Prophesy adventures for me!'

'My dear Julian! I'm far too lazy.'

'Lotus-land, then?'

'This room isn't a bad substitute,' she proffered.

He wondered then at the exact extent of her meaning. He was accustomed to the amazing emotional scenes she had periodically created between them in childhood--scenes which he never afterwards could rehearse to himself; scenes whose fabric he never could dissect, because it was more fantastic, more unreal, than gossamer; scenes in which storm, anger, and heroics had figured; scenes from which he had emerged worried, shattered, usually with the ardent impress of her lips on his, and brimming with self-reproach. A calm existence was not for her; she would neither understand nor tolerate it.

The door opened, and old Nana came shuffling in.

'Mith Eve, pleath, there'th a gentleman downstairth to thee you. Here'th hith card.'

Julian took it.

'Eve, it's Malteios.'

That drowsy voice, indifferent and melodious,--

'Tell him to go away, Nana; tell him I am resting.'

'But, dearie, what'll your mother thay?'

'Tell him to go away, Nana.'

'He'th the Prime Minithter,' Nana began doubtfully.

'Eve!' Julian said in indignation.

'But, Mith Eve, you know he came latht week and you forgot he wath coming and you wath out.'

'Is that so, Eve? Is he here by appointment with you to-day?'

'No.'

'I shall go down to him and find out whether you are speaking the truth.'

He went downstairs, ignoring Eve's voice that called him back. The Premier was in the drawing-room, examining the insignificant ornaments on the table. Their last meeting had been a memorable one, in the painted room overlooking the _platia_.

When their greetings were over, Julian said,--

'I believe you were asking for my cousin, sir?'

'That is so. She promised me,' said the Premier, a sly look coming over his face, 'that she would give me tea to-day. Shall I have the pleasure of seeing her?'

'What,' thought Julian, 'does this old scapegrace politician, who must have his mind and his days full of the coming elections, want with Eve? and want so badly that he can perform the feat of coming out here from Herakleion in the heat of the afternoon?'

Aloud he said, grimly because of the lie she had told him,--

'She will be with you in a few moments, sir.'

In Eve's dark room, where Nana still stood fatly and hopelessly expostulating, and Eve pretended to sleep, he spoke roughly,--

'You lied to me as usual. He is here by appointment. He is waiting. I told him you would not keep him waiting long. You must get up.'

'I shall do nothing of the sort. What right have you to dictate to me?'

'You're making Mathter Julian croth--and he tho thweet-tempered alwayth,' said Nana's warning voice.

'Does she usually behave like this, Nana?'

'Oh, Mathter Julian, it'th dreadful--and me alwayth thaving her from her mother, too. And loothing all her thingth, too, all the time. I can't keep anything in it'th plathe. Only three dayth ago the lotht a diamond ring, but the never cared. The Thpanith gentleman thent it to her, and the never thanked him, and then lotht the ring. And the never notithed or cared. And the getth dretheth and dretheth, and won't put them on twith. And flowerth and chocolathes thent her--they all thpoil her tho--and the biteth all the chocolathes in two to thee what'th inthide, and throwth them away and thayth the dothn't like them. That exathperating, the ith.'

'Leave her to me, Nannie.'

'Mith Naughtineth,' said Nana, as she left the room.

They were alone.

'Eve, I am really angry. That old man!'

She turned luxuriously on to her back, her arms flung wide, and lay looking at him.

'You are very anxious that I should go to him. You are not very jealous of me, are you, Julian?'

'Why does he come?' he asked curiously. 'You never told me....'

'There are a great many things I never tell you, my dear.'

'It is not my business and I am not interested,' he answered, 'but he has come a long way in the heat to see you, and I dislike your callousness. I insist upon your getting up.'

She smiled provokingly. He dropped on his knees near her.

'Darling, to please me?'

She gave a laugh of sudden disdain.

'Fool! I might have obeyed you; now you have thrown away your advantage.'

'Have I?' he said, and, slipping his arm beneath her, he lifted her up bodily. 'Where shall I put you down?' he asked, standing in the middle of the room and holding her. 'At your dressing-table?'

'Why don't you steal me, Julian?' she murmured, settling herself more comfortably in his grasp.

'Steal you? what on earth do you mean? explain!' he said.

'Oh, I don't know; if you don't understand, it doesn't matter,' she replied with some impatience, but beneath her impatience he saw that she was shaken, and, flinging one arm round his neck, she pulled herself up and kissed him on the mouth. He struggled away, displeased, brotherly, and feeling the indecency of that kiss in that darkened room, given by one whose thinly-clad, supple body he had been holding as he might hold a child's.

'You have a genius for making me angry, Eve.'

He stopped: she had relaxed suddenly, limp and white in his arms; with a long sigh she let her head fall back, her eyes closed. The warmth of her limbs reached him through the diaphanous garment she wore. He thought he had never before seen such abandonment of expression and attitude; his displeasure deepened, and an uncomplimentary word rose to his lips.

'I don't wonder....' flashed through his mind.

He was shocked, as a brother might be at the betrayal of his sister's sexuality.

'Eve!' he said sharply.

She opened her eyes, met his, and came to herself.

'Put me down!' she cried, and as he set her on her feet, she snatched at her Spanish shawl and wrapped it round her. 'Oh!' she said, an altered being, shamed and outraged, burying her face, 'go now, Julian--go, go, go.'

He went, shaking his head in perplexity: there were too many things in Herakleion he failed to understand. Paul, Eve, Malteios. This afternoon with Eve, which should have been natural, had been difficult. Moments of illumination were also moments of a profounder obscurity. And why should Malteios return to-day, when in the preceding week, according to Nana, he had been so casually forgotten? Why so patient, so long-suffering, with Eve? Was it possible that he should be attracted by Eve? It seemed to Julian, accustomed still to regard her as a child, very improbable. Malteios! The Premier! And the elections beginning within four days--that he should spare the time! Rumour said that the elections would go badly for him; that the Stavridists would be returned. A bad look-out for the Islands if they were. Rumour said that Stavridis was neglecting no means, no means whatsoever, by which he might strengthen his cause. He was more unscrupulous, younger, more vigorous, than Malteios. The years of dispossession had added to his determination and energy. Malteios had seriously prejudiced his popularity by his liaison with Kato, a woman, as the people of Herakleion never forgot, of the Islands, and an avowed champion of their cause. Was it possible that Eve was mixed up in Malteios' political schemes? Julian laughed aloud at the idea of Eve interesting herself in politics. But perhaps Kato herself, for whom Eve entertained one of her strongest and most enduring enthusiasms, had taken advantage of their friendship to interest Eve in Malteios' affairs? Anything was possible in that preposterous state. Eve, he knew, would mischievously and ignorantly espouse any form of intrigue. If Malteios came with any other motive he was an old satyr--nothing more.

Julian's mind strayed again to the elections. The return of the Stavridis party would mean certain disturbances in the Islands. Disturbances would mean an instant appeal for leadership. He would be reminded of the day he had spent, the only day of his life, he thought, on which he had truly lived, on Aphros. Tsigaridis would come, grave, insistent, to hold him to his undertakings, a figure of comedy in his absurdly picturesque clothes, but also a figure full of dignity with his unanswerable claim. He would bring forward a species of moral blackmail, to which Julian, ripe for adventure and sensitive to his obligations, would surely surrender. After that there would be no drawing back....

'I have little hope of victory,' said Malteios, to whom Julian, in search of information, had recourse; and hinted with infinite suavity and euphemism, that the question of election in Herakleion depended largely, if not entirely, on the condition and judicious distribution of the party funds. Stavridis, it appeared, had controlled larger subscriptions, more trustworthy guarantees. The Christopoulos, the largest bankers, were unreliable. Alexander had political ambitions. An under-secretaryship.... Christopoulos _père_ had subscribed, it was true, to the Malteios party, but while his right hand produced the miserable sum from his right pocket, who could tell with what generosity his left hand ladled out the drachmæ into the gaping Stavridis coffers? Safe in either eventuality. Malteios knew his game.

The Premier enlarged blandly upon the situation, regretful, but without indignation. As a man of the world, he accepted its ways as Herakleion knew them. Julian noted his gentle shrugs, his unfinished sentences and innuendoes. It occurred to him that the Premier's frankness and readiness to enlarge upon political technique were not without motive. Buttoned into his high frock-coat, which the climate of Herakleion was unable to abolish, he walked softly up and down the parquet floor between the lapis columns, his fingers loosely interlaced behind his back, talking to Julian. In another four days he might no longer be Premier, might be merely a private individual, unostentatiously working a dozen strands of intrigue. The boy was not to be neglected as a tool. He tried him on what he conceived to be his tenderest point.

'I have not been unfavourable to your islanders during my administration,'--then, thinking the method perhaps a trifle crude, he added, 'I have even exposed myself to the attack of my opponents on that score; they have made capital out of my clemency. Had I been a less disinterested man, I should have had greater foresight. I should have sacrificed my sense of justice to the demands of my future.'

He gave a deprecatory and melancholy smile.

'Do I regret the course I chose? Not for an instant. The responsibility of a statesman is not solely towards himself or his adherents. He must set it sternly aside in favour of the poor, ignorant destinies committed to his care. I lay down my office with an unburdened conscience.'

He stopped in his walk and stood before Julian, who, with his hands thrust in his pockets, had listened to the discourse from the depths of his habitual arm-chair.

'But you, young man, are not in my position. The door I seek is marked Exit; the door you seek, Entrance. I think I may, without presumption, as an old and finished man, offer you a word of prophecy.' He unlaced his fingers and pointed one of them at Julian. 'You may live to be the saviour of an oppressed people, a not unworthy mission. Remember that my present opponents, should they come to power, will not sympathise with your efforts, as I myself--who knows?--might have sympathised.'

Julian, acknowledging the warning, thought he recognised the style of the Senate Chamber, but failed to recognise the sentiments he had heard expressed by the Premier on a former occasion, on this same subject of his interference in the affairs of the Islands. He ventured to suggest as much. The Premier's smile broadened, his deprecatory manner deepened.

'Ah, you were younger then; hot-headed; I did not know how far I could trust you. Your intentions, excellent; but your judgment perhaps a little precipitate? Since then, you have seen the world; you are a man. You have returned, no doubt, ready to pick up the weapon you tentatively fingered as a boy. You will no longer be blinded by sentiment, you will weigh your actions nicely in the balance. And you will remember the goodwill of Platon Malteios?'

He resumed his soft walk up and down the room.

'Within a few weeks you may find yourself in the heart of strife. I see you as a young athlete on the threshold, doubtless as generous as most young men, as ambitious, as eager. Discard the divine foolishness of allowing ideas, not facts, to govern your heart. We live in Herakleion, not in Utopia. We have all shed, little by little, our illusions....'

After a sigh, the depth of whose genuineness neither he nor Julian could accurately diagnose, he continued, brightening as he returned to the practical,--

'Stavridis--a harsher man than I. He and your islanders would come to grips within a month. I should scarcely deplore it. A question based on the struggle of nationality--for, it cannot be denied, the Italian blood of your islanders severs them irremediably from the true Greek of Herakleion--such questions cry for decisive settlement even at the cost of a little bloodletting. Submission or liberty, once and for all. That is preferable to the present irritable shilly-shally.'

'I know the alternative I should choose,' said Julian.

'Liberty?--the lure of the young,' said Malteios, not unkindly. 'I said that I should scarcely deplore such an attempt, for it would fail; Herakleion could never tolerate for long the independence of the Islands. Yes, it would surely fail. But from it good might emerge. A friendlier settlement, a better understanding, a more cheerful submission. Believe me,' he added, seeing the cloud of obstinate disagreement upon Julian's face, 'never break your heart over the failure. Your Islands would have learnt the lesson of the inevitable; and the great inevitable is perhaps the least intolerable of all human sorrows. There is, after all, a certain kindliness in the fate which lays the obligation of sheer necessity upon our courage.'

For a moment his usual manner had left him; he recalled it with a short laugh.

'Perhaps the thought that my long years of office may be nearly at an end betrays me into this undue melancholy,' he said flippantly; 'pay no attention, young man. Indeed, whatever I may say, I know that you will cling to your idea of revolt. Am I not right?'

Once more the keen, sly look was in his eyes, and Julian knew that only the Malteios who desired the rupture of the Islands with his own political adversary, remained. He felt, in a way, comforted to be again upon the familiar ground; his conception of the man had been momentarily disarranged.

'Your Excellency is very shrewd,' he replied, politely and evasively.

Malteios shrugged and smiled the smile that had such real charm; and as he shrugged and smiled the discussion away into the region of such things dismissed, his glance travelled beyond Julian to the door, his mouth curved into a more goatish smile amidst his beard, and his eyes narrowed into two slits till his whole face resembled the mask of the old faun that Eve had drawn on the blotting paper.

'Mademoiselle!' he murmured, advancing towards Eve, who, dressed in white, appeared between the lapis-lazuli columns.

III

Madame Lafarge gave a picnic which preceded the day of the elections, and to Julian Davenant it seemed that he was entering a cool, dark cavern roofed over with mysterious greenery after riding in the heat across a glaring plain. The transition from the white Herakleion to the deep valley, shut in by steep, terraced hills covered with olives, ilexes, and myrtles--a valley profound, haunted, silent, hallowed by pools of black-green shadow--consciousness of the transition stole over him soothingly, as his pony picked its way down the stony path of the hill-side. He had refused to accompany the others. Early in the morning he had ridden over the hills, so early that he had watched the sunrise, and had counted, from a summit, the houses on Aphros in the glassy limpidity of the Grecian dawn. The morning had been pure as the treble notes of a violin, the sea below bright as a pavement of diamonds. The Islands lay, clear and low, delicately yellow, rose, and lilac, in the serene immensity of the dazzling waters. They seemed to him to contain every element of enchantment; cleanly of line as cameos, yet intangible as a mirage, rising lovely and gracious as Aphrodite from the white flashes of their foam, fairy islands of beauty and illusion in a sea of radiant and eternal youth.

A stream ran through the valley, and near the banks of the stream, in front of a clump of ilexes, gleamed the marble columns of a tiny ruined temple. Julian turned his pony loose to graze, throwing himself down at full length beside the stream and idly pulling at the orchids and magenta cyclamen which grew in profusion. Towards midday his solitude was interrupted. A procession of victorias accompanied by men on horseback began to wind down the steep road into the valley; from afar he watched them coming, conscious of distaste and boredom, then remembering that Eve was of the party, and smiling to himself a little in relief. She would come, at first silent, unobtrusive, almost sulky; then little by little the spell of their intimacy would steal over him, and by a word or a glance they would be linked, the whole system of their relationship developing itself anew, a system elaborated by her, as he well knew; built up of personal, whimsical jokes; stimulating, inventive, she had to a supreme extent the gift of creating such a web, subtly, by meaning more than she said and saying less than she meant; giving infinite promise, but ever postponing fulfilment.

'A flirt?' he wondered to himself, lazily watching the string of carriages in one of which she was.

But she was more elemental, more dangerous, than a mere flirt. On that account, and because of her wide and penetrative intelligence, he could not relegate her to the common category. Yet he thought he might safely make the assertion that no man in Herakleion had altogether escaped her attraction. He thought he might apply this generalisation from M. Lafarge, or Malteios, or Don Rodrigo Valdez, down to the chasseur who picked up her handkerchief. (Her handkerchief! ah, yes! she could always be traced, as in a paper-chase, by her scattered possessions--a handkerchief, a glove, a cigarette-case, a gardenia, a purse full of money, a powder-puff--frivolities doubly delightful and doubly irritating in a being so terrifyingly elemental, so unassailably and sarcastically intelligent.) Eve, the child he had known unaccountable, passionate, embarrassing, who had written him the precocious letters on every topic in a variety of tongues, imaginative exceedingly, copiously illustrated, bursting occasionally into erratic and illegible verse; Eve, with her desperate and excessive passions; Eve, grown to womanhood, grown into a firebrand! He had been entertained, but at the same time slightly offended, to find her grown; his conception of her was disarranged; he had felt almost a sense of outrage in seeing her heavy hair piled upon her head; he had looked curiously at the uncovered nape of her neck, the hair brushed upwards and slightly curling, where once it had hung thick and plaited; he had noted with an irritable shame the softness of her throat in the evening dress she had worn when first he had seen her. He banished violently the recollection of her in that brief moment when in his anger he had lifted her out of her bed and had carried her across the room in his arms. He banished it with a shudder and a revulsion, as he might have banished a suggestion of incest.

Springing to his feet, he went forward to meet the carriages; the shadowed valley was flicked by the bright uniforms of the chasseurs on the boxes and the summer dresses of the women in the victorias; the laughter of the Danish Excellency already reached his ears above the hum of talk and the sliding hoofs of the horses as they advanced cautiously down the hill, straining back against their harness, and bringing with them at every step a little shower of stones from the rough surface of the road. The younger men, Greeks, and secretaries of legations, rode by the side of the carriages. The Danish Excellency was the first to alight, fat and babbling in a pink muslin dress with innumerable flounces; Julian turned aside to hide his smile. Madame Lafarge descended with her customary weightiness, beaming without benevolence but with a tyrannical proprietorship over all her guests. She graciously accorded her hand to Julian. The chasseurs were already busy with wicker baskets.

'The return to Nature,' Alexander Christopoulos whispered to Eve.

Julian observed that Eve looked bored and sulky; she detested large assemblies, unless she could hold their entire attention, preferring the more intimate scope of the _tête-à-tête_. Amongst the largest gathering she usually contrived to isolate herself and one other, with whom she conversed in whispers. Presently, he knew, she would be made to recite, or to tell anecdotes, involving imitation, and this she would perform, at first languidly, but warming with applause, and would end by dancing--he knew her programme! He rarely spoke to her, or she to him, in public. She would appear to ignore him, devoting herself to Don Rodrigo, or to Alexander, or, most probably, to the avowed admirer of some other woman. He had frequently brought his direct and masculine arguments to bear against this practice. She listened without replying, as though she did not understand.

Fru Thyregod was more than usually sprightly.

'Now, Armand, you lazy fellow, bring me my camera; this day has to be immortalised; I must have pictures of all you beautiful young men for my friends in Denmark. Fauns in a Grecian grave! Let me peep whether any of you have cloven feet.'

Madame Lafarge put up her lorgnon, and said to the Italian Minister in a not very low voice,--

'I am so fond of dear Fru Thyregod, but she is terribly vulgar at times.'

There was a great deal of laughter over Fru Thyregod's sally, and some of the young men pretended to hide their feet beneath napkins.

'Eve and Julie, you must be the nymphs,' the Danish Excellency went on.

Eve took no notice; Julie looked shy, and the sisters Christopoulos angry at not being included.

'Now we must all help to unpack; that is half the fun of the picnic,' said Madame Lafarge, in a business-like tone.

Under the glare of her lorgnon Armand and Madame Delahaye attacked one basket; they nudged and whispered to one another, and their fingers became entangled under the cover of the paper wrappings. Eve strolled away, Valdez followed her. The Persian Minister who had come unobtrusively, after the manner of a humble dog, stood gently smiling in the background. Julie Lafarge never took her adoring eyes off Eve. The immense Grbits had drawn Julian on one side, and was talking to him, shooting out his jaw and hitting Julian on the chest for emphasis. Fru Thyregod, with many whispers, collected a little group to whom she pointed them out, and photographed them.

'Really,' said the Danish Minister peevishly, to Condesa Valdez, 'my wife is the most foolish woman I know.'

During the picnic every one was very gay, with the exception of Julian, who regretted having come, and of Miloradovitch, of whom Eve was taking no notice at all. Madame Lafarge was especially pleased with the success of her expedition. She enjoyed the intimacy that existed amongst all her guests, and said as much in an aside to the Roumanian Minister.

'You know, _chère Excellence_, I have known most of these dear friends so long; we have spent happy years together in different capitals; that is the best of diplomacy: _ce qu'il y a de beau dans la carrière c'est qu'on se retrouve toujours_.'

'It is not unlike a large family, one may say,' replied the Roumanian.

'How well you phrase it!' exclaimed Madame Lafarge. 'Listen, everybody: His Excellency has made a real _mot d'esprit_, he says diplomacy is like a large family.'

Eve and Julian looked up, and their eyes met.

'You are not eating anything, Ardalion Semeonovitch,' said Armand (he had once spent two months in Russia) to Miloradovitch, holding out a plate of sandwiches.

'No, nor do I want anything,' said Miloradovitch rudely, and he got up, and walked away by himself.

'Dear me! _ces Russes!_ what manners!' said Madame Lafarge, pretending to be amused; and everybody looked facetiously at Eve.

'I remember once, when I was in Russia, at the time that Stolypin was Prime Minister,' Don Rodrigo began, 'there was a serious scandal about one of the Empress's ladies-in-waiting and a son of old Princess Golucheff--you remember old Princess Golucheff, Excellency? she was a Bariatinsky, a very handsome woman, and Serge Radziwill killed himself on her account--he was a Pole, one of the Kieff Radziwills, whose mother was commonly supposed to be _au mieux_ with Stolypin (though Stolypin was not at all that kind of man; he was _très province_), and most people thought that was the reason why Serge occupied such a series of the highest Court appointments, in spite of being a Pole--the Poles were particularly unpopular just then; I even remember that Stanislas Aveniev, in spite of having a Russian mother--she was an Orloff, and her jewels were proverbial even in Petersburg--they had all been given her by the Grand Duke Boris--Stanislas Aveniev was obliged to resign his commission in the Czar's guard. However, Casimir Golucheff....' but everybody had forgotten the beginning of his story and only Madame Lafarge was left politely listening.

Julian overheard Eve reproducing, in an undertone to Armand, the style and manner of Don Rodrigo's conversation. He also became aware that, between her sallies, Fru Thyregod was bent upon retaining his attention for herself.

He was disgusted with all this paraphernalia of social construction, and longed ardently for liberty on Aphros. He wondered whether Eve were truly satisfied, or whether she played the part merely with the humorous gusto of an artist, caught up in his own game; he wondered to what extent her mystery was due to her life's pretence?

Later, he found himself drifting apart with the Danish Excellency; he drifted, that is, beside her, tall, slack of limb, absent of mind, while she tripped with apparent heedlessness, but with actual determination of purpose. As she tripped she chattered. Fair and silly, she demanded gallantry of men, and gallantry of a kind--perfunctory, faintly pitying, apologetic--she was accorded. She had enticed Julian away, with a certain degree of skill, and was glad. Eve had scowled blackly, in the one swift glance she had thrown them.

'Your cousin enchants Don Rodrigo, it is clear,' Fru Thyregod said with malice as they strolled.

Julian turned to look back. He saw Eve sitting with the Spanish Minister on the steps of the little temple. In front of the temple, the ruins of the picnic stained the valley with bright frivolity; bits of white paper fluttered, tablecloths remained spread on the ground, and laughter echoed from the groups that still lingered hilariously; the light dresses of the women were gay, and their parasols floated above them like coloured bubbles against the darkness of the ilexes.

'What desecration of the Dryads' grove,' said Fru Thyregod, 'let us put it out of sight,' and she gave a little run forward, and then glanced over her shoulder to see if Julian were following her.

He came, unsmiling and leisurely. As soon as they were hidden from sight among the olives, she began to talk to him about himself, walking slowly, looking up at him now and then, and prodding meditatively with the tip of her parasol at the stones upon the ground. He was, she said, so free. He had his life before him. And she talked about herself, of the shackles of her sex, the practical difficulties of her life, her poverty, her effort to hide beneath a gay exterior a heart that was not gay.

'Carl,' she said, alluding to her husband, 'has indeed charge of the affairs of Norway and Sweden also in Herakleion, but Herakleion is so tiny, he is paid as though he were a Consul.'

Julian listened, dissecting the true from the untrue; although he knew her gaiety was no effort, but merely the child of her innate foolishness, he also knew that her poverty was a source of real difficulties to her, and he felt towards her a warm, though a bored and slightly contemptuous, friendliness. He listened to her babble, thinking more of the stream by which they walked, and of the little magenta cyclamen that grew in the shady, marshy places on its banks.

Fru Thyregod was speaking of Eve, a topic round which she perpetually hovered in an uncertainty of fascination and resentment.

'Do you approve of her very intimate friendship with that singer, Madame Kato?'

'I am very fond of Madame Kato myself, Fru Thyregod.'

'Ah, you are a man. But for Eve ... a girl.... After all, what is Madame Kato but a common woman, a woman of the people, and the mistress of Malteios into the bargain?'

Fru Thyregod was unwontedly serious. Julian had not yet realised to what extent Alexander Christopoulos had transferred his attentions to Eve.

'You know I am an unconventional woman; every one who knows me even a little can see that I am unconventional. But when I see a child, a nice child, like your cousin Eve, associated with a person like Kato, I think to myself, "Mabel, that is unbecoming."'

She repeated,--

'And yet I have been told that I was too unconventional. Yes, Carl has often reproached me, and my friends too. They say, "Mabel, you are too soft-hearted, and you are too unconventional." What do you think?'

Julian ignored the personal. He said,--

'I should not describe Eve as a "nice child."'

'No? Well, perhaps not. She is too ... too....' said Fru Thyregod, who, not having very many ideas of her own, liked to induce other people into supplying the missing adjective.

'She is too important,' Julian said gravely.

The adjective in this case was unexpected. The Danish Excellency could only say,--

'I think I know what you mean.'

Julian, perfectly well aware that she did not, and caring nothing whether she did or no, but carelessly willing to illuminate himself further on the subject, pursued,--

'Her frivolity is a mask. Her instincts alone are deep; _how_ deep, it frightens me to think. She is an artist, although, she may never produce art. She lives in a world of her own, with its own code of morals and values. The Eve that we all know is a sham, the product of her own pride and humour. She is laughing at us all. The Eve we know is entertaining, cynical, selfish, unscrupulous. The real Eve is ...' he paused, and brought out his words with a satisfied finality, 'a rebel and an idealist.'

Then, glancing at his bewildered companion, he laughed and said,--

'Don't believe a word I say, Fru Thyregod: Eve is nineteen, bent only upon enjoying her life to the full.'

He knew, nevertheless, that he had swept together the loose wash of his thought into a concrete channel; and rejoiced.

Fru Thyregod passed to a safer topic. She liked Julian, and understood only one form of excitement.

'You bring with you such a breath of freshness and originality,' she said, sighing, 'into our stale little world.'

His newly-found good humour coaxed him into responsiveness.

'No world can surely ever be stale to you, Fru Thyregod; I always think of you as endowed with perpetual youth and gaiety.'

'Ah, Julian, you have perfect manners, to pay so charming a compliment to an old woman like me.'

She neither thought her world stale or little, nor herself old, but pathos had often proved itself of value.

'Everybody knows, Fru Thyregod, that you are the life and soul of Herakleion.'

They had wandered into a little wood, and sat down on a fallen tree beside the stream. She began again prodding at the ground with her parasol, keeping her eyes cast down. She was glad to have captured Julian, partly for her own sake, and partly because she knew that Eve would be annoyed.

'How delightful to escape from all our noisy friends,' she said; 'we shall create quite a scandal; but I am too unconventional to trouble about that. I cannot sympathise with those limited, conventional folk who always consider appearances. I have always said, "One should be natural. Life is too short for the conventions." Although, I think one should refrain from giving pain. When I was a girl, I was a terrible tomboy.'

He listened to her babble of coy platitudes, contrasting her with Eve.

'I never lost my spirits,' she went on, in the meditative tone she thought suitable to _tête-à-tête_ conversations--it provoked intimacy, and afforded agreeable relief to her more social manner; a woman, to be charming, must be several-sided; gay in public, but a little wistful philosophy was interesting in private; it indicated sympathy, and betrayed a thinking mind,--'I never lost my spirits, although life has not always been very easy for me; still, with good spirits and perhaps a little courage one can continue to laugh, isn't that the way to take life? and on the whole I have enjoyed mine, and my little adventures too, my little harmless adventures; Carl always laughs and says, "You will always have adventures, Mabel, so I must make the best of it,"--he says that, though he has been very jealous at times. Poor Carl,' she said reminiscently, 'perhaps I have made him suffer; who knows?'

Julian looked at her; he supposed that her existence was made up of such experiments, and knew that the arrival of every new young man in Herakleion was to her a source of flurry and endless potentialities which, alas, never fulfilled their promise, but which left her undaunted and optimistic for the next affray.

'Why do I always talk about myself to you?' she said, with her little laugh; 'you must blame yourself for being too sympathetic.'

He scarcely knew how their conversation progressed; he wondered idly whether Eve conducted hers upon the same lines with Don Rodrigo Valdez, or whether she had been claimed by Miloradovitch, to whom she said she was engaged. Did she care for Miloradovitch? he was immensely rich, the owner of jewels and oil-mines, remarkably good-looking; dashing, and a gambler. At diplomatic gatherings he wore a beautiful uniform. Julian had seen Eve dancing with him; he had seen the Russian closely following her out of a room, bending forward to speak to her, and her ironical eyes raised for an instant over the slow movement of her fan. He had seen them disappear together, and the provocative poise of her white shoulders, and the richness of the beautiful uniform, had remained imprinted on his memory.

He awoke with dismay to the fact that Fru Thyregod had taken off her hat.

She had a great quantity of soft, yellow hair into which she ran her fingers, lifting its weight as though oppressed. He supposed that the gesture was not so irrelevant to their foregoing conversation, of which he had not noticed a word, as it appeared to be. He was startled to find himself saying in a tone of commiseration,--

'Yes, it must be very heavy.'

'I wish that I could cut it all off,' Fru Thyregod cried petulantly. 'Why, to amuse you, only look....' and to his horror she withdrew a number of pins and allowed her hair to fall in a really beautiful cascade over her shoulders. She smiled at him, parting the strands before her eyes.

At that moment Eve and Miloradovitch came into view, wandering side by side down the path.

Of the four, Miloradovitch alone was amused. Julian was full of a shamefaced anger towards Fru Thyregod, and between the two women an instant enmity sprang into being like a living and visible thing. The Russian drew near to Fru Thyregod with some laughing compliment; she attached herself desperately to him as a refuge from Julian. Julian and Eve remained face to face with one another.

'Walk with me a little,' she said, making no attempt to disguise her fury.

'My dear Eve,' he said, when they were out of earshot, 'I should scarcely recognise you when you put on that expression.'

He spoke frigidly. She was indeed transformed, her features coarsened and unpleasing, her soft delicacy vanished. He could not believe that he had ever thought her rare, exquisite, charming.

'I don't blame you for preferring Fru Thyregod,' she returned.

'I believe your vanity to be so great that you resent any man speaking to any other woman but yourself,' he said, half persuading himself that he was voicing a genuine conviction.

'Very well, if you choose to believe that,' she replied.

They walked a little way in angry silence.

'I detest all women,' he added presently.

'Including me?'

'Beginning with you.'

He was reminded of their childhood with its endless disputes, and made an attempt to restore their friendship.

'Come, Eve, why are we quarrelling? I do not make you jealous scenes about Miloradovitch.'

'Far from it,' she said harshly.

'Why should he want to marry you?' he began, his anger rising again. 'What qualities have you? Clever, seductive, and entertaining! But, on the other hand, selfish, jealous, unkind, pernicious, indolent, vain. A bad bargain. If he knew you as well as I.... Jealousy! It amounts to madness.'

'I am perhaps not jealous where Miloradovitch is concerned,' she said.

'Then spare me the compliment of being jealous of me. You wreck affection; you will wreck your life through your jealousy and exorbitance.'

'No doubt,' she replied in a tone of so much sadness that he became remorseful. He contrasted, moreover, her violence, troublesome, inconvenient, as it often was, with the standardised and distasteful little inanities of Fru Thyregod and her like, and found Eve preferable.

'Darling, you never defend yourself; it is very disarming.'

But she would not accept the olive-branch he offered.

'Sentimentality becomes you very badly, Julian; keep it for Fru Thyregod.'

'We have had enough of Fru Thyregod,' he said, flushing.

'It suits you to say so; I do not forget so easily. Really, Julian, sometimes I think you very commonplace. From the moment you arrived until to-day, you have never been out of Fru Thyregod's pocket. Like Alexander, once. Like any stray young man.'

'Eve!' he said, in astonishment at the outrageous accusation.

'My little Julian, have you washed the lap-dog to-day? Carl always says, "Mabel, you are fonder of your dogs than of your children--you are really dreadful," but I don't think that's quite fair,' said Eve, in so exact an imitation of Fru Thyregod's voice and manner that Julian was forced to smile.

She went on,--

'I expect too much of you. My imagination makes of you something which you are not. I so despise the common herd that I persuade myself that you are above it. I can persuade myself of anything,' she said scathingly, wounding him in the recesses of his most treasured vanity--her good opinion of him; 'I persuade myself that you are a Titan amongst men, almost a god, but in reality, if I could see you without prejudice, what are you fit for? to be Fru Thyregod's lover!'

'You are mad,' he said, for there was no other reply.

'When I am jealous, I am mad,' she flung at him.

'But if you are jealous of me....' he said, appalled. 'Supposing you were ever in love, your jealousy would know no bounds. It is a disease. It is the ruin of our friendship.'

'Entirely.'

'You are inordinately perverse.'

'Inordinately.'

'Supposing I were to marry, I should not dare--what an absurd thought--to introduce you to my wife.'

A truly terrible expression came into her eyes; they narrowed to little slits, and turned slightly inwards; as though herself aware of it, she bent to pick the little cyclamen.

'Are you trying to tell me, Julian....'

'You told me you were engaged to Miloradovitch.'

She stood up, regardless, and he saw the tragic pallor of her face. She tore the cyclamen to pieces beneath her white fingers.

'It is true, then?' she said, her voice dead.

He began to laugh.

'You do indeed persuade yourself very easily.'

'Julian, you must tell me. You must. Is it true?'

'If it were?'

'I should have to kill you--or myself,' she replied with the utmost gravity.

'You are mad,' he said again, in the resigned tone of one who states a perfectly established fact.

'If I am mad, you are unutterably cruel,' she said, twisting her fingers together; 'will you answer me, yes or no? I believe it is true,' she rushed on, immolating herself, 'you have fallen in love with some woman in England, and she, naturally, with you. Who is she? You have promised to marry her. You, whom I thought so free and splendid, to load yourself with the inevitable fetters!'

'I should lose caste in your eyes?' he asked, thinking to himself that Eve was, when roused, scarcely a civilised being. 'But if you marry Miloradovitch you will be submitting to the same fetters you think so degrading.'

'Miloradovitch,' she said impatiently, 'Miloradovitch will no more ensnare me than have the score of people I have been engaged to since I last saw you. You are still evading your answer.'

'You will never marry?' he dwelt on his discovery.

'Nobody that I loved,' she replied without hesitation, 'but, Julian, Julian, you don't answer my question?'

'Would you marry me if I wanted you to?' he asked carelessly.

'Not for the world, but why keep me in suspense? only answer me, are you trying to tell me that you have fallen in love? if so, admit it, please, at once, and let me go; don't you see, I am leaving Fru Thyregod on one side, I ask you in all humility now, Julian.'

'For perhaps the fiftieth time since you were thirteen,' he said, smiling.

'Have you tormented me long enough?'

'Very well: I am in love with the Islands, and with nothing and nobody else.'

'Then why had Fru Thyregod her hair down her back? you're lying to me, and I despise you doubly for it,' she reverted, humble no longer, but aggressive.

'Fru Thyregod again?' he said, bewildered.

'How little I trust you,' she broke out; 'I believe that you deceive me at every turn. Kato, too; you spend hours in Kato's flat. What do you do there? You write letters to people of whom I have never heard. You dined with the Thyregods twice last week. Kato sends you notes by hand from Herakleion when you are in the country. You use the Islands as dust to throw in my eyes, but I am not blinded.'

'I have had enough of this!' he cried.

'You are like everybody else,' she insisted; 'you enjoy mean entanglements, and you cherish the idea of marriage. You want a home, like everybody else. A faithful wife. Children. I loathe children,' she said violently. 'You are very different from me. You are tame. I have deluded myself into thinking we were alike. You are tame, respectable. A good citizen. You have all the virtues. I will live to show you how different we are. Ten years hence, you will say to your wife, "No, my dear, I really cannot allow you to know that poor Eve." And your wife, well trained, submissive, will agree.'

He shrugged his shoulders, accustomed to such storms, and knowing that she only sought to goad him into a rage.

'In the meantime, go back to Fru Thyregod; why trouble to lie to me? And to Kato, go back to Kato. Write to the woman in England, too. I will go to Miloradovitch, or to any of the others.'

He was betrayed into saying,--

'The accusation of mean entanglements comes badly from your lips.'

In her heart she guessed pretty shrewdly at his real relation towards women: a self-imposed austerity, with violent relapses that had no lasting significance, save to leave him with his contemptuous distaste augmented. His mind was too full of other matters. For Kato alone he had a profound esteem.

Eve answered his last remark,--

'I will prove to you the little weight of my entanglements, by dismissing Miloradovitch to-day; you have only to say the word.'

'You would do that--without remorse?'

'Miloradovitch is nothing to me.'

'You are something to him--perhaps everything.'

'Cela ne me regarde pas,' she replied. 'Would you do as much for me? Fru Thyregod, for instance? or Kato?'

Interested and curious, he said,--

'To please you, I should give up Kato?'

'You would not?'

'Most certainly I should not. Why suggest it? Kato is your friend as much as mine. Are all women's friendships so unstable?'

'Be careful, Julian: you are on the quicksands.'

'I have had enough of these topics,' he said, 'will you leave them?'

'No; I choose my own topics; you shan't dictate to me.'

'You would sacrifice Miloradovitch without a thought, to please me--why should it please me?--but you would not forgo the indulgence of your jealousy! I am not grateful. Our senseless quarrels,' he said, 'over which we squander so much anger and emotion.' But he did not stop to question what lay behind their important futility. He passed his hand wearily over his hair, 'I am deluded sometimes into believing in their reality and sanity. You are too difficult. You ... you distort and bewitch, until one expects to wake up from a dream. Sometimes I think of you as a woman quite apart from other women, but at other times I think you live merely by and upon fictitious emotion and excitement. Must your outlook be always so narrowly personal? Kato, thank Heaven, is very different. I shall take care to choose my friends amongst men, or amongst women like Kato,' he continued, his exasperation rising.

'Julian, don't be so angry: it isn't my fault that I hate politics.'

He grew still angrier at her illogical short-cut to the reproach which lay, indeed, unexpressed at the back of his mind.

'I never mentioned politics. I know better. No man in his senses would expect politics from any woman so demoralisingly feminine as yourself. Besides, that isn't your rôle. Your rôle is to be soft, idle; a toy; a siren; the negation of enterprise. Work and woman--the terms contradict one another. The woman who works, or who tolerates work, is only half a woman. The most you can hope for,' he said with scorn, 'is to inspire--and even that you do unconsciously, and very often quite against your will. You sap our energy; you sap and you destroy.'

She had not often heard him speak with so much bitterness, but she did not know that his opinions in this more crystallised form dated from that slight moment in which he had divined her own untrustworthiness.

'You are very wise. I forget whether you are twenty-two or twenty-three?'

'Oh, you may be sarcastic. I only know that I will never have my life wrecked by women. To-morrow the elections take place, and, after that, whatever their result, I belong to the Islands.'

'I think I see you with a certain clearness,' she said more gently, 'full of illusions, independence, and young generosities--_nous passons tous par là_.'

'Talk English, Eve, and be less cynical; if I am twenty-two, as you reminded me, you are nineteen.'

'If you could find a woman who was a help and not a hindrance?' she suggested.

'Ah!' he said, 'the Blue Bird! I am not likely to be taken in; I am too well on my guard.--Look!' he added, 'Fru Thyregod and your Russian friend; I leave you to them,' and before Eve could voice her indignation he had disappeared into the surrounding woods.

IV

On the next day, the day of the elections, which was also the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Herakleion blossomed suddenly, and from the earliest hour, into a striped and fluttering gaudiness. The sun shone down upon a white town beflagged into an astonishing gaiety. Everywhere was whiteness, whiteness, and brilliantly coloured flags. White, green, and orange, dazzling in the sun, vivid in the breeze. And, keyed up to match the intensity of the colour, the band blared brassily, unremittingly, throughout the day from the centre of the _platia_.

A parrot-town, glaring and screeching; a monkey-town, gibbering, excited, inconsequent. All the shops, save the sweet-shops, were shut, and the inhabitants flooded into the streets. Not only had they decked their houses with flags, they had also decked themselves with ribbons, their women with white dresses, their children with bright bows, their carriages with paper streamers, their horses with sunbonnets. Bands of young men, straw-hatted, swept arm-in-arm down the pavements, adding to the din with mouth organs, mirlitons, and tin trumpets. The trams flaunted posters in the colours of the contending parties. Immense char-à-bancs, roofed over with brown holland and drawn by teams of mules, their harness hung with bells and red tassels, conveyed the voters to the polling-booths amid the cheers and imprecations of the crowd.

Herakleion abandoned itself deliriously to political carnival.

In the immense, darkened rooms of the houses on the _platia_, the richer Greeks idled, concealing their anxiety. It was tacitly considered beneath their dignity to show themselves in public during that day. They could but await the fruition or the failure of their activities during the preceding weeks. Heads of households were for the most part morose, absorbed in calculations and regrets. Old Christopoulos, looking more bleached than usual, wished he had been more generous. That secretaryship for Alexander.... In the great sala of his house he paced restlessly up and down, biting his finger nails, and playing on his fingers the tune of the many thousand drachmæ he might profitably have expended. The next election would not take place for five years. At the next election he would be a great deal more lavish.

He had made the same resolution at every election during the past thirty years.

In the background, respectful of his silence, themselves dwarfed and diminutive in the immense height of the room, little knots of his relatives and friends whispered together, stirring cups of tisane. Heads were very close together, glances at old Christopoulos very frequent. Visitors, isolated or in couples, strolled in unannounced and informally, stayed for a little, strolled away again. A perpetual movement of such circulation rippled through the houses in the _platia_ throughout the day, rumour assiduous in its wake. Fru Thyregod alone, with her fat, silly laugh, did her best wherever she went to lighten the funereal oppression of the atmosphere. The Greeks she visited were not grateful. Unlike the populace in the streets, they preferred taking their elections mournfully.

By midday the business of voting was over, and in the houses of the _platia_ the Greeks sat round their luncheon-tables with the knowledge that the vital question was now decided, though the answer remained as yet unknown, and that in the polling-booths an army of clerks sat feverishly counting, while the crowd outside, neglectful of its meal, swarmed noisily in the hope of news. In the houses of the _platia_, on this one day of the year, the Greeks kept open table. Each vast dining-room, carefully darkened and indistinguishable in its family likeness from its neighbour in the house on either side, offered its hospitality under the inevitable chandelier. In each, the host greeted the new-comer with the same perfunctory smile. In each, the busy servants came and went, carrying dishes and jugs of orangeade--for Levantine hospitality, already heavily strained, boggled at wine--among the bulky and old-fashioned sideboards. All joyousness was absent from these gatherings, and the closed shutters served to exclude, not only the heat, but also the strains of the indefatigable band playing on the _platia_.

Out in the streets the popular excitement hourly increased, for if the morning had been devoted to politics, the afternoon and evening were to be devoted to the annual feast and holiday of the Declaration of Independence. The national colours, green and orange, seemed trebled in the town. They hung from every balcony and were reproduced in miniature in every buttonhole. Only here and there an islander in his fustanelle walked quickly with sulky and averted eyes, rebelliously innocent of the brilliant cocarde, and far out to sea the rainbow islands shimmered with never a flag to stain the distant whiteness of the houses upon Aphros.

The houses of the _platia_ excelled all others in the lavishness of their patriotic decorations. The balconies of the club were draped in green and orange, with the arms of Herakleion arranged in the centre in electric lights for the evening illumination. The Italian Consulate drooped its complimentary flag. The house of Platon Malteios--Premier or ex-Premier? no one knew--was almost too ostentatiously patriotic. The cathedral, on the opposite side, had its steps carpeted with red and the spaciousness of its porch festooned with the colours. From the central window of the Davenant house, opposite the sea, a single listless banner hung in motionless folds.

It had, earlier in the day, occasioned a controversy.

Julian had stood in the centre of the frescoed drawing-room, flushed and constrained.

'Father, that flag on our house insults the Islands. It can be seen even from Aphros!'

'My dear boy, better that it should be seen from Aphros than that we should offend Herakleion.'

'What will the islanders think?'

'They are accustomed to seeing it there every year.'

'If I had been at home....'

'When this house is yours, Julian, you will no doubt do as you please; so long as it is mine, I beg you not to interfere.'

Mr Davenant had spoken in his curtest tones. He had added,--

'I shall go to the cathedral this afternoon.'

The service in the cathedral annually celebrated the independence of Herakleion. Julian slipped out of the house, meaning to mix with the ill-regulated crowd that began to collect on the _platia_ to watch for the arrival of the notables, but outside the door of the club he was discovered by Alexander Christopoulos who obliged him to follow him upstairs to the Christopoulos drawing-room.

'My father is really too gloomy for me to confront alone,' Alexander said, taking Julian's arm and urging him along; 'also I have spent the morning in the club, which exasperates him. He likes me to sit at home while he stands looking at me and mournfully shaking his head.'

They came into the sala together, where old Christopoulos paced up and down in front of the shuttered windows, and a score of other people sat whispering over their cups of tisane. White dresses, dim mirrors, and the dull gilt of furniture gleamed here and there in the shadows of the vast room.

'Any news? any news?' the banker asked of the two young men.

'You know quite well, father, that no results are to be declared until seven o'clock this evening.'

Alexander opened a section of a Venetian blind, and as a shaft of sunlight fell startlingly across the floor a blare of music burst equally startlingly upon the silence.

'The _platia_ is crowded already,' said Alexander, looking out.

The hum of the crowd became audible, mingled with the music; explosions of laughter, and some unexplained applause. The shrill cry of a seller of iced water rang immediately beneath the window. The band in the centre continued to shriek remorselessly an antiquated air of the Paris boulevards.

'At what time is the procession due?' asked Fru Thyregod over Julian's shoulder.

'At five o'clock; it should arrive at any moment,' Julian said, making room for the Danish Excellency.

'I adore processions,' cried Fru Thyregod, clapping her hands, and looking brightly from Julian to Alexander.

Alexander whispered to Julie Lafarge, who had come up,--

'I am sure Fru Thyregod has gone from house to house and from Legation to Legation, and has had a meal at each to-day.'

Somebody suggested,--

'Let us open the shutters and watch the procession from the balconies.'

'Oh, what a good idea!' cried Fru Thyregod, clapping her hands again and executing a pirouette.

Down in the _platia_ an indefinite movement was taking place; the band stopped playing for the first time that day, and began shuffling with all its instruments to one side. Voices were then heard raised in tones of authority. A cleavage appeared in the crowd, which grew in length and width as though a wedge were being gradually driven into that reluctant confusion of humanity.

'A path for the procession,' said old Christopoulos, who, although not pleased at that frivolous flux of his family and guests on to the balconies of his house, had joined them, overcome by his natural curiosity.

The path cut in the crowd now ran obliquely across the _platia_ from the end of the rue Royale to the steps of the cathedral opposite, and upon it the confetti with which the whole _platia_ was no doubt strewn became visible. The police, with truncheons in their hands, were pressing the people back to widen the route still further. They wore their gala hats, three-cornered, with upright plumes of green and orange nodding as they walked.

'Look at Sterghiou,' said Alexander.

The Chief of Police rode vaingloriously down the route looking from left to right, and saluting with his free hand. The front of his uniform was crossed with broad gold hinges, and plaits of yellow braid disappeared mysteriously into various pockets. One deduced whistles; pencils; perhaps a knife. Although he did not wear feathers in his hat, one knew that only the utmost self-restraint had preserved him from them.

Here the band started again with a march, and Sterghiou's horse shied violently and nearly unseated him.

'The troops!' said old Christopoulos with emotion.

Debouching from the rue Royale, the army came marching four abreast. As it was composed of only four hundred men, and as it never appeared on any other day of the year, its general Panaïoannou always mobilised it in its entirety on the national festival. This entailed the temporary closing of the casino in order to release the croupiers, who were nearly all in the ranks, and led to a yearly dispute between the General and the board of administration.

'There was once a croupier,' said Alexander, 'who was admitted to the favour of a certain grand-duchess until the day when, indiscreetly coming into the dressing-room where the lady was arranging and improving her appearance, he said, through sheer force of habit, "Madame, les jeux sont faits?" and was dismissed for ever by her reply, "Rien ne va plus."'

The general himself rode in the midst of his troops, in his sky-blue uniform, to which the fantasy of his Buda-Pesth costumier had added for the occasion a slung Hussar jacket of white cloth. His gray moustache was twisted fiercely upwards, and curved like a scimitar across his face. He rode with his hand on his hip, slowly scanning the windows and balconies of the _platia_, which by now were crowded with people, gravely saluting his friends as he passed. Around him marched his bodyguard of six, a captain and five men; the captain carried in one hand a sword, and in the other--nobody knew why--a long frond of palm.

The entire army tramped by, hot, stout, beaming, and friendly. At one moment some one threw down a handful of coins from a window, and the ranks were broken in a scramble for the coppers. Julian, who was leaning apart in a corner of his balcony, heard a laugh like a growl behind him as the enormous hand of Grbits descended on his shoulder.

'Remember the lesson, young man: if you are called upon to deal with the soldiers of Herakleion, a fistful of silver amongst them will scatter them.'

Julian thought apprehensively that they must be overheard, but Grbits continued in supreme unconsciousness,--

'Look at their army, composed of shop-assistants and croupiers. Look at their general--a general in his spare moments, but in the serious business of his life a banker and an intriguer like the rest of them. I doubt whether he has ever seen anything more dead in his life than a dead dog in a gutter. I could pick him up and squash in his head like an egg.'

Grbits extended his arm and slowly unfolded the fingers of his enormous hand. At the same time he gave his great laugh that was like the laugh of a good-humoured ogre.

'At your service, young man,' he said, displaying the full breadth of his palm to Julian, 'whenever you stand in need of it. The Stavridists will be returned to-day; lose no time; show them your intentions.'

He impelled Julian forward to the edge of the balcony and pointed across to the Davenant house.

'That flag, young man: see to it that it disappears within the hour after the results of the elections are announced.'

The army was forming itself into two phalanxes on either side of the cathedral steps. Panaïoannou caracoled up and down shouting his orders, which were taken up and repeated by the busy officers on foot. Meanwhile the notables in black coats were arriving in a constant stream that flowed into the cathedral; old Christopoulos had already left the house to attend the religious ceremony; the foreign Ministers and Consuls attended out of compliment to Herakleion; Madame Lafarge had rolled down the route in her barouche with her bearded husband; Malteios had crossed the _platia_ from his own house, and Stavridis came, accompanied by his wife and daughters. Still the band played on, the crowd laughed, cheered, or murmured in derision, and the strident cries of the water-sellers rose from all parts of the _platia_.

Suddenly the band ceased to play, and in the hush only the hum of the crowd continued audible.

The religious procession came walking very slowly from the rue Royale, headed by a banner and by a file of young girls, walking two by two, in white dresses, with wreaths of roses on their heads. As they walked they scattered sham roses out of baskets, the gesture reminiscent of the big picture in the Senate-room. It was customary for the Premier of the Republic to walk alone, following these young girls, black and grave in his frock-coat after their virginal white, but on this occasion, as no one knew who the actual Premier was, a blank space was left to represent the problematical absentee. Following the space came the Premier's habitual escort, a posse of police; it should have been a platoon of soldiers, but Panaïoannou always refused to consent to such a diminution of his army.

'They say,' Grbits remarked to Julian in this connection, 'that the general withdraws even the sentries from the frontier to swell his ranks.'

'Herakleion is open to invasion,' said Julian, smiling.

Grbits replied sententiously, with the air of one creating a new proverb,--

'Herakleion is open to invasion, but who wants to invade Herakleion?'

The crowd watched the passage of the procession with the utmost solemnity. Not a sound was now heard but the monotonous step of feet. Religious awe had hushed political hilarity. Archbishop and bishops; archmandrites and _papás_ of the country districts, passed in a mingling of scarlet, purple and black. All the pomp of Herakleion had been pressed into service--all the clamorous, pretentious pomp, shouting for recognition, beating on a hollow drum; designed to impress the crowd; and perhaps, also, to impress, beyond the crowd, the silent Islands that possessed no army, no clergy, no worldly trappings, but that suffered and struggled uselessly, pitiably, against the tinsel tyrant in vain but indestructible rebellion.

* * * * * *

As five o'clock drew near, the entire population seemed to be collected in the _platia_. The white streak that had marked the route of the procession had long ago disappeared, and the square was now, seen from above, only a dense and shifting mass of people. In the Christopoulos drawing-room, where Julian still lingered, talking to Grbits and listening to the alternate foolishness, fanaticism, and ferocious good-humour of the giant, the Greeks rallied in numbers with only one topic on their lips. Old Christopoulos was frankly biting his nails and glancing at the clock; Alexander but thinly concealed his anxiety under a dribble of his usual banter. The band had ceased playing, and the subtle ear could detect an inflection in the very murmur of the crowd.

'Let us go on to the balcony again,' Grbits said to Julian; 'the results will be announced from the steps of Malteios' house.'

They went out; some of the Greeks followed them, and all pressed behind, near the window openings.

'It is a more than usually decisive day for Herakleion,' said old Christopoulos, and Julian knew that the words were spoken at, although not to, him.

He felt that the Greeks looked upon him as an intruder, wishing him away so that they might express their opinions freely, but in a spirit of contrariness he remained obstinately.

A shout went up suddenly from the crowd: a little man dressed in black, with a top-hat, and a great many white papers in his hand, had appeared in the frame of Malteios' front-door. He stood on the steps, coughed nervously, and dropped his papers.

'Inefficient little rat of a secretary!' cried Alexander in a burst of fury.

'Listen!' said Grbits.

A long pause of silence from the whole _platia_, in which one thin voice quavered, reaching only the front row of the crowd.

'Stavridis has it,' Grbits said quietly, who had been craning over the edge of the balcony. His eyes twinkled maliciously, delightedly, at Julian across the group of mortified Greeks. 'An immense majority,' he invented, enjoying himself.

Julian was already gone. Slipping behind old Christopoulos, whose saffron face had turned a dirty plum colour, he made his way downstairs and out into the street. A species of riot, in which the police, having failed successfully to intervene, were enthusiastically joining, had broken out in the _platia_. Some shouted for Stavridis, some for Malteios; some railed derisively against the Islands. People threw their hats into the air, waved their arms, and kicked up their legs. Some of them were vague as to the trend of their own opinions, others extremely determined, but all were agreed about making as much noise as possible. Julian passed unchallenged to his father's house.

Inside the door he found Aristotle talking with three islanders. They laid hold of him, urgent though respectful, searching his face with eager eyes.

'It means revolt at last; you will not desert us, Kyrie?'

He replied,--

'Come with me, and you will see.'

They followed him up the stairs, pressing closely after him. On the landing he met Eve and Kato, coming out of the drawing-room. The singer was flushed, two gold wheat-ears trembled in her hair, and she had thrown open the front of her dress. Eve hung on her arm.

'Julian!' Kato exclaimed, 'you have heard, Platon has gone?'

In her excitement she inadvertently used Malteios' Christian name.

'It means,' he replied, 'that Stavridis, now in power, will lose no time in bringing against the Islands all the iniquitous reforms we know he contemplates. It means that the first step must be taken by us.'

His use of the pronoun ranged himself, Kato, Aristotle, the three islanders, and the invisible Islands into an instant confederacy. Kato responded to it,--

'Thank God for this.'

They waited in complete confidence for his next words. He had shed his aloofness, and all his efficiency of active leadership was to the fore.

'Where is my father?'

'He went to the Cathedral; he has not come home yet, Kyrie.'

Julian passed into the drawing-room, followed by Eve and Kato and the four men. Outside the open window, fastened to the balcony, flashed the green and orange flag of Herakleion. Julian took a knife from his pocket, and, cutting the cord that held it, withdrew flag and flag-staff into the room and flung it on to the ground.

'Take it away,' he said to the islanders, 'or my father will order it to be replaced. And if he orders another to be hung out in its place,' he added, looking at them with severity, 'remember there is no other flag in the house, and none to be bought in Herakleion.'

At that moment a servant from the country-house came hurriedly into the room, drew Julian unceremoniously aside, and broke into an agitated recital in a low voice. Eve heard Julian saying,--

'Nicolas sends for me? But he should have given a reason. I cannot come now, I cannot leave Herakleion.'

And the servant,--

'Kyrie, the major-domo impressed upon me that I must on no account return without you. Something has occurred, something serious. What it is I do not know. The carriage is waiting at the back entrance; we could not drive across the _platia_ on account of the crowds.'

'I shall have to go, I suppose,' Julian said to Eve and Kato. 'I will go at once, and will return, if possible, this evening. Nicolas would not send without an excellent reason, though he need not have made this mystery. Possibly a message from Aphros.... In any case, I must go.'

'I will come with you,' Eve said unexpectedly.

V

In almost unbroken silence they drove out to the country-house, in a hired victoria, to the quick, soft trot of the two little lean horses, away from the heart of the noisy town; past the race-course with its empty stands; under the ilex-avenue in a tunnel of cool darkness; along the road, redolent with magnolias in the warmth of the evening; through the village, between the two white lodges; and round the bend of the drive between the bushes of eucalyptus. Eve had spoken, but he had said abruptly,--

'Don't talk; I want to think,' and she, after a little gasp of astonished indignation, had relapsed languorous into her corner, her head propped on her hand, and her profile alone visible to her cousin. He saw, in the brief glance that he vouchsafed her, that her red mouth looked more than usually sulky, in fact not unlike the mouth of a child on the point of tears, a very invitation to inquiry, but, more from indifference than deliberate wisdom, he was not disposed to take up the challenge. He too sat silent, his thoughts flying over the day, weighing the consequences of his own action, trying to forecast the future. He was far away from Eve, and she knew it. At times he enraged and exasperated her almost beyond control. His indifference was an outrage on her femininity. She knew him to be utterly beyond her influence: taciturn when he chose, ill-tempered when he chose, exuberant when he chose, rampageous, wild; insulting to her at moments; domineering whatever his mood, and regardless of her wishes; yet at the same time unconscious of all these things. Alone with her now, he had completely forgotten her presence by his side.

Her voice broke upon his reflections,--

'Thinking of the Islands, Julian?' and her words joining like a cogwheel smoothly on to the current of his mind, he answered naturally,--

'Yes,'

'I thought as much. I have something to tell you. You may not be interested. I am no longer engaged to Miloradovitch.'

'Since when?'

'Since yesterday evening. Since you left me, and ran away into the woods. I was angry, and vented my anger on him.'

'Was that fair?'

'He has you to thank. It has happened before--with others.'

Roused for a second from his absorption, he impatiently shrugged his shoulders, and turned his back, and looked out over the sea. Eve was again silent, brooding and resentful in her corner. Presently he turned towards her, and said angrily, reverting to the Islands,--

'You are the vainest and most exorbitant woman I know. You resent one's interest in anything but yourself.'

As she did not answer, he added,--

'How sulky you look; it's very unbecoming.'

Was no sense of proportion or of responsibility ever to weigh upon her beautiful shoulders? He was irritated, yet he knew that his irritation was half-assumed, and that in his heart he was no more annoyed by her fantasy than by the fantasy of Herakleion. They matched each other; their intangibility, their instability, were enough to make a man shake his fists to Heaven, yet he was beginning to believe that their colour and romance--for he never dissociated Eve and Herakleion in his mind--were the dearest treasures of his youth. He turned violently and amazingly upon her.

'Eve, I sometimes hate you, damn you; but you are the rainbow of my days.'

She smiled, and, enlightened, he perceived with interest, curiosity, and amused resignation, the clearer grouping of the affairs of his youthful years. Fantasy to youth! Sobriety to middle-age! Carried away, he said to her,--

'Eve! I want adventure, Eve!'

Her eyes lit up in instant response, but he could not read her inward thought, that the major part of his adventure should be, not Aphros, but herself. He noted, however, her lighted eyes, and leaned over to her.

'You are a born adventurer, Eve, also.'

She remained silent, but her eyes continued to dwell on him, and to herself she was thinking, always sardonic although the matter was of such perennial, such all-eclipsing importance to her,--

'A la bonne heure, he realises my existence.'

'What a pity you are not a boy; we could have seen the adventure of the Islands through together.'

('The Islands always!' she thought ruefully.)

'I should like to cross to Aphros to-night,' he murmured, with absent eyes....

('Gone again,' she thought. 'I held him for a moment.')

When they reached the house no servants were visible, but in reply to the bell a young servant appeared, scared, white-faced, and, as rapidly disappearing, was replaced by the old major-domo. He burst open the door into the passage, a crowd of words pressing on each other's heels in his mouth; he had expected Julian alone; when he saw Eve, who was idly turning over the letters that awaited her, he clapped his hand tightly over his lips, and stood, struggling with his speech, balancing himself in his arrested impetus on his toes.

'Well, Nicolas?' said Julian.

The major-domo exploded, removing his hand from his mouth,--

'Kyrie! a word alone....' and as abruptly replaced the constraining fingers.

Julian followed him through the swing door into the servants' quarters, where the torrent broke loose.

'Kyrie, a disaster! I have sent men with a stretcher. I remained in the house myself looking for your return. Father Paul--yes, yes, it is he--drowned--yes, drowned--at the bottom of the garden. Come, Kyrie, for the love of God. Give directions. I am too old a man. God be praised, you have come. Only hasten. The men are there already with lanterns.'

He was clinging helplessly to Julian's wrist, and kept moving his fingers up and down Julian's arm, twitching fingers that sought reassurance from firmer muscles, in a distracted way, while his eyes beseechingly explored Julian's face.

Julian, shocked, jarred, incredulous, shook off the feeble fingers in irritation. The thing was an outrage on the excitement of the day. The transition to tragedy was so violent that he wished, in revolt, to disbelieve it.

'You must be mistaken, Nicolas!'

'Kyrie, I am not mistaken. The body is lying on the shore. You can see it there. I have sent lanterns and a stretcher. I beg of you to come.'

He spoke, tugging at Julian's sleeve, and as Julian remained unaccountably immovable he sank to his knees, clasping his hands and raising imploring eyes. His fustanelle spread its pleats in a circle on the stone floor. His story had suddenly become vivid to Julian with the words, 'The body is lying on the shore'; 'drowned,' he had said before, but that had summoned no picture. The body was lying on the shore. The body! Paul, brisk, alive, familiar, now a body, merely. The body! had a wave, washing forward, deposited it gently, and retreated without its burden? or had it floated, pale-faced under the stars, till some man, looking by chance down at the sea from the terrace at the foot of the garden, caught that pale, almost phosphorescent gleam rocking on the swell of the water?

The old major-domo followed Julian's stride between the lemon-trees, obsequious and conciliatory. The windows of the house shone behind them, the house of tragedy, where Eve remained as yet uninformed, uninvaded by the solemnity, the reality, of the present. Later, she would have to be told that a man's figure had been wrenched from their intimate and daily circle. The situation appeared grotesquely out of keeping with the foregoing day, and with the wide and gentle night.

From the paved walk under the pergola of gourds rough steps led down to the sea. Julian, pausing, perceived around the yellow squares of the lanterns the indistinct figures of men, and heard their low, disconnected talk breaking intermittently on the continuous wash of the waves. The sea that he loved filled him with a sudden revulsion for the indifference of its unceasing movement after its murder of a man. It should, in decency, have remained quiet, silent; impenetrable, unrepentant, perhaps; inscrutable, but at least silent; its murmur echoed almost as the murmur of a triumph....

He descended the steps. As he came into view, the men's fragmentary talk died away; their dim group fell apart; he passed between them, and stood beside the body of Paul.

Death. He had never seen it. As he saw it now, he thought that he had never beheld anything so incontestably real as its irrevocable stillness. Here was finality; here was defeat beyond repair. In the face of this judgment no revolt was possible. Only acceptance was possible. The last word in life's argument had been spoken by an adversary for long remote, forgotten; an adversary who had remained ironically dumb before the babble, knowing that in his own time, with one word, he could produce the irrefutable answer. There was something positively satisfying in the faultlessness of the conclusion. He had not thought that death would be like this. Not cruel, not ugly, not beautiful, not terrifying--merely unanswerable. He wondered now at the multitude of sensations that had chased successively across his mind or across his vision: the elections, Fru Thyregod, the jealousy of Eve, his incredulity and resentment at the news, his disinclination for action, his indignation against the indifference of the sea; these things were vain when here, at his feet, lay the ultimate solution.

Paul lay on his back, his arms straight down his sides, and his long, wiry body closely sheathed in the wet soutane. The square toes of his boots stuck up, close together, like the feet of a swathed mummy. His upturned face gleamed white with a tinge of green in the light of the lanterns, and appeared more luminous than they. So neat, so orderly he lay; but his hair, alone disordered, fell in wet red wisps across his neck and along the ground behind his head.

At that moment from the direction of Herakleion there came a long hiss and a rush of bright gold up into the sky; there was a crackle of small explosions, and fountains of gold showered against the night as the first fireworks went up from the quays. Rockets soared, bursting into coloured stars among the real stars, and plumes of golden light spread themselves dazzlingly above the sea. Faint sounds of cheering were borne upon the breeze.

The men around the body of the priest waited, ignorant and bewildered, relieved that some one had come to take command. Their eyes were bent upon Julian as he stood looking down; they thought he was praying for the dead. Presently he became aware of their expectation, and pronounced with a start,--

'Bind up his hair!'

Fingers hastened clumsily to deal with the stringy red locks; the limp head was supported, and the hair knotted somehow into a semblance of its accustomed roll. The old major-domo quavered in a guilty voice, as though taking the blame for carelessness,--

'The hat is lost, Kyrie.'

Julian let his eyes travel over the little group of men, islanders all, with an expression of searching inquiry.

'Which of you made this discovery?'

It appeared that one of them, going to the edge of the sea in expectation of the fireworks, had noticed, not the darkness of the body, but the pallor of the face, in the water not far out from the rocks. He had waded in and drawn the body ashore. Dead Paul lay there deaf and indifferent to this account of his own finding.

'No one can explain....'

Ah, no! and he, who could have explained, was beyond the reach of their curiosity. Julian looked at the useless lips, unruffled even by a smile of sarcasm. He had known Paul all his life, had learnt from him, travelled with him, eaten with him, chaffed him lightly, but never, save in that one moment when he had gripped the priest by the wrist and had looked with steadying intention into his eyes, had their intimate personalities brushed in passing. Julian had no genius for friendship.... He began to see that this death had ended an existence which had run parallel with, but utterly walled off from, his own.

In shame the words tore themselves from him,--

'Had he any trouble?'

The men slowly, gravely, mournfully shook their heads. They could not tell. The priest had moved amongst them, charitable, even saintly; yes, saintly, and one did not expect confidences of a priest. A priest was a man who received the confidences of other men. Julian heard, and, possessed by a strong desire, a necessity, for self-accusation, he said to them in a tone of urgent and impersonal Justice, as one who makes a declaration, expecting neither protest nor acquiescence,--

'I should have inquired into his loneliness.'

They were slightly startled, but, in their ignorance, not over-surprised, only wondering why he delayed in giving the order to move the body on to the stretcher and carry it up to the church. Farther up the coast, the rockets continued to soar, throwing out bubbles of green and red and orange, fantastically tawdry. Julian remained staring at the unresponsive corpse, repeating sorrowfully,--

'I should have inquired--yes, I should have inquired--into his loneliness.'

He spoke with infinite regret, learning a lesson, shedding a particle of his youth. He had taken for granted that other men's lives were as promising, as full of dissimulated eagerness, as his own. He had walked for many hours up and down Paul's study, lost in an audible monologue, expounding his theories, tossing his rough head, emphasising, enlarging, making discoveries, intent on his egotism, hewing out his convictions, while the priest sat by the table, leaning his head on his hand, scarcely contributing a word, always listening. During those hours, surely, his private troubles had been forgotten? Or had they been present, gnawing, beneath the mask of sympathy? A priest was a man who received the confidences of other men!

'Carry him up,' Julian said, 'carry him up to the church.'

He walked away alone as the dark cortège set itself in movement, his mind strangely accustomed to the fact that Paul would no longer frequent their house and that the long black figure would no longer stroll, tall and lean, between the lemon-trees in the garden. The fact was more simple and more easily acceptable than he could have anticipated. It seemed already quite an old-established fact. He remembered with a shock of surprise, and a raising of his eyebrows, that he yet had to communicate it to Eve. He knew it so well himself that he thought every one else must know it too. He was immeasurably more distressed by the tardy realisation of his own egotism in regard to Paul, than by the fact of Paul's death.

He walked very slowly, delaying the moment when he must speak to Eve. He sickened at the prospect of the numerous inevitable inquiries that would be made to him by both his father and his uncle. He would never hint to them that the priest had had a private trouble. He rejoiced to remember his former loyalty, and to know that Eve remained ignorant of that extraordinary, unexplained conversation when Paul had talked about the mice. Mice in the church! He, Julian, must see to the decent covering of the body. And of the face, especially of the face.

An immense golden wheel flared out of the darkness; whirled, and died away above the sea.

In the dim church the men had set down the stretcher before the iconostase. Julian felt his way cautiously amongst the rush-bottomed chairs. The men were standing about the stretcher, their fishing caps in their hands, awed into a whispering mysticism which Julian's voice harshly interrupted,--

'Go for a cloth, one of you--the largest cloth you can find.'

He had spoken loudly in defiance of the melancholy peace of the church, that received so complacently within its ready precincts the visible remains from which the spirit, troubled and uncompanioned in life, had fled. He had always thought the church complacent, irritatingly remote from pulsating human existence, but never more so than now when it accepted the dead body as by right, firstly within its walls, and lastly within its ground, to decompose and rot, the body of its priest, among the bodies of other once vital and much-enduring men.

'Kyrie, we can find only two large cloths, one a dust-sheet, and one a linen cloth to spread over the altar. Which are we to use?'

'Which is the larger?'

'Kyrie, the dust-sheet, but the altar-cloth is of linen edged with lace.'

'Use the dust-sheet; dust to dust,' said Julian bitterly.

Shocked and uncomprehending, they obeyed. The black figure now became a white expanse, under which the limbs and features defined themselves as the folds sank into place.

'He is completely covered over?'

'Completely, Kyrie.'

'The mice cannot run over his face?'

'Kyrie, no!'

'Then no more can be done until one of you ride into Herakleion for the doctor.'

He left them, re-entering the garden by the side-gate which Paul had himself constructed with his capable, carpenter's hands. There was now no further excuse for delay; he must exchange the darkness for the unwelcome light, and must share out his private knowledge to Eve. Those men, fisher-folk, simple folk, had not counted as human spectators, but rather as part of the brotherhood of night, nature, and the stars.

He waited for Eve in the drawing-room, having assured himself that she had been told nothing, and there, presently, he saw her come in, her heavy hair dressed high, a fan and a flower drooping from her hand, and a fringed Spanish shawl hanging its straight silk folds from her escaping shoulders. Before her indolence, and her slumbrous delicacy, he hesitated. He wildly thought that he would allow the news to wait. Tragedy, reality, were at that moment so far removed from her.... She said in delight, coming up to him, and forgetful that they were in the house in obedience to a mysterious and urgent message,--

'Julian, have you seen the fireworks? Come out into the garden. We'll watch.'

He put his arm through her bare arm,--

'Eve, I must tell you something.'

'Fru Thyregod?' she cried, and the difficulty of his task became all but insurmountable.

'Something serious. Something about Father Paul.'

Her strange eyes gave him a glance of undefinable suspicion.

'What about him?'

'He has been found, in the water, at the bottom of the garden.'

'In the water?'

'In the sea. Drowned.'

He told her all the circumstances, doggedly, conscientiously, under the mockery of the tinsel flames that streamed out from the top of the columns, and of the distant lights flashing through the windows, speaking as a man who proclaims in a foreign country a great truth bought by the harsh experience of his soul, to an audience unconversant with his alien tongue. This truth that he had won, in the presence of quiet stars, quieter death, and simple men, was desecrated by its recital to a vain woman in a room where the very architecture was based on falsity. Still he persevered, believing that his own intensity of feeling must end in piercing its way to the foundations of her heart. He laid bare even his harassing conviction of his neglected responsibility,--

'I should have suspected ... I should have suspected....'

He looked at Eve; she had broken down and was sobbing, Paul's name mingled incoherently with her sobs. He did not doubt that she was profoundly shocked, but with a new-found cynicism he ascribed her tears to shock rather than to sorrow. He himself would have been incapable of shedding a single tear. He waited quietly for her to recover herself.

'Oh, Julian! Poor Paul! How terrible to die like that, alone, in the sea, at night....' For a moment her eyes were expressive of real horror, and she clasped Julian's hand, gazing at him while all the visions of her imagination were alive in her eyes. She seemed to be on the point of adding something further, but continued to cry for a few moments, and then said, greatly sobered, 'You appear to take for granted that he has killed himself?'

He considered this. Up to the present no doubt whatever had existed in his mind. The possibility of an accident had not occurred to him. The very quality of repose and peace that he had witnessed had offered itself to him as the manifest evidence that the man had sought the only solution for a life grown unendurable. He had acknowledged the man's wisdom, bowing before his recognition of the conclusive infallibility of death as a means of escape. Cowardly? so men often said, but circumstances were conceivable--circumstances in the present case unknown, withheld, and therefore not to be violated by so much as a hazarded guess--circumstances were conceivable in which no other course was to be contemplated. He replied with gravity,--

'I do believe he put an end to his life.'

The secret reason would probably never be disclosed; even if it came within sight, Julian must now turn his eyes the other way. The secret which he might have, nay, should have, wrenched from his friend's reserve while he still lived, must remain sacred and unprofaned now that he was dead. Not only must he guard it from his own knowledge, but from the knowledge of others. With this resolution he perceived that he had already blundered.

'Eve, I have been wrong; this thing must be presented as an accident. I have no grounds for believing that he took his life. I must rely on you to support me. In fairness on poor Paul.... He told me nothing. A man has a right to his own reticence.'

He paused, startled at the truth of his discovery, and cried out, taking his head between his hands,--

'Oh God! the appalling loneliness of us all!'

He shook his head despairingly for a long moment with his hands pressed over his temples. Dropping his hands with a gesture of discouragement and lassitude, he regarded Eve.

'I've found things out to-night, I think I've aged by five years. I know that Paul suffered enough to put an end to himself. We can't tell what he suffered from. I never intended to let you think he had suffered. We must never let any one else suspect it. But imagine the stages and degrees of suffering which led him to that state of mind; imagine his hours, his days, and specially his nights. I looked on him as a village priest, limited to his village; I thought his long hair funny; God forgive me, I slightly despised him. You, Eve, you thought him ornamental, a picturesque appendage to the house. And all that while, he was moving slowly towards the determination that he must kill himself.... Perhaps, probably, he took his decision yesterday, when you and I were at the picnic. When Fru Thyregod.... For months, perhaps, or for years, he had been living with the secret that was to kill him. He knew, but no one else knew. He shared his knowledge with no one. I think I shall never look at a man again without awe, and reverence, and terror.'

He was trembling strongly, discovering his fellows, discovering himself, his glowing eyes never left Eve's face. He went on talking rapidly, as though eager to translate all there was to translate into words before the aroused energy deserted him.

'You vain, you delicate, unreal thing, do you understand at all? Have you ever seen a dead man? You don't know the meaning of pain. You inflict pain for your amusement. You thing of leisure, you toy! Your deepest emotion is your jealousy. You can be jealous even where you cannot love. You make a plaything of men's pain--you woman! You can change your personality twenty times a day. You can't understand a man's slow, coherent progression; he, always the same person, scarred with the wounds of the past. To wound you would be like wounding a wraith.'

Under the fury of his unexpected outburst, she protested,--

'Julian, why attack me? I've done, I've said, nothing.'

'You listened uncomprehendingly to me, thinking if you thought at all, that by to-morrow I should have forgotten my mood of to-night. You are wrong. I've gone a step forward to-day. I've learnt.... Learnt, I mean, to respect men who suffer. Learnt the continuity and the coherence of life. Days linked to days. For you, an episode is an isolated episode.'

He softened.

'No wonder you look bewildered. If you want the truth, I am angry with myself for my blindness towards Paul. Poor little Eve! I only meant half I said.'

'You meant every word; one never speaks the truth so fully as when one speaks it unintentionally.'

He smiled, but tolerantly and without malice.

'Eve betrays herself by the glibness of the axiom. You know nothing of truth. But I've seen truth to-night. All Paul's past life is mystery, shadow, enigma to me, but at the same time there is a central light--blinding, incandescent light--which is the fact that he suffered. Suffered so much that, a priest, he preferred the supreme sin to such suffering. Suffered so much that, a man, he preferred death to such suffering! All his natural desire for life was conquered. That irresistible instinct, that primal law, that persists even to the moment when darkness and unconsciousness overwhelm us--the fight for life, the battle to retain our birthright--all this was conquered. The instinct to escape from life became stronger than the instinct to preserve it! Isn't that profoundly illuminating?'

He paused.

'That fact sweeps, for me, like a great searchlight over an abyss of pain. The pain the man must have endured before he arrived at such a reversal of his religion and of his most primitive instinct! His world was, at the end, turned upside down. A terrifying nightmare. He took the only course. You cannot think how final death is--so final, so simple. So simple. There is no more to be said. I had no idea....'

He spoke himself with the simplicity he was trying to express. He said again, candidly, evenly, in a voice from which all the emotion had passed,--

'So simple.'

They were silent for a long time. He had forgotten her, and she was wondering whether she dared now recall him to the personal. She had listened, gratified when he attacked her, resentful when he forgot her, bored with his detachment, but wise enough to conceal both her resentment and her boredom. She had worshipped him in his anger, and had admired his good looks in the midst of his fire. She had been infinitely more interested in him than in Paul. Shocked for a moment by Paul's death, aware of the stirrings of pity, she had quickly neglected both for the sake of the living Julian.

She reviewed a procession of phrases with which she might recall his attention.

'You despise me, Julian.'

'No, I only dissociate you. You represent a different sphere. You belong to Herakleion. I love you--in your place.'

'You are hurting me.'

He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her towards the fight. She let him have his way, with the disconcerting humility he had sometimes found in her. She bore his inspection mutely, her hands dropping loosely by her sides, fragile before his strength. He found that his thoughts had swept back, away from death, away from Paul, to her sweetness and her worthlessness.

'Many people care for you--more fools they,' he said. 'You and I, Eve, must be allies now. You say I despise you. I shall do so less if I can enlist your loyalty in Paul's cause. He has died as the result of an accident. Are you to be trusted?'

He felt her soft shoulders move in the slightest shrug under the pressure of his hands.

'Do you think,' she asked, 'that you will be believed?'

'I shall insist upon being believed. There is no evidence--is there?--to prove me wrong.'

As she did not answer, he repeated his question, then released her in suspicion.

'What do you know? tell me!'

After a very long pause, he said quietly,--

'I understand. There are many ways of conveying information. I am very blind about some things. Heavens! if I had suspected that truth, either you would not have remained here, or Paul would not have remained here. A priest! Unheard of.... A priest to add to your collection. First Miloradovitch, now Paul. Moths pinned upon a board. He loved you? Oh,' he cried in a passion, 'I see it all: he struggled, you persisted--till you secured him. A joke to you. Not a joke now--surely not a joke, even to you--but a triumph. Am I right? A triumph! A man, dead for you. A priest. You allowed me to talk, knowing all the while.'

'I am very sorry for Paul,' she said absently.

He laughed at the pitiably inadequate word.

'Have the courage to admit that you are flattered. More flattered than grieved. Sorry for Paul--yes, toss him that conventional tribute before turning to the luxury of your gratified vanity. That such things can be! Surely men and women live in different worlds?'

'But, Julian, what could I do?'

'He told you he loved you?'

She acquiesced, and he stood frowning at her, his hands buried in his pockets and his head thrust forward, picturing the scenes, which had probably been numerous, between her and the priest, letting his imagination play over the anguish of his friend and Eve's indifference. That she had not wholly discouraged him, he was sure. She would not so easily have let him go. Julian was certain, as though he had observed their interviews from a hidden corner, that she had amusedly provoked him, watched him with half-closed, ironical eyes, dropped him a judicious word in her honeyed voice, driven him to despair by her disregard, raised him to joy by her capricious friendliness. They had had every opportunity for meeting. Eve was strangely secretive. All had been carried on unsuspected. At this point he spoke aloud, almost with admiration,--

'That you, who are so shallow, should be so deep!'

A glimpse of her life had been revealed to him, but what secrets remained yet hidden? The veils were lifting from his simplicity; he contemplated, as it were, a new world--Eve's world, ephemerally and clandestinely populated. He contemplated it in fascination, acknowledging that here was an additional, a separate art, insistent for recognition, dominating, imperative, forcing itself impudently upon mankind, exasperating to the straight-minded because it imposed itself, would not be denied, was subtle, pretended so unswervingly to dignity that dignity was accorded it by a credulous humanity--the art which Eve practised, so vain, so cruel, so unproductive, the most fantastically prosperous of impostors!

She saw the marvel in his eyes, and smiled slightly.

'Well, Julian?'

'I am wondering,' he cried, 'wondering! trying to pierce to your mind, your peopled memory, your present occupation, your science. What do you know? what have you heard? What have you seen? You, so young.... Who are not young. How many secrets like the secret of Paul are buried away in your heart? That you will never betray? Do you ever look forward to the procession of your life? You, so young. I think you have some extraordinary, instinctive, inherited wisdom, some ready-made heritage, bequeathed to you by generations, that compensates for the deficiencies of your own experience. Because you are so young. And so old, that I am afraid.'

'Poor Julian,' she murmured. A gulf of years lay between them, and she spoke to him as a woman to a boy. He was profoundly shaken, while she remained quiet, gently sarcastic, pitying towards him, who, so vastly stronger than she, became a bewildered child upon her own ground. He had seen death, but she had seen, toyed with, dissected the living heart. She added, 'Don't try to understand. Forget me and be yourself. You are annoying me.'

She had spoken the last words with such impatience, that, torn from his speculations, he asked,--

'Annoying you? Why?'

After a short hesitation she gave him the truth,--

'I dislike seeing you at fault.'

He passed to a further bewilderment.

'I want you infallible.'

Rousing herself from the chair where she had been indolently lying, she said in the deepest tones of her contralto voice,--

'Julian, you think me worthless and vain; you condemn me as that without the charity of any further thought. You are right to think me heartless towards those I don't love. You believe that I spend my life in vanity. Julian, I only ask to be taken away from my life; I have beliefs, and I have creeds, both of my own making, but I'm like a ship without a rudder. I'm wasting my life in vanity. I'm capable of other things. I'm capable of the deepest good, I know, as well as of the most shallow evil. Nobody knows, except perhaps Kato a little, how my real life is made up of dreams and illusions that I cherish. People are far more unreal to me than my own imaginings. One of my beliefs is about you. You mustn't ever destroy it. I believe you could do anything.'

'No, no,' he said, astonished.

But she insisted, lit by the flame of her conviction.

'Yes, anything. I have the profoundest contempt for the herd--to which you don't belong. I have believed in you since I was a child; believed in you, I mean, as something Olympian of which I was frightened. I have always known that you would justify my faith.'

'But I am ordinary, normal!' he said, defending himself. He mistrusted her profoundly; wondered what attack she was engineering. Experience of her had taught him to be sceptical.

'Ah, don't you see, Julian, when I am sincere?' she said, her voice breaking. 'I am telling you now one of the secrets of my heart, if you only knew it. The gentle, the amiable, the pleasant--yes, they're my toys. I'm cruel, I suppose. I'm always told so. I don't care; they're worth nothing. It does their little souls good to pass through the mill. But you, my intractable Julian....'

'Kyrie,' said Nicolas, appearing, 'Tsantilas Tsigaridis, from Aphros, asks urgently whether you will receive him?'

'Bring him in,' said Julian, conscious of relief, for Eve's words had begun to trouble him.

Outside, the fireworks continued to flash like summer lightning.

VI

Tsigaridis came forward into the room, his fishing cap between his fingers, and his white hair standing out in bunches of wiry curls round his face. Determination was written in the set gravity of his features, even in the respectful bow with which he came to a halt before Julian. Interrupted in their conversation, Eve had fallen, back, half lying, in her arm-chair, and Julian, who had been pacing up and down, stood still with folded arms, a frown cleaving a deep valley between his brows. He spoke to Tsigaridis,--

'You asked for me, Tsantilas?'

'I am a messenger, Kyrie.'

He looked from the young man to the girl, his age haughty towards their youth, his devotion submissive towards the advantage of their birth. He said to Julian, using almost the same words as he had used once before,--

'The people of Aphros are the people of your people,' and he bowed again.

Julian had recovered his self-possession; he no longer felt dazed and bewildered as he had felt before Eve. In speaking to Tsigaridis he was speaking of things he understood. He knew very well the summons Tsigaridis was bringing him, the rude and fine old man, single-sighted as a prophet, direct and unswerving in the cause he had at heart. He imagined, with almost physical vividness, the hand of the fisherman on his shoulder, impelling him forward.

'Kyrie,' Tsigaridis continued, 'to-day the flag of Herakleion flew from the house of your honoured father until you with your own hand threw it down. I was in Herakleion, where the news was brought to me, and there is no doubt that by now it is known also on Aphros. Your action can be interpreted only in one way. I know that to-day'--he crossed himself devoutly--'Father Paul, who was our friend and yours, has met his death; I break in upon your sorrow; I dared not wait; even death must not delay me. Kyrie, I come to bring you back to Aphros.'

'I will go to-night,' said Julian without hesitation. 'My father and my uncle are in Herakleion, and I will start from here before they can stop me. Have you a boat?'

'I can procure one,' said Tsigaridis, very erect, and looking at Julian with shining eyes.

'Then I will meet you at the private jetty in two hours' time. We shall be unnoted in the darkness, and the illuminations will be over by then.'

'Assuredly,' said the fisherman.

'We go in all secrecy,' Julian added. 'Tsantilas, listen: can you distribute two orders for me by nightfall? I understand that you have organised a system of communications?'

The old man's face relaxed slowly from its stern dignity; it softened into a mixture of slyness and pride and tenderness--the tenderness of a father for his favourite child. Almost a smile struggled with his lips. A strange contortion troubled his brows. Slowly and portentously, he winked.

'Then send word to Aphros,' said Julian, 'that no boat be allowed to leave the Islands, and send word round the mainland recalling every available islander. Is it possible? I know that every islander in Herakleion to-night is sitting with boon companions in buried haunts, talking, talking, talking. Call them together, Tsantilas.'

'It will be done, Kyrie.'

'And Madame Kato--she must be informed.'

'Kyrie, she sends you a message that she leaves Herakleion by to-night's train for Athens. When her work is done in Athens, she also will return to Aphros.'

Tsigaridis took a step forward and lifted Julian's hands to his lips as was his wont. He bowed, and with his patriarchal gravity left the room.

Julian in a storm of excitement flung himself upon his knees beside Eve's chair.

'Eve!' he cried. 'Oh, the wild adventure! Do you understand? It has come at last. Paul--I had almost forgotten the Islands for him, and now I must forget him for the Islands. Too much has happened to-day. To-morrow all Herakleion will know that the Islands have broken away, and that I and every islander are upon Aphros. They will come at first with threats; they will send representatives. I shall refuse to retract our declaration. Then they will begin to carry out their threats. Panaïoannou--think of it!--will organise an attack with boats.' He became sunk in practical thought, from which emerging he said more slowly and carefully, 'They will not dare to bombard the island because they know that Italy and Greece are watching every move, and with a single man-of-war could blow the whole town of Herakleion higher than Mount Mylassa. Kato will watch over us from Athens.... They will dare to use no more than reasonable violence. And they will never gain a footing.'

Eve was leaning forward; she put both hands on his shoulders as he knelt.

'Go on talking to me,' she said, 'my darling.'

In a low, intense voice, with unseeing eyes, he released all the flood of secret thought that he had, in his life, expressed only to Paul and to Kato.

'I went once to Aphros, more than a year ago; you remember. They asked me then, through Tsigaridis, whether I would champion them if they needed championship. I said I would. Father was very angry. He is incomprehensibly cynical about the Islands, so cynical that I have been tempted to think him merely mercenary, anxious to live at peace with Herakleion for the sake of his profits. He is as cynical as Malteios, or any stay-in-power politician here. He read me a lecture and called the people a lot of rebellious good-for-nothings. Eve, what do I care? One thing is true, one thing is real: those people suffer. Everything on earth is empty, except pain. Paul suffered, so much that he preferred to die. But a whole people doesn't die. I went away to England, and I put Herakleion aside, but at the bottom of my heart I never thought of anything else; I knew I was bound to those people, and I lived, I swear to you, with the sole idea that I should come back, and that this adventure of rescue would happen some day exactly as it is happening now. I thought of Kato and of Tsigaridis as symbolical, almost mythological beings; my tutelary deities; Kato vigorous, and Tsigaridis stern. Eve, I would rather die than read disappointment in that man's eyes. I never made him many promises, but he must find me better than my word.'

He got up and walked once or twice up and down the room, beating his fist against his palm and saying,--

'Whatever good I do in my life, will be done in the Islands.'

He came back and stood by Eve.

'Eve, yesterday morning when I rode over the hills I saw the Islands lying out in the sea.... I thought of father, cynical and indifferent, and of Stavridis, a self-seeker. I wondered whether I should grow into that. I thought that in illusion lay the only loveliness.'

'Ah, how I agree!' she said fervently.

He dropped on his knees again beside her, and she put her fingers lightly on his hair.

'When Tsigaridis came, you were telling me that you believed in me--Heaven knows why. For my part, I only believe that one can accomplish when one has faith in a cause, and is blind to one's own fate. And I believe that the only cause worthy of such faith, is the redemption of souls from pain. I set aside all doubt. I will listen to no argument, and I will walk straight towards the object I have chosen. If my faith is an illusion, I will make that illusion into a reality by the sheer force of my faith.'

He looked up at Eve, whose eyes were strangely intent on him.

'You see,' he said, fingering the fringe of her Spanish shawl, 'Herakleion is my battleground, and if I am to tilt against windmills it must be in Herakleion. I have staked out Herakleion for my own, as one stakes out a claim in a gold-mining country. The Islands are the whole adventure of youth for me.'

'And what am I?' she murmured to him.

He looked at her without appearing to see her; he propped his elbow on her knee, leant his chin in his palm, and went on talking about the Islands.

'I know that I am making the thing into a religion, but then I could never live, simply drifting along. Aimless.... I don't understand existence on those terms. I am quite prepared to give everything for my idea; father can disinherit me, and I know I am very likely to be killed. I don't care. I may be mistaken; I may be making a blunder, an error of judgment. I don't care. Those people are mine. Those Islands are my faith. I am blind.'

'And you enjoy the adventure,' she said.

'Of course, I enjoy the adventure. But there is more in it than that,' he said, shaking his head; 'there is conviction, burnt into me. Fanatical. Whoever is ready to pay the ultimate price for his belief, has a right to that belief. Heaven preserve me,' he cried, showing his fist, 'from growing like father, or Malteios, or Stavridis. Eve, you understand.'

She murmured again,--

'And what am I? What part have I got in this world of yours?'

Again he did not appear to hear her, but making an effort to get up, he said,--

'I promised to meet Tsantilas, and I must go,' but she pressed her hands on his shoulders and held him down.

'Stay a little longer. I want to talk to you.'

Kneeling there, he saw at last that her mouth was very resolute and her eyes full of a desperate decision. She sat forward in her chair, so close to him that he felt the warmth of her body, and saw that at the base of her throat a little pulse was beating quickly.

'What is it, Eve?'

'This,' she said, 'that if I let you go I may never see you again. How much time have you?'

He glanced at the heavy clock between the lapis columns.

'An hour and a half.'

'Give me half an hour.'

'Do you want to stop me from going?'

'Could I stop you if I tried?'

'I should never listen to you.'

'Julian,' she said, 'I rarely boast, as you know, but I am wondering now how many people in Herakleion would abandon their dearest ideals for me? If you think my boast is empty--remember Paul.'

He paused for a moment, genuinely surprised by the point of view she presented to him.

'But I am different,' he said then, quite simply and with an air of finality.

She laughed a low, delighted laugh.

'You have said it: you are different. Of course you are different. So different, that you never notice me. People cringe to me--oh, I may say this to you--but you, Julian, either you are angry with me or else you forget me.'

She looked at the clock, and for the first time a slight loss of self-assurance came over her, surprising and attractive in her, who seemed always to hold every situation in such contemptuous control.

'Only half an hour,' she said, 'and I have to say to you all that which I have been at such pains to conceal--hoping all the while that you would force the gates of my concealment, trample on my hypocrisy!'

Her eyes lost their irony and became troubled; she gazed at him with the distress of a child. He was uneasily conscious of his own embarrassment; he felt the shame of taking unawares the self-reliant in a moment of weakness, the mingled delight and perplexity of the hunter who comes suddenly upon the nymph, bare and gleaming, at the edge of a pool. All instinct of chivalry urged him to retreat until she should have recovered her self-possession. He desired to help her, tender and protective; and again, relentlessly, he would have outraged her reticence, forced her to the uttermost lengths of self-revelation, spared her no abasement, enjoyed her humiliation. Simultaneously, he wanted the triumph over her pride, the battle joined with a worthy foe; and the luxury of comforting her new and sudden pathos, as he alone, he knew, could comfort it. She summoned in him, uncivilised and wholly primitive, a passion of tyranny and a passion of possessive protection.

He yielded to the former, and continued to look at her in expectation, without speaking.

'Help me a little, Julian,' she murmured piteously, keeping her eyes bent on her hands, which were lying in her lap. 'Look back a little, and remember me. I can remember you so well: coming and going and disregarding me, or furiously angry with me; very often unkind to me; tolerant of me sometimes; negligently, insultingly, certain of me always!'

'We used to say that although we parted for months, we always came together again.'

She raised her eyes, grateful to him, as he still knelt on the floor in front of her, but he was not looking at her; he was staring at nothing, straight in front of him.

'Julian,' she said, and spoke of their childhood, knowing that her best hope lay in keeping his thoughts distant from the present evening.

Her distress, which had been genuine, had passed. She had a vital game to play, and was playing it with the full resources of her ability. She swept the chords lightly, swift to strike again that chord which had whispered in response. She bent a little closer to him.

'I have always had this belief in you, of which I told you. You and I both have in us the making of fanatics. We never have led, and never should lead, the tame life of the herd.'

She touched him with that, and regained command over his eyes, which this time she held unswervingly. But, having forced him to look at her, she saw a frown gathering on his brows; he sprang to his feet, and made a gesture as if to push her from him.

'You are playing with me; if you saw me lying dead on that rug you would turn from me as indifferently as from Paul.'

At this moment of her greatest danger, as he stood towering over her, she dropped her face into her hands, and he looked down only upon the nape of her neck and her waving hair. Before he could speak she looked up again, her eyes very sorrowful under plaintive brows.

'Do I deserve that you should say that to me? I never pretended to be anything but indifferent to those I didn't love. I should have been more hypocritical. You despise me now, so I pay the penalty of my own candour. I have not the pleasant graces of a Fru Thyregod, Julian; not towards you, that is. I wouldn't offer you the insult of an easy philandering. I might make your life a burden; I might even kill you. I know I have often been impossible towards you in the past. I should probably be still more impossible in the future. If I loved you less, I should, no doubt, love you better. You see that I am candid.'

He was struck, and reflected: she spoke truly, there was indeed a vein of candour which contradicted and redeemed the petty deceits and untruthfulnesses which so exasperated and offended him. But he would not admit his hesitation.

'I have told you a hundred times that you are cruel and vain and irredeemably worthless.'

She answered after a pause, in the deep and wonderful voice which she knew so well how to use,--

'You are more cruel than I; you hurt me more than I can say.'

He resisted his impulse to renounce his words, to pretend that he had chosen them in deliberate malice. As he said nothing, she added,--

'Besides, have I ever shown myself any of those things to you? I haven't been cruel to you; I haven't even been selfish; you have no right to find fault with me.'

She had blundered; he flew into a rage.

'Your damned feminine reasoning! Your damned personal point of view! I can see well enough the fashion in which you treat other men. I don't judge you only by your attitude towards myself.'

Off her guard, she was really incapable of grasping his argument; she tried to insist, to justify herself, but before his storm of anger she cowered away.

'Julian, how you frighten me.'

'You only pretend to be frightened.'

'You are brutal; you mangle every word I say,' she said hopelessly.

He had reduced her to silence; he stood over her threateningly, much as a tamer of wild beasts who waits for the next spring of the panther. Desperate, her spirit flamed up again, and she cried,--

'You treat me monstrously; I am a fool to waste my time over you; I am accustomed to quite different treatment.'

'You are spoilt; you are accustomed to flattery--flattery which means less than nothing,' he sneered, stamping upon her attempt at arrogance.

'Ah, Julian!' she said, suddenly and marvellously melting, and leaning forward she stretched out both hands towards him, so that he was obliged to take them, and she drew him down to his knees once more beside her, and smiled into his eyes, having taken command and being resolved that no crisis of anger should again arise to estrange them, 'I shall never have flattery from you, shall I? my turbulent, impossible Julian, whose most meagre compliment I have treasured ever since I can remember! but it is over now, my time of waiting for you'--she still held his hands, and the smile with which she looked at him transfigured all her face.

He was convinced; he trembled. He strove against her faintly,--

'You choose your moment badly; you know that I must leave for Aphros.'

'You cannot!' she cried in indignation.

As his eyes hardened, she checked herself; she knew that for her own safety she must submit to his will without a struggle. Spoilt, irrational as she was, she had never before so dominated her caprice. Her wits were all at work, quick slaves to her passion.

'Of course you must go,' she said.

She played with his fingers, her head bent low, and he was startled by the softness of her touch.

'What idle hands,' he said, looking at them; 'you were vain of them, as a child.'

But she did not wish him to dwell upon her vanity.

'Julian, have I not been consistent, all my life? Are you taking me seriously? Do you know that I am betraying all the truth? One hasn't often the luxury of betraying all the truth. I could betray even greater depths of truth, for your sake. Are you treating what I tell you with the gravity it deserves? You must not make a toy of my secret. I have no strength of character, Julian. I suppose, in its stead, I have been given strength of love. Do you want what I offer you? Will you take the responsibility of refusing it?'

'Is that a threat?' he asked, impressed and moved.

She shrugged slightly and raised her eyebrows; he thought he had never so appreciated the wonderful mobility of her face.

'I am nothing without the person I love. You have judged me yourself: worthless--what else?--cruel, vain. All that is true. Hitherto I have tried only to make the years pass by. Do you want me to return to such an existence?'

His natural vigour rebelled against her frailty.

'You are too richly gifted, Eve, to abandon yourself to such slackness of life.'

'I told you I had no strength of character,' she said with bitterness, 'what are my gifts, such as they are, to me? You are the thing I want.'

'You could turn your gifts to any account.'

'With you, yes.'

'No, independently of me or any other human being. One stands alone in work. Work is impersonal.'

'Nothing is impersonal to me,' she replied morosely, 'that's my tragedy.'

She flung out her hands.

'Julian, I cherish such endless dreams! I loathe my life of petty adventures; I undertake them only in order to forget the ideal which until now has been denied me. I have crushed down the vision of life with you, but always it has remained at the back of my mind, so wide, so open, a life so free and so full of music and beauty, Julian! I would work--for you. I would create--for you. I don't want to marry you, Julian. I value my freedom above all things. Bondage is not for you or me. But I'll come with you anywhere--to Aphros if you like.'

'To Aphros?' he repeated.

'Why not?'

She put in, with extraordinary skill,--

'I belong to the Islands no less than you.'

Privately she thought,--

'If you knew how little I cared about the Islands!'

He stared at her, turning her words over in his mind. He was as reckless as she, but conscientiously he suggested,--

'There may be danger.'

'I am not really a coward, only in the unimportant things. And you said yourself that they could never invade the island,' she added with complete confidence in his statement.

He dreamt aloud,--

'I have only just found her. This is Herakleion! She might, who knows? be of use to Aphros.'

She wondered which consideration weighed most heavily with him.

'You were like my sister,' he said suddenly.

She gave a rueful smile, but said nothing.

'No, no!' he cried, springing up. 'This can never be; have you bewitched me? Let me go, Eve; you have been playing a game with me.'

She shook her head very slowly and tears gathered in her eyes.

'Then the game is my whole life, Julian; put me to any test you choose to prove my sincerity.'

She convinced him against his will, and he resented it.

'You have deceived me too often.'

'I have been obliged to deceive you, because I could not tell you the truth.'

'Very plausible,' he muttered.

She waited, very well acquainted with the vehemence of his moods and reactions. She was rewarded; he said next, with laughter lurking in his eyes,--

'Ever since I can remember, I have quarrelled with you several times a day.'

'But this evening we have no time to waste in quarrelling,' she replied, relieved, and stretching out her hands to him again. As he took them, she added in a low voice, 'You attract me fatally, my refractory Julian.'

'We will go to Aphros,' he said, 'as friends and colleagues.'

'On any terms you choose to dictate,' she replied with ironical gravity.

A flash of clear-sightedness pierced his attempt at self-deception; he saw the danger into which they were deliberately running, he and she, alone amidst fantastic happenings, living in fairyland, both headstrong and impatient creatures, unaccustomed to forgo their whims, much less their passions.... He was obliged to recognise the character of the temple which stood at the end of the path they were treading, and of the deity to whom it was dedicated; he saw the temple with the eyes of his imagination as vividly as his mortal eyes would have seen it: white and lovely amongst cypresses, shadowy within; they would surely enter. Eve he certainly could not trust; could he trust himself? His honesty answered no. She observed the outward signs of what was passing in his mind, he started, he glanced at her, a look of horror and vigorous repudiation crossed his face, his eyes dwelt on her, then she saw--for she was quick to read him--by the slight toss of his head that he had banished sagacity.

'Come on to the veranda,' she said, tugging at his hand.

They stood on the veranda, watching the lights in the distance; the sky dripped with gold; balls of fire exploded into sheaves of golden feathers, into golden fountains and golden rain; golden slashes like the blades of scimitars cut across the curtain of night. Eve cried out with delight. Fiery snakes rushed across the sky, dying in a shower of sparks. At one moment the whole of the coast-line was lit up by a violet light, which most marvellously gleamed upon the sea.

'Fairyland!' cried Eve, clapping her hands.

She had forgotten Aphros. She had forgotten Paul.

The fireworks were over. Tsigaridis pulled strongly and without haste at his oars across a wide sea that glittered now like black diamonds under the risen moon. The water rose and fell beneath the little boat as gently and as regularly as the breathing of a sleeper. In a milky sky, spangled with stars, the immense moon hung flat and motionless, casting a broad path of rough silver up the blackness of the waters, and illuminating a long stretch of little broken clouds that lay above the horizon like the vertebræ of some gigantic crocodile. The light at the tip of the pier showed green, for they saw it still from the side of the land, but as they drew farther out to sea and came on a parallel line with the light, they saw it briefly half green, half ruby; then, as they passed it, looking back they saw only the ruby glow. Tsigaridis rowed steadily, silently but for the occasional drip of the water with the lifting of an oar, driving his craft away from the lights of the mainland--the stretch of Herakleion along the coast--towards the beckoning lights in the heart of the sea.

For ahead of them clustered the little yellow lights of the sheerly-rising village on Aphros; isolated lights, three or four only, low down at the level of the harbour, then, after a dark gap representing the face of the cliff, the lights in the houses, irregular, tier above tier. But it was not to these yellow lights that the glance was drawn. High above them all, upon the highest summit of the island, flared a blood-red beacon, a fierce and solitary stain of scarlet, a flame like a flag, like an emblem, full of hope as it leapt towards the sky, full of rebellion as it tore its angry gash across the night. In the moonlight the tiny islands of the group lay darkly outlined in the sea, but the moonlight, placid and benign, was for them without significance: only the beacon, insolently red beneath the pallor of the moon, burned for them with a message that promised to all men strife, to others death, and to the survivors liberty.

The form of Aphros was no more than a silhouette under the moon, a silhouette that rose, humped and shadowy, bearing upon its crest that flower of flame; dawn might break upon an island of the purest loveliness, colour blown upon it as upon the feathers of a bird, fragile as porcelain, flushed as an orchard in blossom; to-night it lay mysterious, unrevealed, with that single flame as a token of the purpose that burned within its heart. Tenderness, loveliness, were absent from the dark shape crowned by so living, so leaping an expression of its soul. Here were resolution, anticipation, hope, the perpetual hope of betterment, the undying chimera, the sublime illusion, the lure of adventure to the rebel and the idealist alike. The flame rang out like a bugle call in the night, its glare in the darkness becoming strident indeed as the note of a bugle in the midst of silence.

A light breeze brushed the little boat as it drew away from the coast, and Tsigaridis with a word of satisfaction shipped his oars and rose, the fragile craft rocking as he moved; Eve and Julian, watching from the prow, saw a shadow creep along the mast and the triangular shape of a sail tauten itself darkly against the path of the moon. Tsigaridis sank back into an indistinguishable block of intenser darkness in the darkness at the bottom of the boat. A few murmured words had passed,--

'I will take the tiller, Tsigaridis.'

'Malista, Kyrie,' and the silence had fallen again, the boat sailing strongly before the breeze, the beacon high ahead, and the moon brilliant in the sky. Eve, not daring to speak, glanced at Julian's profile as she sat beside him. He was scowling. Had she but known, he was intensely conscious of her nearness, assailed again with that now familiar ghost, the ghost of her as he had once held her angrily in his arms, soft, heavy, defenceless; and his fingers as they closed over the tiller closed as delicately as upon the remembered curves of her body; she had taken off her hat, and the scent of her hair reached him, warm, personal she was close to him, soft, fragrant, silent indeed, but mysteriously alive; the desire to touch her grew, like the desire of thirst; life seemed to envelop him with a strange completeness. Still a horror held him back: was it Eve, the child to whom he had been brotherly? or Eve, the woman? but in spite of his revulsion--for it was not his habit to control his desires--he changed the tiller to the other hand, and his free arm fell round her shoulders; he felt her instant yielding, her movement nearer towards him, her shortened breath, the falling back of her head; he knew that her eyes were shut; his fingers moulded themselves lingeringly round her throat; she slipped still lower within the circle of his arm, and his hand, almost involuntarily, trembled over the softness of her breast.