Mr. Dainopoulos afterwards developed into an excellent diplomatist, his principal virtue being a knack of gauging personal values and extracting usefulness from apparently dry husks. He withdrew from the imaginative sensualist who sat during the night in a highly varnished pine shack brooding upon the exasperating proximity of inaccessible seraglios. A useful instrument in many schemes, he did not merit a whole evening. Like most sensualists of the grosser kind he was a bore, and Mr. Dainopoulos had other clients. He picked his way out of the incredible mire of the docks, and crossed over to the cleaner side of the road which extended from Venizelos Street past the Custom House, and which was being extensively remodelled by the army of occupation. Even as Mr. Dainopoulos crossed he could see a number of industrious beings mounted on newly erected telegraph poles, their movements illuminated by small bright lights so that they resembled a row of burning martyrs elevated by some Macedonian tyrant, their cries and contortions as they reached down into the darkness for material and tools recalling the agonies of shrivelling victims. The hotel was in blank darkness. The squirming, writhing exfoliations which constituted the Berlin architect's conception of loveliness showed not a glint of light. One could not believe that it had inhabitants, or that they were alive. Nevertheless, Mr. Dainopoulos halted before the massive double doors and rang the bell, a tall, high-shouldered shade demanding admission to a familiar vault. It was some time after he had relapsed into a motionless silence and an observer might have imagined him to have forgotten his errand, when one of the leaves of the door opened a few inches, and he raised his head. At the sound of his voice the door opened a little more so that he could slide his body sideways through the aperture. Then the door closed behind him and the hotel resumed its appearance of a monstrous Renaissance tomb.

Inside, the night-porter, a person in a slovenly undress of dirty shirt, riding-breeches open like funnels at the knee, and Turkish slippers, yawned and motioned his visitor to a chair while he slowly ascended the stairs, which were lit by a single invisible lamp on the landing. Mr. Dainopoulos remained sunk in thought. It was, in a way, a perfectly honest and rational proposition he had to make, but he found himself involved in some doubt as to the way the person above, an Englishman, would take it. He knew something of the English, being married to one of that race, and he sometimes reflected upon the unexpected workings of their minds. They were oppressively practical and drove wonderful bargains; and then suddenly they would flare into inexplicable passion over something which he for the life of him could not comprehend. If this person upstairs did that, what would it be? Mr. Dainopoulos shook his head. He could not say. He would have to take a chance. He might be tolerated, or sworn at, or laughed at, or arrested, or thrown down the stairs. All these things happened to honest merchandisers, he was well aware. He sometimes watched these English under lowered lids and marvelled. Personally he preferred German or American men. He felt nearer to them, less conscious of a certain incomprehensible reticence of soul which is peculiar to the English, a sort of polite and poignant regret that he should see fit to cumber the earth, which had happened, by a singular and unexplained destiny, to be their heritage. Association with them, under such circumstances as he encountered, was provocative of considerable thought. To men like him, the confused product of a hundred diverging stocks, from Illyrian to Copt, the phenomenon of these blond and disdainful beings, who came always in ships and were apologetic even in their invasions, bore the mark of something supernatural, since the contemplation of them in their own land filled a normal Latin with inarticulate contempt. Mr. Dainopoulos had no pride. He would have found it an embarrassing impediment in his business. But he did devote an occasional moment of leisure to wondering how men could so impose their eccentric habit of thought upon the nations, and why he, for example, should be directed to obtain his personal ideals from a distant island in the northern seas.

The servant appeared on the landing, and Mr. Dainopoulos immediately went up.

The Berlin architect, no doubt in anticipation of invading armies, had exhausted his ingenuity in the faÇade and the reception rooms, and the chambers above were left in a state of disturbing starkness. Mr. Dainopoulos was led along corridors that chilled the heart with their bare rectangular perspectives, and was halted at length before a door behind which the voices of men could be heard in conversation. And in reply to a knock a slightly querulous voice intoned, "Come in, come in!" as though in infinite but weary patience with elementary intelligences. Mr. Dainopoulos stepped in.

Three men occupied the room. A naval lieutenant sat on the bed smoking a cigarette, a young man who did not raise his eyes to glance at the intruder. The owner of the room was a major, who was seated at a small escritoire near the window, and whose belt and cap hung over a chair. He was a man of thirty-odd, as clean as though he had been scoured and scraped in boiling water, the small absurd moustache as decorative as a nail-brush, and with a look of capable insolence in his blue-gray eyes. A small safe at his side was open and he remained stooping over this as he looked up and saw Mr. Dainopoulos standing by the door. The other man was in civilian tweeds, astride of a chair with his arms on the back, smoking a large curved meerschaum pipe. A clean-shaven circular-faced man of doubtful age, he was the only one of the three who regarded their visitor in a humane manner. He nodded slightly in response to the low bow made by Mr. Dainopoulos on his entry. The latter, however, knew better than to presume on this. He paused until the major invited him to approach, and the major did not do this. He simply waited, leaning over his safe, for Mr. Dainopoulos to explain his intrusion, his existence on earth, and his intentions as to the future, and anything else which might be regarded as extenuating his conduct. When Mr. Dainopoulos remarked that he had called on a little matter of business, the major bent his head again and went on investigating the papers in the safe, as though Mr. Dainopoulos had suddenly and completely evaporated.

"Well," he observed at length, straightening up and laying some papers on his desk, "why do you call on a little matter of business in the middle of the night?" He brought his left arm up in a peculiar whirl to the level of his eyes and looked at his wrist watch. "Eleven-twenty," he added in a tone of detached contempt, and shot a severe look at his visitor.

Mr. Dainopoulos remained standing by the door and maintained his attitude of calm urgency. He explained that the departure of the consuls had led him to remodel his arrangements. All three looked at him with attention when he made this statement. The naval lieutenant, whose work it was to examine and pass all neutral vessels, knew Mr. Dainopoulos very well. To his regret he had never found that gentleman doing anything at all shady, but he had never abandoned his conviction that he would catch him some day. The civilian, who was a censor and decoder of neutral correspondence, was familiar with the Dainopoulos dossier in his office and had read with surprise the chatty letters to girls in London which came from the man's wife. He, however, was not in a position to reveal his knowledge, and looked at Mr. Dainopoulos with good-tempered curiosity. The major, who knew his visitor better than either of the others, having purchased large quantities of stores from him at a handsome profit to the vendor, looked as if he had been insulted when the consuls were mentioned. As well he might, since those astute gentlemen had done their best to keep all possible material out of his hands, had blandly checkmated the armies of occupation at every turn, even preaching a holy war against them among the owners of Turkish baths in the Via Egnatia. They had financed Hellenic Turks who laid injunctions on rights-of-way, issued writs against movement of goods, and sought to inflame French against English and Italian against both. The consuls had been the curse of every executive at Headquarters, for their resources and nerve seemed unlimited. They worked together like a team of experienced crooks on a steamship, and never for a moment were the invaders permitted to forget that the local government was neutral. The major was happier than he had been for a long while, though he lacked the emotional demonstrativeness proper to such a mood. All three of these men, by their reports, had aided in the grand coup which had culminated that evening in the expulsion of the consuls across the frontier. But their first thought, when Mr. Dainopoulos mentioned consuls, was that by some ghastly mischance the consuls had got back into Saloniki and the whole weary business was to begin again.

"Eh?" said the major, snarling up his upper lip so that his moustache looked more like a nail-brush than ever, and looking as if he were about to spring up and fasten his teeth in his visitor's neck. "What's that?"

Thus having evoked a suitable interest in his affairs, Mr. Dainopoulos drew a small notebook from his pocket and began to enumerate the list of goods the sudden departure of the consuls had left on his hands. In the midst of it, the major nodded to a chair and said, "Sit down over here, please." Mr. Dainopoulos came forward, sat down, and proceeded. The naval lieutenant reached over to the dressing table, took up a Turkish dagger and began turning it over in his hands, examining the edge with an intense stare. The censor drew steadily at his pipe and looked Mr. Dainopoulos up and down. He was a novelist, and of the three may be said to have had some practice in the gauging of character. He was aware, in spite of a life spent exclusively in southern England and among one small exclusive caste of English people, that this Levantine might have a view of his own. He was interesting. Where had he picked up that English wife? A slight shudder passed over him in spite of himself at the thought of an English woman in a Levantine's arms. No doubt, however, she was a house-maid or something of that sort. Must be making a lot of money. The censor felt a surge of indignation over this. His own family's resources had been quadrupled by the war; but that of course was the reward of patriotic endeavour. He found it intolerable that a neutral should make money out of bloodshed. Mr. Dainopoulos proceeded as calmly and collectedly as though he were a salesman in Birmingham or Liverpool. He certainly was unaware of inspiring horror and contempt. He even mentioned a thousand yards of Indian cotton drill which he had in his warehouse and which he had purchased for a song from a German firm in Alexandria a few days before the English had sequestered the business. The only point on which he was reticent was the fact that he had already been paid in gold for most of it by the consular agents; a most satisfactory arrangement for him, but unfortunate for them in the present juncture, since they had no receipt and the goods were to be held against their order. There was something exasperating in the spectacle of this man sitting there, with all the marks of clandestine knavery about him, merely offering bona fide goods for sale. He was a Greek in Greece, transacting business which, although he did not yet know it, was of vital importance to them, for a whole string of vessels bound for Saloniki had been sunk inside of two days, from the Start to Karaburun. They were at a loss for a week or so, and a week or so in war is not to be ignored. And here was an unprepossessing person offering them, at a comparatively reasonable rate, a remarkable consignment of material. Apart from their own needs in Macedonia they had recently sent a few thousand men to an island in the Ægean to prepare a base, and the ships bearing their stores were unreported. Sunk, of course. They sat in various poses thinking of all this, and Mr. Dainopoulos closed his notebook and took out a cigarette.

It should be said for him that if he had known their actual position his price would have been slightly higher, just as later on English merchants' prices became so high that men spat at the sound of their names. But he was not a profiteer in the modern sense. He knew nothing of advertising, for example. He thought 100 per cent. an adequate reimbursement for the risks of trade.

He was asked when he could effect delivery. He said in a week or ten days, some of it being on board a steamer on its way now from Alexandria.

"What steamer is that?" demanded the lieutenant.

"The Kalkis, four hundred tons," he replied. "I have had her a year now."

"What speed?"

"Oh, four. Perhaps four and a half. A very old ship. No good except for my business to the Islands."

"Don't know about that, my friend," muttered the major. "You may have to give up your business to the Islands. We commandeer our own ships; I don't see how you are going to get out of it."

"That would suit me," said Mr. Dainopoulos promptly. "She costs me fifteen thousand francs a month insurance. And coal is four hundred francs a ton in Port Said. I make very little out of her."

This was scarcely the literal truth, though Mr. Dainopoulos might be pardoned for depreciating his profits at a moment when a purchaser appeared. As a matter of fact he had made already out of that small ship about seven times her original purchase price and he had a neat scheme in hand which would make her a very good investment indeed.

"We have some business in the Islands, too, you see," the major remarked abstractedly. "I think you had better come to my office say about ten-thirty to-morrow. You know the place. Next to the Ottoman Bank, eh? G. O. S. Room Fourteen. Ask for Major Begg."

Mr. Dainopoulos, who would probably have done a thousand francs' worth of business before the major had had his bath, expressed his willingness to appear.

"Will you have a drink?" said the major in a harsh, brow-beating tone which was believed by himself and many others of his class to evoke the very soul of bluff hospitality. Mr. Dainopoulos, however, had a strange feeling of having been good-humouredly kicked in the face. He declined the refreshment, not because he felt insulted, but because he knew the only drink these men had was whiskey and the smell and taste of the stuff made him sick.

"All right," said the major, regarding an abstainer with disfavour. He liked a man to take a drink. "To-morrow at ten-thirty. You might close the door. Thanks."

As he closed the door behind him, as requested, Mr. Dainopoulos reflected that he would have time to lay the matter before a French colonel he knew before reaching Room Fourteen. But he believed the best price was to be had from the British. He had found out that much in the course of his career—they did not haggle.

The three men he had left did not speak for a moment, waiting for him to get out of earshot.

"Looks like Providence," observed the lieutenant, making a lunge with the dagger at a knot in the bedstead.

The major pulled up his trouser leg and scratched a hairy calf. "These infernal fleas!" he muttered. "Yes, as you say, Providence. An angel very much in disguise."

"What about that ship, the Kalkis?" asked the censor.

"Oh, we shall probably charter her," said the major bitterly. "Take all the risk and pay him a princely sum for sitting tight here and doing nothing. We ought to buy, but we won't."

He sat silent for a moment. He was thinking of those men in Phyros, waiting for their stores, eating sparingly of their emergency rations, sampling the local cheese and bread and keeping a bright look-out for transports which were lying on their sides in eighty fathoms. Something would have to be done at once about them. This Dainopoulos had—here the major glanced at his shorthand notes—four thousand feet of timber and the Phyros crowd were frantic for timber for a jetty. Just think of it! A fertile island which these Greeks had had for a couple of thousand years, and no jetty yet! What could one do with people like that? Hopeless. Then there was flour. He simply had to have some flour soon. Dainopoulos said he had fifteen hundred barrels when the Kalkis came in.

There was in all this hard thinking no complete view of the war or of the world. If they could collar stores from some other front or from one of their allies, it was all one to them. Even the course of events had no interest for them beyond their own base. This was an inevitable result of the intensive pressure of responsibility on executives. They were not callous. They were simply busy. Their own lives were still bounded by the social barriers of England. They never spoke of private affairs except to some man of their own class who had been to one of the great public schools. For them the war was a war to perpetuate this social hierarchy, to place it once more upon an impregnable base. They wished to win, they but could see no difference between democracy and defeat. Even the novelist was a novelist within the radius of his social sphere, and remained within it in a city of Macedonia. He felt it incumbent upon him to remain also a gentleman, even at the expense of valuable collisions with alien temperaments. "He's a Greek, and I loathe them," summarizes, in the major's words, their collective sentiment. And their allies, it is to be feared, suffered under this highly specialized form of criticism. Nothing that happened was adequate to demolish this formidable Kultur. In victory and in defeat it was indestructible. Only the genius of the race, working in the very strongholds of that Kultur, can split it open and release new forces and aspirations. But of this even the novelist, who trafficked in happy endings, had no suspicion. He wrote a short story later, a story in which an English girl who had been carried off by a rascally Greek was rescued by an English officer who took her home to England and married her.

To the lieutenant the departure of the consuls and the impending formation of a provisional government were affairs of qualified good. A provisional government would immediately shriek for the return of all sequestrated property. It would demand the status of allies, and all their ships would start a complicated system of espionage and smuggling. It would be, in his opinion, a series of perfect days. Nobody was honest nowadays. Not a week ago he had caught naval stores going over the side of a ship into a local boat, and the guilty party was wearing three medals, for valour and distinguished service. He sometimes wished they would put him on a ship again. It gave one a chance to do something besides play detective anyway. The major spoke again.

"What about a captain for the Kalkis? We shall have to have one of our own men, Mathews."

"Afraid that's not possible," said the lieutenant. "We haven't too many men, you know. Better send him out with a convoy going to Alex. I might have had one of those chaps who were rescued the other day off that transport, but they've all gone home overland. And they won't stay, you know. All want to get home."

"Can one blame them?" asked the censor. "I read letters in which these seamen say they have not seen their families for seven or eight months."

"Dear me!" said the major drily. His own family were Indian Civil Service. "What you might call the hardships of war. Possibly we may find someone without family ties, Mathews."

The lieutenant smiled and ran his thumb along the blade of the Turkish dagger.

"Possibly," he replied. He smiled because the major was rather conspicuous at home for his affairs with married women.

"By the way," said the censor, following some obscure association of ideas, "I met Morpeth this evening and he was telling me they expected some new arrivals from Paris at the Omphale."

"Yes, I heard that," said the major, who was not at all interested. "It will be a riot. Probably three or four. And about thirty or forty Greek, French, Italian, and Serbian lieutenants, standing round six deep, making them squiffy on Floka's Monopole. No, thanks. Stale pastry, anyhow."

The lieutenant continued to smile.

"They'd better be doing that than slapping each other's faces and exchanging cards at the Cercle Militaire," he murmured.

"They do that anyhow—afterwards," said the major, thrusting his papers into the safe and lighting a cigarette. He shoved the door to with his foot, twirled the knob, and stood up.

"What about some golf to-morrow afternoon?" he demanded. "Didn't you say you had a friend coming ashore, Mathews?"

"Yes, from the Proteus. He'll be here about three, I think. Very decent chap, too."

"Right. We'll go out in the new car. See you in the morning."

Mr. Dainopoulos found the trolley cars had stopped running and began to walk home past the cafÉs of the front. On the other side of the road the stern rails of a score of small coasting craft moved up and down gently in the slight swell, and from here and there amid the confused dunnage on deck a figure moved in sleep, or a silhouette of a man bending over a lantern showed up for a moment. At intervals strains of American jazz music came from the haunts of pleasure, and one could get a glimpse now and then of a dreary dance-floor with half a dozen soldiers and sailors slathering clumsily to and fro, embracing women that gave one the horrors merely to look at, women like half-starved harpies or cylinders of oily fat, the sweat running down through the calcareous deposits on their faces and their squat chunky feet slewed sideways in bronze and coppery shoes. Mr. Dainopoulos hurried past these abodes. Mr. Bates, Archy Bates, a great business friend of his, was somewhere inside one of them, fulfilling his destiny as a patron of Aphrodite and Dionysos; but Mr. Dainopoulos had finished business for the day and he wanted to get home. This was not to be without meeting Archy. The cat-like smile on his unfortunate features, his hat on the back of his head, and his hands in his pockets, Mr. Bates emerged from the OdÉon Bar just as a carriage appeared in the distance. Mr. Bates did not conceal his gratification. Would his friend come back and have a drink?

"Not to-night," said Mr. Dainopoulos quietly. "Me, I'm going home now. Excuse me, Mister."

"Now, now!" protested Archy, clinging with the adhesiveness of the pickled philanthropist. "Now, now! Lissen. Come-a-me to White Tower. Eh? Laddie? You-n-me, eh? Li'l' fren' o' mine Whi' Tower. She gotta fren', y' know. Here y'are."

The driver, seeing a possible fare, stopped, and Archy, still adhering, dragged Mr. Dainopoulos in after him.

"Stivan," said Mr. Dainopoulos to the driver, whom he knew, "go to the White Tower and when this gentleman has got out, drive me home quick, understand? Leave him behind. And go back to him if he wants you. Now!"

The driver at once set off up the road again and Mr. Bates, who, like Shakespeare, had small Latin and less Greek, sat smiling in the darkness, trying to formulate in his mind and articulate with his tongue something that just eluded him. To meet his old fren' like this—it was a—'strornery thing how he couldn't shay just how he felt. He smiled.

Mr. Dainopoulos sat without smiling. He was not a drinking man at any time, and the professional soak was a mystery to him. Mr. Bates was as much a mystery as the major. His actions had the disconcerting lack of rational sequence that one discerns in pampered carnivora. Absent-minded sensuality is a baffling phenomenon. Mr. Dainopoulos had something of the clear sharp logic of the Latin, and the vinous benevolence of Mr. Bates aroused in him a species of alert incredulity. He sat in silence, listening to the gurgle of his companion's incoherence. This was a phase of his daily existence which he never mentioned to his wife; his dealings with the more dissipated of her countrymen. To his relief the carriage stopped at the entrance of the Tower Gardens. He took Mr. Bates's arm to assist him to alight, but Mr. Bates had forgotten the White Tower. He was trying to sing and not succeeding very well. He sat erect, his hat pushed back until the brim formed a dark halo about his smile, beating time with one hand.

"Here you are, Mister Bates," said Mr. Dainopoulos, trying to move him. Mr. Bates resisted gently, drew back his chin a little more and attacked a lower G:

The sound of that small and strangely clear voice, after the odorous gibbering speech, almost appalled Mr. Dainopoulos. He spoke rapidly to the driver, instructing him to wait and he would be paid in due time, and started off into the darkness.

Mr. Bates finished his song to his own satisfaction and having smiled into the darkness for a while, began to wonder where he was. "'Strornery thing, but he was almost shertain ol' fren' of his had been there. Mush 'ave been a mishtake." He got out so suddenly the driver was scared. Mr. Bates took a bill out of his pocket, held it up uncertainly for a moment, and when the driver had clutched it, marched in an intricate manner into the gardens. His smile became more cat-like than ever as the sound of syncopated music reached his ear and he passed a woman strolling under the trees. He hummed his song again. The evening, for him, was only just beginning.

Mr. Dainopoulos hurried forward and soon left the region of hard arc-lights behind. His house was not far from here. He wished to get home. He regretted sometimes that his business took him so much away from the house, for he retained sufficient simplicity to imagine that the laws of nature do not apply to love, that you can increase the volume without diminishing the intensity. But he consoled himself with the thought that in a few years he would be able to devote himself entirely to his wife. His dream was not very clear in its outlines as yet, because the war now raging was far-reaching in its effects. It would be unwise to make plans which the political changes might render impossible of accomplishment. For the present he was satisfied to place his reserves at a safe distance in diversified but thoroughly sound securities, so that unless the civilized world turned completely upside down and all men repudiated their obligations, he would be able to control his resources. There was not much doubt about that in his mind. He knew that business would go on, was going on, even while men moved in massed millions to destroy each other. While the line swayed and crumpled and broke, or surged forward under the incredibly sustained roar of ten thousand cannon, English and French and German business men were perfecting their plans for doing business with each other as soon as it was over. The ethical side of the question scarcely arose in his mind, since he had grown accustomed to wars and the money to be made out of them. To him the struggle in France and on the Slavic frontier was far off and shadowy, as was the grim game at sea. He was not to be blamed for measuring events by the scale in use by those of his race; and if there was somewhat more ferocity and sustained butchery in this war than in others, it was only another significant symptom of Anglo-Saxon temperament, because business, he knew quite well, was going on.

He knocked at the door in the wall which had so impressed Mr. Spokesly earlier in the evening, and was admitted after a parley by a middle-aged servant-woman.

"Madama gone to bed?" he asked, picking up a large cat that was rubbing herself against his leg, and putting her out into the garden.

"No, she's not gone to bed. She said she would wait for you to come home."

"All right. You can go to bed then," he retorted.

The woman shot the bolts and picked up the cheap pink glass lamp without answering. Mr. Dainopoulos made his way upstairs. There was no light in the room looking out over the sea. In their chamber beyond, a night-light, very small and rose-coloured, was burning on a small table below a picture of the Virgin, as though it were a shrine. It took the place of one, for his wife made the most of his rather dilapidated devoutness, and often left a candle burning there. There was an ulterior motive in her action which she had never formulated exactly even to herself. This was the appeal which a strange and sensuous religion made to her romantic instinct. She would always be Church of England herself; but the impression made by candles and an ikon upon her girl-friends in Haverstock Hill in North London was always before her. She could hear them breathe the word "ikon," and then draw in their breath in an ecstasy of awe. And the thought of it gave her pleasure.

But she was not in the chamber and he returned to the other room in search of her.

She was lying as before, her eyes closed and her hands clasped lightly over the tartan rug. A screen had been opened and stationed between her and the window. This was the hour to which his thoughts went forward occasionally during the day of chaffering on the front, or in his blue-distempered office with its shabby chestnut fittings in the CitÉ Saul. To the western cynic there was a rich humour in the sheer fortuitousness of their meeting in the midst of a drowning multitude. To him it was not humorous at all. To him it was significant of a profound fatality. To him it confirmed his inherited faith in omens and the finger of God. She was a common enough type of woman in most things, yet she embodied for him a singular ideal of human achievement. He knew of nothing in the world comparable with her, and the knowledge that she was his was at times almost unbelievable. Whether she loved him was a question he never faced. He believed it, and doubted, and believed again. He knew by instinct that it was not a matter of importance as was the fact of possession. He extracted a rare and subtle pleasure from the fragrant ambiguity of her smile. After all, though it may be doubted if he had ever entertained the thought, he was fortunate in his circumstances. He had no need to be jealous or watchful. She lay there quietly, thinking of course of him, while he was on his affairs in the port.

He paused now and saw that she was asleep, and he set the little night-light on the table and sat down near her, watching her with an expression of grave enthusiasm on his damaged features. He was not familiar with the stock witticisms concerning the hollowness of marriage and the inevitable disgust which follows possession. Indeed, for all his rascality and guile in business he was a rather unsophisticated fellow. He possessed that infinite patience which is sometimes more effective in retaining love than even courage or folly. Another factor in his favour was his lack of facility for friendship. This worked both ways, for friendship is the secret antagonist of both business and love. He sat there, shading his eyes with his curved palm, watching his wife, thinking of past, present, and future in that confused and gentle abstraction which we call happiness, when she suddenly opened her eyes and looked at him for one brief instant with a blank and vacant gaze. Then she smiled and he bent over her.

"Back, Boris?" she murmured chidingly.

"My business, darling. I had to see a man."

"Always business. I thought you'd never come."

"First I had to take that gentleman to the French Pier, for a boat. And then I went to the Olympos Hotel. I think very good business."

"Don't talk about business now."

"But, my sweetheart, it is all for you. By-and-by you will see."

"See what, silly?" she asked, rumpling his hair.

"See what? You ask a funny question. I cannot tell you, not yet. But in my mind, I see it."

And he did, too. He saw, in his mind, a superb and curving shore of yellow sand encircling a sea of flawless azure. He saw a long line of white villas, white with biscuit-coloured balconies and green jalousies, rising amid gardens of laurel and palm; he saw white yachts rocking at anchor, and illuminated houseboats in the shadow of a great breakwater. He saw the spangled lights of a fairy city, a city filled with fabrics and jewels which he would buy for her. He saw all this, and in his mind the world had fought itself to a standstill and the cautious investor had come into his own. He saw the war-weary battalions returning to their toil, slaving to pay off the cost of their adventure. This was the way of the world as he knew it. It was no use blaming him: he merely took advantage of human need and folly, as we all do. He had been through wars before and knew the inevitable reactions, and the almost incredible cheapness of money that followed. He was by instinct one of those who, like camp-followers on a grand scale, prosper amid the animosities of simpler folk; persons who found fortunes upon great wars, as did the Jews in London after 1815 and the bourgeois bankers of Paris after the Revolution. And it surprised him how little his wife knew, how little she questioned the world in which she lived. Of course it was charming, and he was fascinated just because she had that amazing racial blindness to facts and lived in a fanciful world of her own. The English were all like that, it seemed to him.

He put his arms about her.

"In my mind I see it. You wait. Everything you can think of, all very fine."

"Here in Saloniki?"

"No!"

"In England?"

Mr. Dainopoulos laughed a little and shook his head. He was quite sure England wouldn't be any place for him after this war. In his own private opinion, there wouldn't be any England within ten years from now, which shows how logical and wide-awake Latins can make errors of judgment. In any case, there were too many Jews there.

"Because I don't want to go to America," she remarked, still rumpling his hair.

"America! What makes you think of America? You must be losing your mind, Alice." He almost shivered. He was just as well able to make money in America as anywhere else, but what use would it be to him in such a place? It is extremely difficult for the Anglo-Saxon to realize it, but men like Mr. Dainopoulos find occidental institutions a spiritual desolation. He recalled the time when he boarded in Newark, New Jersey, and worked in a felt-hat factory. The house was of wood without even a floor of stone, and he could not sleep because of the vermin. And the food! He experienced afresh the nausea of those meals among the roomers, the bulging haunches of the negroid waitress colliding with his shoulders as she worked round and served the rows and rows of oval dishes dripping with soggy, impossible provender. And the roomers: English, German, and American, with their horrible whiskey and their ever-lasting gibberish of "wop" and "dago," their hints and blustering invitations to join mysterious fraternities which no one seemed to understand or explain. Mr. Dainopoulos must not be censured for withdrawing from all this. He made no claims upon western civilization, and its lack of logic and continuity led him to prefer something less virtuous, perhaps, but also less of a strain upon normal human nature.

"You say you don't want to go to America. And I'll say it, too. I've been there, and that was enough for me. I should die there, with the food they give you. It's a fine country, with fine trees in the streets," he added, thinking of an imperial horse-chestnut tree which had thrust a branch bearing pale candles of bloom against his window out there, "and the big men are good men to do business. But not for me. Dirty wood houses and soot coming down all the time on the bed. Like ashes from the engines."

"Like London," said Alice, smiling.

But Mr. Dainopoulos had been living on a somewhat higher scale in London and he had not noticed the dirt so much. Moreover, he could always get the food he wanted in London.

"Well, where?" insisted Alice, humouring him.

"There's plenty places," he said soberly, rather faint as he compared their present surroundings with that dream-villa by the blue sea. "Too soon yet to be sure we get there. I got a lot of business to finish up first. And we're all right here for a while. You're not lonesome, darling?"

"Oh, no! You saw Evanthia here to-night?"

"Yes, I saw her, but she didn't tell me anything."

"He's gone away, with the consuls."

Mr. Dainopoulos gave a low whistle.

"I never thought about that. What'll she do now? That's bad for her, though."

"She wants to follow him but I don't think she can. I believe she heard he'll go to Constantinople. She said she'd do anything to get there."

"Well, if she wants to go to Constantinople, she might be able to," he said, pondering. "I heard to-day a ship might be going down to the Islands. There's always a chance. I'll see. But if she's got any sense she'll go back to her mother. That feller Lietherthal is good company but he'll go back to Munich by-and-by."

"She doesn't love him, I am almost sure."

"Evanthia, she don't love anybody except herself. I told you that."

"She loves me," said Alice.

"Well, p'raps she does, but you know what I mean."

"That gentleman this evening, Mr. Spokesly, he was interested in her."

"He's got a young lady in London," said Mr. Dainopoulos.

"Has he?" she murmured absently. "Do you think he'll come to-morrow night?"

"Yes, I think so. I bet you're goin' to have Evanthia in, too."

"Well, perhaps he'll fall in love with her," she whispered delightedly.

"What, and him with a young lady in London!"

"I don't think he's very fond of his young lady in London."

"Well, how do you know that? Women...."

"Never mind. It's easy to tell if a man is in love," she answered, watching him. He held her tightly for a moment.

"Not so easy to tell about a woman," he said into her hair. "Is it, my little wife, my little wife?"

"Why, don't you know yet?" she bantered, giving him that secret, fragrant, ambiguous smile.

"My little wife!" he repeated in a tense whisper. And as he said it, he felt in his heart he would never know.