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.