The town house of the Davenants stood in the platia, at right angles to the club. On the death of old Mr Davenant—'President Davenant,' as he was nicknamed—the town and the country properties had been divided between the two inheriting brothers; Herakleion said that the brothers had drawn lots for the country house, but in point of fact the matter had been settled by amicable arrangement. William Davenant, the elder of the brothers, widowed, with an only son away for three-quarters of the year at school in England, was more conveniently installed in the town, within five minutes reach of the central office, than Robert, who, with a wife and a little girl, preferred the distance of his country house and big garden. The two establishments, as time went on, became practically interchangeable.

The rue Royale—Herakleion was so cosmopolitan as to give to its principal thoroughfare a French name—was at this hour crowded with the population that, imprisoned all day behind closed shutters, sought in the evening what freshness it could find in the cobbled streets between the stucco houses. The street life of the town began between five and six, and the Davenants, father and son, were jostled as they walked slowly along the pavements, picking their way amongst the small green tables set outside the numerous cafÉs. At these tables sat the heterogenous elements that composed the summer population of the place, men of every nationality: old gamblers too disreputable for Monte Carlo; young Levantines, natives, drinking absinthe; Turks in their red fezzes; a few rakish South Americans. The trams screamed discordantly in their iron grooves, and the bells of the cinema tinkled unceasingly. Between the tramlines and the kerb dawdled the hired victorias, few empty at this time of day, but crowded with families of Levantines, the men in straw hats, the women for the most part in hot black, very stout, and constantly fanning their heavily powdered faces. Now and then a chasseur from some diplomatic house passed rapidly in a flaming livery.

Mr Davenant talked to his son as they made their way along.

'How terrible those parties are. I often wish I could dissociate myself altogether from that life, and God knows that I go merely to hear what people are saying. They know it, and of course they will never forgive me. Julian, in order to conciliate Herakleion, you will have to marry a Greek.'

'Alexander Christopoulos attacked me to-day,' Julian said. 'Wanted me to go to Paris with him and see the world.'

He did not note in his own mind that he refrained from saying that Madame Kato had also, so to speak, attacked him on the dangerous subject of the Islands.

They turned now, having reached the end of the rue Royale, into the platia, where the cavernous archway of the club stained the white front of the houses with a mouth of black. The houses of the platia were large, the hereditary residences of the local Greek families. The Christopoulos house stood next to the club, and next to that was the house of the Premier, His Excellency Platon Malteios, and next to that the Italian Consulate, with the arms of Italy on a painted hatchment over the door. The centre of the square was empty, cobbled in an elaborate pattern which gave the effect of a tessellated pavement; on the fourth side of the square were no houses, for here lay the wide quay which stretched right along above the sea from one end of the town to the other.

The Davenant house faced the sea, and from the balcony of his bedroom on the second floor Julian could see the Islands, yellow with little white houses on them; in the absolute stillness and limpidity of the air he could count the windows on Aphros, the biggest island, and the terraces on the slope of the hills. The first time he had arrived from school in England he had run up to his bedroom, out on to the balcony, to look across the platia with its many gaudily striped sunblinds, at the blue sea and the little yellow stains a few miles out from the shore.

At the door of the Davenant house stood two horses ready saddled in the charge of the door-keeper, fat Aristotle, an islander, who wore the short bolero and pleated fustanelle, like a kilt, of his country. The door-keepers of the other houses had gathered round him, but as Mr Davenant came up they separated respectfully and melted away to their individual charges.

The way lay along the quays and down the now abandoned ilex avenue. The horses' hoofs padded softly in the thick dust. The road gleamed palely beneath the thick shadows of the trees, and the water, seen between the ancient trunks, was almost purple. The sun was gone, and only the last bars of the sunset lingered in the sky. At the tip of the pier of Herakleion twinkled already the single light of phosphorescent green that daily, at sunset, shone out, to reflect irregularly in the water.

They passed out of the avenue into the open country, the road still skirting the sea on their left, while on their right lay the strip of flat country crowded in between Mount Mylassa and the sea, carefully cultivated by the labourers of the Davenants, where the grapes hung on the festooned branches looped from pole to pole. William Davenant observed them critically, thinking to himself, 'A good harvest.' Julian Davenant, fresh from an English county, saw as with a new eye their beauty and their luxuriance. He rode loosely in the saddle, his long legs dangling, indisputably English, though born in one of the big painted rooms overlooking the platia of Herakleion, and reared in the country until the age of ten. He had always heard the vintage discussed since he could remember. He knew that his family for three generations had been the wealthiest in the little state, wealthier than the Greek banking-houses, and he knew that no move of the local politics was entirely free from the influence of his relations. His grandfather, indeed, having been refused a concession he wanted from the government, had roused his Islands to a declaration of independence under his own presidency—a state of affairs which, preposterous as it was, had profoundly alarmed the motley band that made up the Cabinet in Herakleion. What had been done once, could be repeated.... Granted his concession, Julian's grandfather had peaceably laid down the dignity of his new office, but who could say that his sons might not repeat the experiment?

These things had been always in the boy's scheme of life. He had not pondered them very deeply. He supposed that one day he would inherit his father's share in the concern, and would become one of the heads of the immense family which had spread like water over various districts of the Mediterranean coasts. Besides the Davenants of Herakleion, there were Davenants at Smyrna, Davenants at Salonica, Davenants at Constantinople. Colonies of Davenants. It was said that the Levant numbered about sixty families of Davenants. Julian was not acquainted with them all. He did not even know in what degree of relationship they stood to him.

Every time that he passed through London on his way to school, or, now, to Oxford, he was expected to visit his great-uncle, Sir Henry, who lived in an immense house in Belgrave Square, and had a business room downstairs where Julian was interviewed before luncheon. In this room hung framed plans of the various Davenant estates, and Julian, as he stood waiting for Sir Henry, would study the plan of Herakleion, tracing with his finger the line of the quays, the indent of the platia, the green of the race-course, the square which indicated the country house; in a corner of this plan were the Islands, drawn each in separate detail. He became absorbed, and did not notice the entrance of Sir Henry till the old man's hand fell on his shoulder.

'Ha! Looking at the plan, are you? Familiar to you, what? So it is familiar to me, my boy. Never been there, you know. Yet I know it. I know my way about. Know it as though I had seen it.'

He didn't really know it, Julian thought—he didn't feel the sun hot on his hands, or see the dazzling, flapping sunblinds, or the advertisements written up in Greek characters in the streets.

Sir Henry went on with his sermon.

'You don't belong there, boy; don't you ever forget that. You belong here. You're English. Bend the riches of that country to your own purpose, that's all right, but don't identify yourself with it. Impose yourself. Make 'em adopt your methods. That's the strength of English colonisation.'

The old man, who was gouty, and leaned his hands on the top of a stick, clapped the back of one hand with the palm of the other and blew out his lips, looking at his great-nephew.

'Yes, yes, remember that. Impose yourself. On my soul, you're a well-grown boy. What are you? nineteen? Great overgrown colt. Get your hair cut. Foreign ways; don't approve of that. Big hands you've got; broad shoulders. Loosely put together. Hope you're not slack. Can you ride?'

'I ride all day out there,' said Julian softly, a little bewildered.

'Well, well. Come to luncheon. Keep a head on your shoulders. Your grandfather lost his once; very foolish man. Wonder he didn't lose it altogether. President indeed! stuff and nonsense. Not practical, sir, not practical.' Sir Henry blew very hard. 'Let's have no such rubbish from you, boy. What'll you drink? Here, I'll give you the best: Herakleion, 1895. Best year we ever had. Hope you appreciate good wine; you're a wine-merchant, you know.'

He cackled loudly at his joke. Julian drank the wine that had ripened on the slopes of Mount Mylassa, or possibly on the Islands, and wished that the old man had not so blatantly called him a wine-merchant. He liked Sir Henry, although after leaving him he always had the sensation of having been buffeted by spasmodic gusts of wind.

He was thinking about Sir Henry now as he rode along, and pitying the old man to whom those swags of fruit meant only a dusty bottle, a red or a blue seal, and a date stamped in gold numerals on a black label. The light was extraordinarily tender, and the air seemed almost tangible with the heavy, honeyed warmth that hung over the road. Julian took off his gray felt hat and hung it on the high peak of his saddle.

They passed through a little village, which was no more than a score of tumbledown houses sown carelessly on each side of the road; here, as in the rue Royale, the peasants sat drinking at round tables outside the cafÉ to the harsh music of a gramophone, with applause and noisy laughter. Near by, half a dozen men were playing at bowls. When they saw Mr Davenant, they came forward in a body and laid eager hands on the neck of his horse. He reined up.

Julian heard the tumult of words: some one had been arrested, it was Vassili's brother. Vassili, he knew, was the big chasseur at the French Legation. He heard his father soothing, promising he would look into the matter; he would, if need be, see the Premier on the morrow. A woman flung herself out of the cafÉ and clasped Julian by the knee. They had taken her lover. Would he, Julian, who was young, be merciful? Would he urge his father's interference? He promised also what was required of him, feeling a strange thrill of emotion and excitement. Ten days ago he had been at Oxford, and here, to-day, Kato had spoken to him as to a grown man, and here in the dusk a sobbing woman was clinging about his knee. This was a place in which anything, fantastic or preposterous, might come to pass.

As they rode on, side by side, his father spoke, thinking aloud. An absent-minded man, he gave his confidence solely in this, so to speak, unintentional manner. Long periods, extending sometimes over months, during which his mind lay fallow, had as their upshot an outbreak of this audible self-communion. Julian had inherited the trait; his mind progressed, not regularly, but by alternate stagnation and a forward bound.

'The mistake that we have made lies in the importation of whole families of islanders to the mainland. The Islands have always considered themselves as a thing apart, as, indeed, historically, they always were. A hundred years is not sufficient to make them an intrinsic part of the State of Herakleion. I cannot wonder that the authorities here dislike us. We have introduced a discontented population from the Islands to spread sedition among the hitherto contented population of the mainland. If we were wise, we should ship the whole lot back to the Islands they came from. Now, a man is arrested on the Islands by the authorities, and what happens? He is the brother of Vassili, an islander living in Herakleion. Vassili spreads the news, it flies up and down the town, and out into the country. It has greeted us out here already. In every cafÉ of the town at this moment the islanders are gathered together, muttering; some will get drunk, perhaps, and the municipal police will intervene; from a drunken row the affair will become political; some one will raise the cry of "Liberty!", heads will be broken, and to-morrow a score of islanders will be in jail. They will attribute their imprisonment to the general hostility to their nationality, rather than to the insignificant brawl. Vassili will come to me in Herakleion to-morrow. Will I exercise my influence with Malteios to get his brother released? I shall go, perhaps, to Malteios, who will listen to me suavely, evasively.... It has all happened a hundred times before. I say, we ought to ship the whole lot back to where they came from.'

'I suppose they are really treated with unfairness?' Julian said, more speculation than interest in his tone.

'I suppose a great many people would think so. The authorities are certainly severe, but they are constantly provoked. And, you know, your uncle and I make it up to the islanders in a number of private ways. Ninety per cent. of the men on the Islands are employed by us, and it pays us to keep them devoted to us by more material bonds than mere sentiment; also it alleviates their discontent, and so obviates much friction with Herakleion.'

'But of course,' said Julian quickly, 'you don't allow Malteios to suspect this?'

'My dear boy! what do you suppose? Malteios is President of Herakleion. Of course, we don't mention such things. But he knows it all very well, and winks at it—perforce. Our understanding with Malteios is entirely satisfactory, entirely. He is on very wholesome terms of friendly respect to us.'

Julian rarely pronounced himself; he did so now.

'If I were an islander—that is, one of a subject race—I don't think I should be very well content to forgo my liberty in exchange for underhand compensation from an employer whose tactics it suited to conciliate my natural dissatisfaction.'

'What a ridiculous phrase. And what ridiculous sentiments you occasionally give vent to. No, no, the present arrangement is as satisfactory as we can hope to make it, always excepting that one flaw, that we ought not to allow islanders in large numbers to live upon the mainland.'

They turned in between the two white lodges of the country house, and rode up the drive between the tall, pungent, untidy trees of eucalyptus. The house, one-storied, low, and covered with wistaria and bougainvillea, glimmered white in the uncertain light. The shutters were flung back and the open windows gaped, oblong and black, at regular intervals on the upper floor. On the ground level, a broad veranda stretched right along the front of the house, and high French windows, opening on to this, yellow with light, gave access to the downstairs rooms.

'HolÀ!' Mr Davenant called in a loud voice.

'Malista, Kyrie,' a man's voice answered, and a servant in the white fustanelle of the Islands, with black puttees wound round his legs, and red shoes with turned-up toes and enormous rosettes on the tip, came running to hold the horses.

'They have taken Vassili's brother, Kyrie,' he said as Mr Davenant gave him the reins.

Julian was already in the drawing-room, among the chintz-covered sofas, loaded little tables, and ubiquitous gilt chairs. Four fat columns, painted to represent lapis-lazuli, divided the room into two halves, and from their Corinthian capitals issued flames made of red tinsel and painted gray smoke, which dispersed itself realistically over the ceiling.

He stood in the window, absently looking out into the garden across the veranda, where the dinner table was laid for six. Pots of oleander and agapanthus stood along the edge of the veranda, between the fat white columns, with gaps between them through which one might pass out into the garden, and beyond them in the garden proper the fruit gleamed on the lemon-trees, and, somewhere, the sea whispered in the dusk. The night was calm and hot with the serenity of established summer weather, the stars big and steady like sequins in the summer sky. The spirit of such serenity does not brood over England, where to-day's pretence of summer will be broken by the fresh laughter of to-morrow's shower. The rose must fall to pieces in the height of its beauty beneath the fingers of sudden and capricious storm. But here the lemons hung, swollen and heavily pendulous, among the metallic green of their leaves, awaiting the accomplished end of their existence, the deepening of their gold, the fuller curve of their ripened luxuriance, with the complacency of certainty; fruit, not for the whim of the elements, but progressing throughout the year steadfastly towards the hand and the basket of the picker. Here and there the overburdened stem would snap, and the oblong ball of greenish-gold would fall with a soft and melancholy thud, like a sigh of regret, upon the ground beneath the tree; would roll a little way, and then be still. The little grove stretched in ordered lines and spaces, from the veranda, where the windows of the house threw rectangles of yellow light on to the ground in the blackness, to the bottom of the garden, where the sea washed indolently against the rocks.

Presently he would see Eve, his eyes would meet her mocking eyes, and they would smile at one another out of the depths of their immemorial friendship. She was familiar to him, so familiar that he could not remember the time when, difficult, intractable, exasperating, subtle, incomprehensible, she had not formed part of his life. She was as familiar to him as the house in the platia, with its big, empty drawing-room, the walls frescoed with swinging monkeys, broken columns, and a romantic land and seascape; as the talk about the vintage; as the preposterous politics, always changing, yet always, monotonously, nauseatingly, pettishly, the same. She was not part of his life in England, the prosaic life; she was part of his life on the Greek seaboard, unreal and fantastic, where the most improbable happenings came along with an air of ingenuousness, romance walking in the garments of every day. After a week in Herakleion he could not disentangle the real from the unreal.

It was the more baffling because those around him, older and wiser than he, appeared to take the situation for granted and to treat it with a seriousness that sometimes led him, when, forgetful, he was off his guard, to believe that the country was a real country and that its statesmen, Platon Malteios, Gregori Stavridis, and the rest, were real statesmen working soberly towards a definite end. That its riots were revolutions; that its factions were political parties; that its discordant, abusive, wrangling Chamber was indeed a Senate. That its four hundred stout soldiers, who periodically paraded the platia under the command of a general in a uniform designed by a theatrical costumier in Buda-Pesth, were indeed an army. That the platia itself was a forum. That the society was brilliant; that its liaisons had the dignity of great passions. That his aunt, who talked weightily and contradicted every one, including herself—the only person who ever ventured to do such a thing—was indeed a political figure, an Egeria among the men in whose hands lay the direction of affairs. In his more forgetful moments, he was tempted to believe these things, when he saw his father and his Uncle Robert, both unbending, incisive, hard-headed business men, believing them. As a rule, preserving his nice sense of perspective, he saw them as a setting to Eve.

He was beginning to adjust himself again to the life which faded with so extraordinary a rapidity as the express or the steamer bore him away, three times a year, to England. It faded always then like a photographic proof when exposed to the light. The political jargon was the first to go—he knew the sequence—'civil war,' 'independent archipelago,' 'overthrow of the Cabinet,' 'a threat to the Malteios party,' 'intrigues of the Stavridists,' the well-known phrases that, through sheer force of reiteration, he accepted without analysis; then, after the political jargon, the familiar figures that he saw almost daily, Sharp, his father's chief clerk; Aristotle, the door-keeper, his tussore fustanelle hanging magisterially from the rotundity of his portentous figure; Madame Lafarge, erect, and upholstered like a sofa, driving in her barouche; the young men at the club, languid and insolent and licentious; then, after the familiar figures, the familiar scenes; and lastly Eve herself, till he could no longer recall the drowsy tones of her voice, or evoke her eyes, that, though alive with malice and mockery, were yet charged with a mystery to which he could give no name. He was sad when these things began to fade. He clung on to them, because they were dear, but they slipped through his fingers like running water. Their evanescence served only to convince him the more of their unreality.

Then, England, immutable, sagacious, balanced; Oxford, venerable and self-confident, turning the young men of the nation as by machinery out of her mould. Law-abiding England, where men worked their way upwards, attaining power and honour in the ripeness of years. London, where the houses were of stone. Where was Herakleion, stucco-built and tawdry, city of perpetually-clanging bells, revolutions, and Prime Ministers made and unmade in a day? Herakleion of the yellow islands, washed by too blue a sea. Where?

Eve had never been to England, nor could he see any place in England for her. She should continue to live as she had always lived, among the vines and the magnolias, attended by a fat old woman who, though English, had spent so many years of her life in Herakleion that her English speech was oddly tainted by the southern lisp of the native Greek she had never been able to master; old Nana, who had lost the familiarity of one tongue without acquiring that of another; the ideal duenna for Eve.

Then with a light step across the veranda a young Greek priest came into the room by one of the French windows, blinking and smiling in the light, dressed in a long black soutane and black cap, his red hair rolled up into a knob at the back of his head according to the fashion of his church. He tripped sometimes over his soutane as he walked, muscular and masculine inside that feminine garment, and when he did this he would gather it up impatiently with a hand on which grew a pelt of wiry red hairs. Father Paul had instituted himself as a kind of private chaplain to the Davenants. Eve encouraged him because she thought him picturesque. Mrs Robert Davenant found him invaluable as a lieutenant in her campaign of control over the peasants and villagers, over whom she exercised a despotic if benevolent authority. He was therefore free to come and go as he pleased.

The population, Julian thought, was flowing back into his recovered world.

England and Oxford were put aside; not forgotten, not indistinct, not faded like Herakleion was wont to fade, but merely put aside, laid away like winter garments in summer weather. He was once more in the kingdom of stucco and adventure. Eve was coming back to him, with her strange shadowy eyes and red mouth, and her frivolity beneath which lay some force which was not frivolous. There were women who were primarily pretty; women who were primarily motherly; women who, like Mrs Robert Davenant, were primarily efficient, commanding, successful, metallic; women who, like Kato, were consumed by a flame of purpose which broke, hot and scorching, from their speech and burned relentlessly in their eyes; women who were primarily vain and trifling; he found he could crowd Eve into no such category. He recalled her, spoilt, exquisite, witty, mettlesome, elusive, tantalising; detached from such practical considerations as punctuality, convenience, reliability. A creature that, from the age of three, had exacted homage and protection....

He heard her indolent voice behind him in the room, and turned expectantly for their meeting.

---