PanaÏoannou attempted a landing before sunrise on the following day.

A few stars were still visible, but the moon was paling, low in the heavens, and along the eastern horizon the sky was turning rosy and yellow above the sea. Earth, air, and water were alike bathed in purity and loveliness. Julian, hastily aroused, remembered the Islands as he had seen them from the mainland on the day of Madame Lafarge's picnic. In such beauty they were lying now, dependent on his defence.... Excited beyond measure, he dressed rapidly, and as he dressed he heard the loud clanging of the school bell summoning the men to arms; he heard the village waking, the clatter of banging doors, of wooden soles upon the cobbles, and excited voices. He rushed from his room into the passage, where he met Eve.

She was very pale, and her hair was streaming round her shoulders. She clung to him.

'Oh, Julian, what is it? why are they ringing the bells? why are you dressed? where are you going?'

He explained, holding her, stroking her hair.

'Boats have been sighted, setting out from Herakleion; I suppose they think they will take us by surprise. You know, I have told off two men to look after you; you are to go into the little hut which is prepared for you in the very centre of the island. They will never land, and you will be perfectly safe there. I will let you know directly they are driven off. You must let me go, darling.'

'Oh, but you? but you?' she cried desperately.

'They won't come near me,' he replied laughing.

'Julian, Julian,' she said, holding on to his coat as he tried to loosen her fingers, 'Julian, I want you to know: you're all my life, I give you myself, on whatever terms you like, for ever if you like, for a week if you like; you can do with me whatever you choose; throw me away when you've done with me; you think me worthless; I care only for you in the world.'

He was astonished at the starkness and violence of the passion in her eyes and voice.

'But I am not going into any danger,' he said, trying to soothe her.

'For God's sake, kiss me,' she said, distraught, and seeing that he was impatient to go.

'I'll kiss you to-night,' he answered tempestuously, with a ring of triumph as one who takes a decision.

'No, no: now.'

He kissed her hair, burying his face in its thickness.

'This attack is a comedy, not a tragedy,' he called back to her as he ran down the stairs.

The sentry who had first sighted the fleet of boats was still standing upon his headland, leaning on his rifle, and straining his eyes over the sea. Julian saw him thus silhouetted against the morning sky. Day was breaking as Julian came up the mule-path, a score of islanders behind him, walking with the soft, characteristic swishing of their white woollen skirts, and the slight rattle of slung rifles. All paused at the headland, which was above a little rocky creek; the green and white water foamed gently below. Out to sea the boats were distinctly visible, dotted about the sea, carrying each a load of men; there might be twenty or thirty, with ten or fifteen men in each.

'They must be out of their senses,' Tsigaridis growled; 'their only hope would have lain in a surprise attack at night—which by the present moonlight would indeed have proved equally idle—but at present they but expose themselves to our butchery.'

'The men are all at their posts?' Julian asked.

'Malista, Kyrie, malista.' They remained for a little watching the boats as the daylight grew. The colours of the dawn were shifting, stretching, widening, and the water, turning from iron-gray to violet, began along the horizon to reflect the transparency of the sky. The long, low, gray clouds caught upon their edges an orange flush; a sudden bar of gold fell along the line where sky and water met; a drift of tiny clouds turned red like a flight of flamingoes; and the blue began insensibly to spread, pale at first, then deepening as the sun rose out of the melting clouds and flooded over the full expanse of sea. To the left, the coast of the mainland, with Mount Mylassa soaring, and Herakleion at its base, broke the curve until it turned at an angle to run northward. Smoke began to rise in steady threads of blue from the houses of Herakleion. The red light died away at the tip of the pier. The gulls circled screaming, flashes of white and gray, marbled birds; and beyond the thin line of foam breaking against the island the water was green in the shallows.

All round Aphros the islanders were lying in pickets behind defences, the naturally rocky and shelving coast affording them the command of every approach. The port, which was the only really suitable landing-place, was secure, dominated as it was by the village; no boat could hope to live for five minutes under concentrated rifle fire from the windows of the houses. The other possible landing-places—the creeks and little beaches—could be held with equal ease by half a dozen men with rifles lying under shelter upon the headlands or on the ledges of the rocks. Julian was full of confidence. The danger of shelling he discounted, firstly because Herakleion possessed no man-of-war, or, indeed, any craft more formidable than the police motor-launch, and secondly because the authorities in Herakleion knew well enough that Italy, for reasons of her own, neither wholly idealistic nor disinterested, would never tolerate the complete destruction of Aphros. Moreover, it would be hopeless to attempt to starve out an island whose population lived almost entirely upon the fish caught round their own shores, the vegetables and fruit grown upon their own hillsides, the milk and cheeses from their own rough-feeding goats, and the occasional but sufficient meat from their own sheep and bullocks.

'Kyrie,' said Tsigaridis, 'should we not move into shelter?'

Julian abandoned the headland regretfully. For his own post he had chosen the Davenant house in the village. He calculated that PanaÏoannou, unaware of the existence of a number of rifles on the island, would make his first and principal attempt upon the port, expecting there to encounter a hand to hand fight with a crowd diversely armed with knives, stones, pitchforks, and a few revolvers—a brief, bloody, desperate resistance, whose term could be but a matter of time, after which the village would fall into the hands of the invaders and the rebellion would be at an end. At most, PanaÏoannou would argue, the fighting would be continued up into the main street of the village, the horizontal street that was its backbone, terminating at one end by the market-place above the port, and at the other by the Davenants' house; and ramifications of fighting—a couple of soldiers here and there pursuing a fleeing islander—up the sloping, narrow, stepped streets running between the houses, at right angles from the main street, up the hill. Julian sat with his rifle cocked across his knees in one of the window recesses of his own house, and grinned as he anticipated PanaÏoannou's surprise. He did not want a massacre of the fat, well-meaning soldiers of Herakleion—the casino, he reflected, must be closed to-day, much to the annoyance of the gambling dagos; however, they would have excitement enough, of another kind, to console them—he did not want a massacre of the benevolent croupier-soldiers he had seen parading the platia only two days before, but he wanted them taught that Aphros was a hornets' nest out of which they had better keep their fingers. He thought it extremely probable that after a first repulse they would refuse to renew the attack. They liked well enough defiling across the platia on Independence Day, and recognising their friends amongst the admiring crowd, but he doubted whether they would appreciate being shot down in open boats by an enemy they could not even see.

In the distance, from the windows of his own house, he heard firing, and from the advancing boats he could see spurts of smoke. He discerned a commotion in one boat; men got up and changed places, and the boat turned round and began to row in the opposite direction. Young Zapantiotis called to him from another window,—

'You see them, Kyrie? Some one has been hit.'

Julian laughed exultantly. On a table near him lay a crumpled handkerchief of Eve's, and a gardenia; he put the flower into his buttonhole. Behind all his practical plans and his excitement lay the memory of his few words with her in the passage; under the stress of her emotion she had revealed a depth and vehemence of truth that he hitherto scarcely dared to imagine. To-day would be given to him surely more than his fair share for any mortal man: a fight, and the most desirable of women! He rejoiced in his youth and his leaping blood. Yet he continued sorry for the kindly croupier-soldiers.

The boats came on, encouraged by the comparative silence on the island. Julian was glad it was not the fashion among the young men of Herakleion, his friends, to belong to the army. He wondered what Grbits was thinking of him. He was probably on the quay, watching through a telescope. Or had the expedition been kept a secret from the still sleeping Herakleion? Surely! for he could distinguish no crowd upon the distant quays across the bay.

A shot rang out close at hand, from some window of the village, and in one of the foremost boats he saw a man throw up his hands and fall over backwards.

He sickened slightly. This was inevitable, he knew, but he had no lust for killing in this cold-blooded fashion. Kneeling on the window-seat he took aim between the bars of the grating, and fired a quantity of shots all round the boat; they splashed harmlessly into the water, but had the effect he desired; the boat turned round in retreat.

Firing crackled now from all parts of the island. The casualties in the boats increased. In rage and panic the soldiers fired wildly back at the island, especially at the village; bullets ping-ed through the air and rattled on the roofs; occasionally there came a crash of broken glass. Once Julian heard a cry, and, craning his head to look down the street, he saw an islander lying on his face on the ground between the houses with his arms outstretched, blood running freely from his shoulder and staining his white clothes.

'My people!' Julian cried in a passion, and shot deliberately into a boat-load of men.

'God!' he said to himself a moment later, 'I've killed him.'

He laid down his rifle with a gesture of horror, and went out into the courtyard where the fountain still played and the pigeons prinked and preened. He opened the door into the street, went down the steps and along the street to where the islander lay groaning, lifted him carefully, and dragged him into the shelter of the house. Zapantiotis met him in the court.

'Kyrie,' he said, scared and reproachful, 'you should have sent me.'

Julian left him to look after the wounded man, and returned to the window; the firing had slackened, for the boats were now widely dispersed over the sea, offering only isolated targets at a considerable distance. Time had passed rapidly, and the sun had climbed high overhead. He looked at the little dotted boats, bearing their burden of astonishment, death, and pain. Was it possible that the attack had finally drawn away?

At that thought, he regretted that the fighting had not given an opportunity of a closer, a more personal struggle.

An hour passed. He went out into the village, where life was beginning to flow once more into the street and market-place; the villagers came out to look at their broken windows, and their chipped houses; they were all laughing and in high good-humour, pointing proudly to the damage, and laughing like children to see that in the school-house, which faced the sea and in which the remaining Greek officials were still imprisoned, nearly all the windows were broken. Julian, shaking off the people, men and women, who were trying to kiss his hands or his clothes, appeared briefly in the class-room to reassure the occupants. They were all huddled into a corner, behind a barricade of desks and benches. The one guard who had been left with them had spent his time inventing terrible stories for their distress. The wooden wall opposite the windows was pocked in two or three places by bullets.

As Julian came out again into the market-place he saw old Tsigaridis riding down on his great white mule from the direction of the hills, accompanied by two runners on foot. He waited while the mule picked its way carefully and delicately down the stepped path that led from the other side of the market-place up into the interior of the island.

'They are beaten off, Tsantilas.'

'No imprudences,' said the grave old man, and recommended to the people, who came crowding round his mule, to keep within the shelter of their houses.

'But, Tsantilas, we have the boats within our sight; they cannot return without our knowledge in ample time to seek shelter.'

'There is one boat for which we cannot account—the motor-boat—it is swift and may yet take us by surprise,' Tsigaridis replied pessimistically.

He dismounted from his mule, and walked up the street with Julian by his side, while the people, crestfallen, dispersed with lagging footsteps to their respective doorways. The motor-launch, it would appear, had been heard in the far distance, 'over there,' said Tsigaridis, extending his left arm; the pickets upon the eastern coasts of the island had distinctly heard the echo of its engines—it was, fortunately, old and noisy—but early in the morning the sound had ceased, and since then had not once been renewed. Tsigaridis inferred that the launch was lying somewhere in concealment amongst the tiny islands, from where it would emerge, unexpectedly and in an unexpected place, to attack.

'It must carry at least fifty men,' he added.

Julian revelled in the news. A motor-launch with such a crew would provide worthier game than little cockleshell rowing-boats. PanaÏoannou himself might be of the party. Julian saw the general already as his prisoner.

He remembered Eve. So long as the launch lay in hiding he could not allow her to return to the village. It was even possible that they might have a small gun on board. He wanted to see her, he ached with the desire to see her, but, an instinctive Epicurean, he welcomed the circumstances that forced him to defer their meeting until nightfall....

He wrote her a note on a leaf of his pocket-book, and despatched it to her by one of Tsigaridis' runners.

The hours of waiting fretted him, and to ease his impatience he started on a tour of the island with Tsigaridis. They rode on mules, nose to tail along the winding paths, not climbing up into the interior, but keeping to the lower track that ran above the sea, upon the first flat ledge of the rock, all around the island. In some places the path was so narrow and so close to the edge that Julian could, by leaning sideways in his saddle, look straight down the cliff into the water swirling and foaming below. He was familiar with almost every creek, so often had he bathed there as a boy. Looking at the foam, he murmured to himself,—

'Aphros....'

There were no houses here among the rocks, and no trees, save for an occasional group of pines, whose little cones clustered among the silvery branches, quite black against the sky. Here and there, above creeks or the little sandy beaches where a landing for a small boat would have been possible, the picket of islanders had come out from their shelter behind the boulders, and were sitting talking on the rocks, holding their rifles upright between their knees, while a solitary sentinel kept watch at the extremity of the point, his kilted figure white as the circling seagulls or as the foam. A sense of lull and of siesta lay over the afternoon. At every picket Julian asked the same question, and at every picket the same answer was returned,—

'We have heard no engines since earliest morning, Kyrie.'

Round the curve of the island, the first tiny, uninhabited islands came into view. Some of them were mere rocks sticking up out of the sea; others, a little larger, grew a few trees, and a boat could have hidden, invisible from Aphros, on their farther side. Julian looked longingly at the narrow stretches of water which separated them. He even suggested starting to look for the launch.

'It would be madness, Kyrie.'

Above a little bay, where the ground sloped down less abruptly, and where the sand ran gently down under the thin wavelets, they halted with the picket of that particular spot. Their mules were led away by a runner. Julian enjoyed sitting amongst these men, hearing them talk, and watching them roll cigarette after cigarette with the practised skill of their knotty fingers. Through the sharp lines of their professional talk, and the dignity of their pleasant trades—for they were all fishermen, vintagers, or sheep and goat-herds—he smiled to the hidden secret of Eve, and fancied that the soft muslin of her garments brushed, as at the passage of a ghost, against the rude woollen garments of the men; that her hands, little and white and idle, fluttered over their hardened hands; that he alone could see her pass amongst their group, smile to him, and vanish down the path. He was drowsy in the drowsy afternoon; he felt that he had fought and had earned his rest, and, moreover, was prepared to rise from his sleep with new strength to fight again. Rest between a battle and a battle. Strife, sleep, and love; love, sleep, and strife; a worthy plan of life!

He slept.

When he woke the men still sat around him, talking still of their perennial trades, and without opening his eyes he lay listening to them, and thought that in such a simple world the coming and going of generations was indeed of slight moment, since in the talk of crops and harvests, of the waxing and waning of moons, of the treachery of the sea or the fidelity of the land, the words of the ancestor might slip unchanged as an inheritance to grandson and great-grandson. Of such kindred were they with nature, that he in his half-wakefulness barely distinguished the voices of the men from the wash of waves on the shore. He opened his eyes. The sun, which he had seen rising out of the sea in the dawn, after sweeping in its great flaming arc across the sky, had sunk again under the horizon. Heavy purple clouds like outpoured wine stained the orange of the west. The colour of the sea was like the flesh of a fig.

Unmistakably, the throb of an engine woke the echoes between the islands.

All eyes met, all voices hushed; tense, they listened. The sound grew; from a continuous purr it changed into separate beats. By mutual consent, and acting under no word of command, the men sought the cover of their boulders, clambering over the rocks, carrying their rifles with them, white, noiseless, and swift. Julian found himself with three others in a species of little cave the opening of which commanded the beach; the cave was low, and they were obliged to crouch; one man knelt down at the mouth with his rifle ready to put to his shoulder. Julian could smell, in that restricted place, the rough smell of their woollen clothes, and the tang of the goat which clung about one man, who must be a goat-herd.

Then before their crouching position could begin to weary them, the beat of the engines became insistent, imminent; and the launch shot round the curve, loaded with standing men, and heading directly for the beach. A volley of fire greeted them, but the soldiers were already overboard, waist-deep in water, plunging towards the shore with their rifles held high over their heads, while the crew of the launch violently reversed the engines and drove themselves off the sand by means of long poles, to save the launch from an irrevocable grounding. The attack was well planned, and executed by men who knew intimately the lie of the coast. With loud shouts, they emerged dripping from the water on to the beach.

They were at least forty strong; the island picket numbered only a score, but they had the advantage of concealment. A few of the soldiers dropped while yet in the water; others fell forward on to their faces with their legs in the water and their heads and shoulders on dry land; many gained a footing but were shot down a few yards from the edge of the sea; the survivors flung themselves flat behind hummocks of rock and fired in the direction of the defending fire. Everything seemed to have taken place within the compass of two or three minutes. Julian had himself picked off three of the invaders; his blood was up, and he had lost all the sickening sense of massacre he had felt during the early part of the day.

He never knew how the hand to hand fight actually began; he only knew that suddenly he was out of the cave, in the open, without a rifle, but with his revolver in his grasp, backed and surrounded by his own shouting men, and confronted by the soldiers of Herakleion, heavily impeded by their wet trousers, but fighting sheerly for their lives, striving to get at him, losing their heads and aiming wildly, throwing aside their rifles and grappling at last bodily with their enemies, struggling not to be driven back into the sea, cursing the islanders, and calling to one another to rally, stumbling over the dead and the wounded. Julian scarcely recognised his own voice in the shout of, 'Aphros!' He was full of the lust of fighting; he had seen men roll over before the shot of his revolver, and had driven them down before the weight of his fist. He was fighting joyously, striking among the waves of his enemies as a swimmer striking out against a current. All his thought was to kill, and to rid his island of these invaders; already the tide had turned, and that subtle sense of defeat and victory that comes upon the crest of battle was infusing respectively despair and triumph. There was now no doubt in the minds of either the attackers or the defenders in whose favour the attack would end. There remained but three alternatives: surrender, death, or the sea.

Already many were choosing the first, and those that turned in the hope of regaining the launch were shot down or captured before they reached the water. The prisoners, disarmed, stood aside in a little sulky group under the guard of one islander, watching, resignedly, and with a certain indifference born of their own secession from activity, the swaying clump of men, shouting, swearing, and stumbling, and the feeble efforts of the wounded to drag themselves out of the way of the trampling feet. The sand of the beach was in some places, where blood had been spilt, stamped into a dark mud. A wounded soldier, lying half in and half out of the water, cried out pitiably as the salt water lapped over his wounds.

The decision was hastened by the crew of the launch, who, seeing a bare dozen of their companions rapidly overpowered by a superior number of islanders, and having themselves no fancy to be picked off at leisure from the shore, started their engines and made off to sea. At that a cry of dismay went up; retreat, as an alternative, was entirely withdrawn; death an empty and unnecessary display of heroism; surrender remained; they chose it thankfully.