The lyric of their early days of love piped clear and sweet upon the terraces of Aphros.

Their surroundings entered into a joyous conspiracy with their youth. Between halcyon sky and sea the island lay radiantly; as it were suspended, unattached, coloured like a rainbow, and magic with the enchantment of its isolation. The very foam which broke around its rocks served to define, by its lacy fringe of white, the compass of the magic circle. To them were granted solitude and beauty beyond all dreams of lovers. They dwelt in the certainty that no intruder could disturb them—save those intruders to be beaten off in frank fight—no visitor from the outside world but those that came on wings, swooping down out of the sky, poising for an instant upon the island, that halting place in the heart of the sea, and flying again with restless cries, sea-birds, the only disturbers of their peace. From the shadow of the olives, or of the stunted pines whose little cones hung like black velvet balls in the transparent tracery of the branches against the sky, they lay idly watching the gulls, and the tiny white clouds by which the blue was almost always flaked. The population of the island melted into a harmony with nature like the trees, the rocks and boulders, or the roving flocks of sheep and herds of goats. Eve and Julian met with neither curiosity nor surprise; only with acquiescence. Daily as they passed down the village street, to wander up the mule-tracks into the interior of Aphros, they were greeted by smiles and devotion that were as unquestioning and comfortable as the shade of the trees or the cool splash of the water; and nightly as they remained alone together in their house, dark, roofed over with stars, and silent but for the ripple of the fountain, they could believe that they had been tended by invisible hands in the island over which they reigned in isolated sovereignty.

They abandoned themselves to the unbelievable romance. He, indeed, had striven half-heartedly; but she, with all the strength of her nature, had run gratefully, nay, clamantly, forward, exacting the reward of her patience, demanding her due. She rejoiced in the casting aside of shackles which, although she had resolutely ignored them in so far as was possible, had always irked her by their latent presence. At last she might gratify to the full her creed of living for and by the beloved, in a world of beauty where the material was denied admittance. In such a dream, such an ecstasy of solitude, they gained marvellously in one another's eyes. She revealed to Julian the full extent of her difference and singularity. For all their nearness in the human sense, he received sometimes with a joyful terror the impression that he was living in the companionship of a changeling, a being strayed by accident from another plane. The small moralities and tendernesses of mankind contained no meaning for her. They were burnt away by the devastating flame of her own ideals. He knew now, irrefutably, that she had lived her life withdrawn from all but external contact with her surroundings.

Her sensuality, which betrayed itself even in the selection of the arts she loved, had marked her out for human passion. He had observed her instinct to deck herself for his pleasure; he had learnt the fastidious refinement with which she surrounded her body. He had marked her further instinct to turn the conduct of their love into a fine art. She had taught him the value of her reserve, her evasions, and of her sudden recklessness. He never discovered, and, no less epicurean than she, never sought to discover, how far her principles were innate, unconscious, or how far deliberate. They both tacitly esteemed the veil of some slight mystery to soften the harshness of their self-revelation.

He dared not invoke the aid of unshrinking honesty to apportion the values between their physical and their mental affinity.

What was it, this bond of flesh? so material, yet so imperative, so compelling, as to become almost a spiritual, not a bodily, necessity? so transitory, yet so recurrent? dying down like a flame, to revive again? so unimportant, so grossly commonplace, yet creating so close and tremulous an intimacy? this magic that drew together their hands like fluttering butterflies in the hours of sunlight, and linked them in the abandonment of mastery and surrender in the hours of night? that swept aside the careful training, individual and hereditary, replacing pride by another pride? this unique and mutual secret? this fallacious yet fundamental and dominating bond? this force, hurling them together with such cosmic power that within the circle of frail human entity rushed furiously the tempest of an inexorable law of nature?

They had no tenderness for one another. Such tenderness as might have crept into the relationship they collaborated in destroying, choosing to dwell in the strong clean air of mountain-tops, shunning the ease of the valleys. Violence was never very far out of sight. They loved proudly, with a flame that purged all from their love but the essential, the ideal passion.

'I live with a MÆnad,' he said, putting out his hand and bathing his fingers in her loosened hair.

From the rough shelter of reeds and matting where they idled then among the terraced vineyards, the festoons of the vines and the bright reds and yellows of the splay leaves, brilliant against the sun, framed her consonant grace. The beautiful shadows of lacing vines dappled the ground, and the quick lizards darted upon the rough terrace walls.

He said, pursuing his thought,—

'You have never the wish of other women—permanency? a house with me? never the inkling of such a wish?'

'Trammels!' she replied, 'I've always hated possessions.'

He considered her at great length, playing with her hair, fitting his fingers into its waving thicknesses, putting his cheek against the softness of her cheek, and laughing.

'My changeling. My nymph,' he said.

She lay silent, her arms folded behind her head, and her eyes on him as he continued to utter his disconnected sentences.

'Where is the Eve of Herakleion? The mask you wore! I dwelt only upon your insignificant vanity, and in your pride you made no defence. Most secret pride! Incredible chastity of mind! Inviolate of soul, to all alike. Inviolate. Most rare restraint! The expansive vulgarity of the crowd! My Eve....'

He began again,—

'So rarely, so stainlessly mine. Beyond mortal hopes. You allowed all to misjudge you, myself included. You smiled, not even wistfully, lest that betray you, and said nothing. You held yourself withdrawn. You perfected your superficial life. That profound humour.... I could not think you shallow—not all your pretence could disguise your mystery—but, may I be forgiven, I have thought you shallow in all but mischief. I prophesied for you'—he laughed—'a great career as a destroyer of men. A great courtesan. But instead I find you a great lover. Une grande amoureuse.'

'If that is mischievous,' she said, 'my love for you goes beyond mischief; it would stop short of no crime.'

He put his face between his hands for a second.

'I believe you; I know it.'

'I understand love in no other way,' she said, sitting up and shaking her hair out of her eyes; 'I am single-hearted. It is selfish love: I would die for you, gladly, without a thought, but I would sacrifice my claim on you to no one and to nothing. It is all-exorbitant. I make enormous demands. I must have you exclusively for myself.'

He teased her,—

'You refuse to marry me.'

She was serious.

'Freedom, Julian! romance! The world before us, to roam at will; fairs to dance at; strange people to consort with, to see the smile in their eyes, and the tolerant "Lovers!" forming on their lips. To tweak the nose of Propriety, to snatch away the chair on which she would sit down! Who in their senses would harness the divine courser to a mail-cart?'

She seemed to him lit by an inner radiance, that shone through her eyes and glowed richly in her smile.

'Vagabond!' he said. 'Is life to be one long carnival?'

'And one long honesty. I'll own you before the world—and court its disapproval. I'll release you—no, I'll leave you—when you tire of me. I wouldn't clip love's golden wings. I wouldn't irk you with promises, blackmail you into perjury, wring from you an oath we both should know was made only to be broken. We'll leave that to middle-age. Middle-age—I have been told there is such a thing? Sometimes it is fat, sometimes it is wan, surely it is always dreary! It may be wise and successful and contented. Sometimes, I'm told, it even loves. We are young. Youth!' she said, sinking her voice, 'the winged and the divine.'

When he talked to her about the Islands, she did not listen, although she dared not check him. He talked, striving to interest her, to fire her enthusiasm. He talked, with his eyes always upon the sea, since some obscure instinct warned him not to keep them bent upon her face; sometimes they were amongst the vines, which in the glow of their September bronze and amber resembled the wine flowing from their fruits, and from here the sea shimmered, crudely and cruelly blue between those flaming leaves, undulating into smooth, nacreous folds; sometimes they were amongst the rocks on the lower levels, on a windier day, when white crests spurted from the waves, and the foam broke with a lacy violence against the island at the edge of the green shallows; and sometimes, after dusk, they climbed to the olive terraces beneath the moon that rose through the trees in a world strangely gray and silver, strangely and contrastingly deprived of colour. He talked, lying on the ground, with his hands pressed close against the soil of Aphros. Its contact gave him the courage he needed.... He talked doggedly; in the first week with the fire of inspiration, after that with the perseverance of loyalty. These monologues ended always in the same way. He would bring his glance from the sea to her face, would break off his phrase in the middle, and, coming suddenly to her, would cover her hair, her throat, her mouth, with kisses. Then she would turn gladly and luxuriously towards him, curving in his arms, and presently the grace of her murmured speech would again bewitch him, until upon her lips he forgot the plea of Aphros.

There were times when he struggled to escape her, his physical and mental activity rebelling against the subjection in which she held him. He protested that the affairs of the Islands claimed him; that Herakleion had granted but a month for negotiations; precautions must be taken, and the scheme of government amplified and consolidated. Then the angry look came over her face, and all the bitterness of her resentment broke loose. Having captured him, much of her precocious wisdom seemed to have abandoned her.

'I have waited for you ten years, yet you want to leave me. Do I mean less to you than the Islands? I wish the Islands were at the bottom of the sea instead of on the top of it.'

'Be careful, Eve.'

'I resent everything which takes you from me,' she said recklessly.

Another time she cried, murky with passion,—

'Always these councils with Tsigaridis and the rest! always these secret messages passing between you and Kato! Give me that letter.'

He refused, shredding Kato's letter and scattering the pieces into the sea.

'What secrets have you with Kato, that you must keep from me?'

'They would have no interest for you,' he replied, remembering that she was untrustworthy—that canker in his confidence.

The breeze fanned slightly up the creek where they were lying on the sand under the shadow of a pine, and out in the dazzling sea a porpoise leapt, turning its slow black curve in the water. The heat simmered over the rocks.

'We share our love,' he said morosely, 'but no other aspect of life. The Islands are nothing to you. An obstacle, not a link.' It was a truth that he rarely confronted.

'You are wrong: a background, a setting for you, which I appreciate.'

'You appreciate the picturesque. I know. You are an artist in appreciation of the suitable stage-setting. But as for the rest....' he made a gesture full of sarcasm and renunciation.

'Give me up, Julian, and all my shortcomings. I have always told you I had but one virtue. I am the first to admit the insufficiency of its claim. Give yourself wholly to your Islands. Let me go.' She spoke sadly, as though conscious of her own irremediable difference and perversity.

'Yet you yourself—what were your words?—said you believed in me; you even wrote to me, I remember still, "conquer, shatter, demolish!" But I must always struggle against you, against your obstructions. What is it you want? Liberty and irresponsibility, to an insatiable degree!'

'Because I love you insatiably.'

'You are too unreasonable sometimes' ('Reason!' she interrupted with scorn, 'what has reason got to do with love?') 'you are unreasonable to grudge me every moment I spend away from you. Won't you realise that I am responsible for five thousand lives? You must let me go now; only for an hour. I promise to come back to you in an hour.'

'Are you tired of me already?'

'Eve....'

'When we were in Herakleion, you were always saying you must go to Kato; now you are always going to some council; am I never to have you to myself?'

'I will go only for an hour. I must go, Eve, my darling.'

'Stay with me, Julian. I'll kiss you. I'll tell you a story.' She stretched out her hands. He shook his head, laughing, and ran off in the direction of the village.

When he returned, she refused to speak to him.

But at other times they grew marvellously close, passing hours and days in unbroken union, until the very fact of their two separate personalities became an exasperation. Then, silent as two souls tortured, before a furnace, they struggled for the expression that ever eludes; the complete, the satisfying expression that shall lay bare one soul to another soul, but that, ever failing, mockingly preserves the unwanted boon of essential mystery.

That dumb frenzy outworn, they attained, nevertheless, to a nearer comradeship, the days, perhaps, of their greatest happiness, when with her reckless fancy she charmed his mind; he thought of her then as a vagrant nymph, straying from land to land, from age to age, decking her spirit with any flower she met growing by the way, chastely concerned with the quest of beauty, strangely childlike always, pure as the fiercest, tallest flame. He could not but bow to that audacity, that elemental purity, of spirit. Untainted by worldliness, greed, or malice.... The facts of her life became clearer to him, startling in their consistency. He could not associate her with possessions, or a fixed abode, she who was free and elusive as a swallow, to whom the slightest responsibility was an intolerable and inadmissible yoke from beneath which, without commotion but also without compunction, she slipped. On no material point could she be touched—save her own personal luxury, and that seemed to grow with her, as innocent of effort as the colour on a flower; she kindled only in response to music, poetry, love, or laughter, but then with what a kindling! she flamed, she glowed; she ranged over spacious and fabulous realms; her feet never touched earth, they were sandal-shod and carried her in the clean path of breezes, and towards the sun, exalted and ecstatic, breathing as the common air the rarity of the upper spaces. At such times she seemed a creature blown from legend, deriving from no parentage; single, individual, and lawless.

He found that he had come gradually to regard her with a superstitious reverence.

He evolved a theory, constructed around her, dim and nebulous, yet persistent; perforce nebulous, since he was dealing with a matter too fine, too subtle, too unexplored, to lend itself to the gross imperfect imprisonment of words. He never spoke of it, even to her, but staring at her sometimes with a reeling head he felt himself transported, by her medium, beyond the matter-of-fact veils that shroud the limit of human vision. He felt illuminated, on the verge of a new truth; as though by stretching out his hand he might touch something no hand of man had ever touched before, something of unimaginable consistency, neither matter nor the negation of matter; as though he might brush the wings of truth, handle the very substance of a thought....

He felt at these times like a man who passes through a genuine psychical experience. Yes, it was as definite as that; he had the glimpse of a possible revelation. He returned from his vision—call it what he would, vision would serve as well as any other word—he returned with that sense of benefit by which alone such an excursion—or was it incursion?—could be justified. He brought back a benefit. He had beheld, as in a distant prospect, a novel balance and proportion of certain values. That alone would have left him enriched for ever.

Practical as he could be, theories and explorations were yet dear to him: he was an inquisitive adventurer of the mind no less than an active adventurer of the world. He sought eagerly for underlying truths. His apparently inactive moods were more accurately his fallow moods. His thought was as an ardent plough, turning and shifting the loam of his mind. Yet he would not allow his fancy to outrun his conviction; if fancy at any moment seemed to lead, he checked it until more lumbering conviction could catch up. They must travel ever abreast, whip and reins alike in his control.

Youth—were the years of youth the intuitive years of perception? Were the most radiant moments the moments in which one stepped farthest from the ordered acceptance of the world? Moments of danger, moments of inspiration, moments of self-sacrifice, moments of perceiving beauty, moments of love, all the drunken moments! Eve moved, he knew, permanently upon that plane. She led an exalted, high-keyed inner life. The normal mood to her was the mood of a sensitive person caught at the highest pitch of sensibility. Was she unsuited to the world and to the necessities of the world because she belonged, not here, but to another sphere apprehended by man only in those rare, keen moments that Julian called the drunken moments? apprehended by poet or artist—the elect, the aristocracy, the true path-finders among the race of man!—in moments when sobriety left them and they passed beyond?

Was she to blame for her cruelty, her selfishness, her disregard for truth? was she, not evil, but only alien? to be forgiven all for the sake of the rarer, more distant flame? Was the standard of cardinal virtues set by the world the true, the ultimate standard? Was it possible that Eve made part of a limited brotherhood? was indeed a citizen of some advanced state of such perfection that this world's measures and ideals were left behind and meaningless? meaningless because unnecessary in such a realm of serenity?

Aphros, then—the liberty of Aphros—and Aphros meant to him far more than merely Aphros—that was surely a lovely and desirable thing, a worthy aim, a high beacon? If Eve cared nothing for the liberty of Aphros, was it because in her world (he was by now convinced of its existence) there was no longer any necessity to trouble over such aims, liberty being as natural and unmeditated as the air in the nostrils?

(Not that this would ever turn him from his devotion; at most he could look upon Aphros as a stage upon the journey towards that higher aim—the stage to which he and his like, who were nearly of the elect, yet not of them, might aspire. And if the day should ever come when disillusion drove him down; when, far from becoming a citizen of Eve's far sphere, he should cease to be a citizen even of Aphros and should become a citizen merely of the world, no longer young, no longer blinded by ideals, no longer nearly a poet, but merely a grown, sober man—then he would still keep Aphros as a bright memory of what might have been, of the best he had grasped, the possibility which in the days of youth had not seemed too extravagantly unattainable.)

But in order to keep his hold upon this world of Eve's, which in his inner consciousness he already recognised as the most valuable rift of insight ever vouchsafed to him, it was necessary that he should revolutionise every ancient gospel and reputable creed. The worth of Eve was to him an article of faith. His intimacy with her was a privilege infinitely beyond the ordinary privilege of love. Whatever she might do, whatever crime she might commit, whatever baseness she might perpetrate, her ultimate worth, the core, the kernel, would remain to him unsullied and inviolate. This he knew blindly, seeing it as the mystic sees God; and knew it the more profoundly that he could have defended it with no argument of reason.

What then? the poet, the creator, the woman, the mystic, the man skirting the fringes of death—were they kin with one another and free of some realm unknown, towards which all, consciously or unconsciously, were journeying? Where the extremes of passion (he did not mean only the passion of love), of exaltation, of danger, of courage and vision—where all these extremes met—was it there, the great crossways where the moral ended, and the divine began? Was it for Eve supremely, and to a certain extent for all women and artists—the visionaries, the lovely, the graceful, the irresponsible, the useless!—was it reserved for them to show the beginning of the road?

Youth! youth and illusion! to love Eve and Aphros! when those two slipped from him he would return sobered to the path designated by the sign-posts and milestones of man, hoping no more than to keep as a gleam within him the light glowing in the sky above that unattainable but remembered city.

He returned to earth; Eve was kneading and tormenting a lump of putty, and singing to herself meanwhile; he watched her delicate, able hands, took one of them, and held it up between his eyes and the sun.

'Your fingers are transparent, they're like cornelian against the light,' he said.

She left her hand within his grasp, and smiled down at him.

'How you play with me, Julian,' she said idly.

'You're such a delicious toy.'

'Only a toy?'

He remembered the intricate, untranslatable thoughts he had been thinking about her five minutes earlier, and began to laugh to himself.

'A great deal more than a toy. Once I thought of you only as a child, a helpless, irritating, adorable child, always looking for trouble, and turning to me for help when the trouble came.'

'And then?'

'Then you made me think of you as a woman,' he replied gravely.

'You seemed to hesitate a good deal before deciding to think of me as that.'

'Yes, I tried to judge our position by ordinary codes; you must have thought me ridiculous.'

'I did, darling.' Her mouth twisted drolly as she said it.

'I wonder now how I could have insulted you by applying them to you,' he said with real wonderment; everything seemed so clear and obvious to him now.

'Why, how do you think of me now?'

'Oh, God knows!' he replied. 'I've called you changeling sometimes, haven't I?' He decided to question her. 'Tell me, Eve, how do you explain your difference? you outrage every accepted code, you see, and yet one retains one's belief in you. Is one simply deluded by your charm? or is there a deeper truth? can you explain?' He had spoken in a bantering tone, but he knew that he was trying an experiment of great import to him.

'I don't think I'm different, Julian; I think I feel things strongly, no more.'

'Or else you don't feel them at all.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well—Paul,' he said reluctantly.

'You have never got over that, have you?'

'Exactly!' he exclaimed. 'It seems to you extraordinary that I should still remember Paul, or that his death should have made any impression upon me. I ought to hate you for your indifference. Sometimes I have come very near to hating you. But now—perhaps my mind is getting broader—I blame you for nothing because I believe you are simply not capable of understanding. But evidently you can't explain yourself. I love you!' he said, 'I love you!'

He knew that her own inability to explain herself—her unself-consciousness—had done much to strengthen his new theories. The flower does not know why or how it blossoms....

On the day that he told her, with many misgivings, that Kato was coming to Aphros, she uttered no word of anger, but wept despairingly, at first without speaking, then with short, reiterated sentences that wrung his heart for all their unreason,—

'We were alone. I was happy as never in my life. I had you utterly. We were alone. Alone! Alone!'

'We will tell Kato the truth,' he soothed her; 'she will leave us alone still.'

But it was not in her nature to cling to straws of comfort. For her, the sunshine had been unutterably radiant; and for her it was now proportionately blackened out.

'We were alone,' she repeated, shaking her head with unspeakable mournfulness, the tears running between her fingers.

For the first time he spoke to her with a moved, a tender compassion, full of reverence.

'Your joy ... your sorrow ... equally overwhelming and tempestuous. How you feel—you tragic child! Yesterday you laughed and made yourself a crown of myrtle.'

She refused to accompany him when he went to meet Kato, who, after a devious journey from Athens, was to land at the rear of the island away from the curiosity of Herakleion. She remained in the cool house, sunk in idleness, her pen and pencil alike neglected. She thought only of Julian, absorbingly, concentratedly. Her past life appeared to her, when she thought of it at all, merely as a period in which Julian had not loved her, a period of waiting, of expectancy, of anguish sometimes, of incredible reticence supported only by the certainty which had been her faith and her inspiration....

To her surprise, he returned, not only with Kato but with Grbits.

Every word and gesture of the giant demonstrated his enormous pleasure. His oddly Mongolian face wore a perpetual grin of triumphant truancy. His good-humour was not to be withstood. He wrung Eve's hands, inarticulate with delight. Kato, her head covered with a spangled veil—Julian had never seen her in a hat—stood by, looking on, her hands on her hips, as though Grbits were her exhibit. Her little eyes sparkled with mischief.

'He is no longer an officer in the Serbian army,' she said at last, 'only a free-lance, at Julian's disposal. Is it not magnificent? He has sent in his resignation. His career is ruined. The military representative of Serbia in Herakleion!'

'A free-lance,' Grbits repeated, beaming down at Julian. (It annoyed Eve that he should be so much the taller of the two).

'We sent you no word, not to lessen your surprise,' said Kato.

They stood, all four, in the courtyard by the fountain.

'I told you on the day of the elections that when you needed me I should come,' Grbits continued, his grin widening.

'Of course, you are a supreme fool, Grbits,' said Kato to him.

'Yes,' he replied, 'thank Heaven for it.'

'In Athens the sympathy is all with the Islands,' said Kato. She had taken off her veil, and they could see that she wore the gold wheat-ears in her hair. Her arms were, as usual, covered with bangles, nor had she indeed made any concessions to the necessities of travelling, save that on her feet, instead of her habitual square-toed slippers, she wore long, hideous, heelless, elastic-sided boots. Eve reflected that she had grown fatter and more stumpy, but she was, as ever, eager, kindly, enthusiastic, vital; they brought with them a breath of confidence and efficiency, those disproportionately assorted travelling companions; Julian felt a slight shame that he had neglected the Islands for Eve; and Eve stood by, listening to their respective recitals, to Grbits' startling explosions of laughter, and Kato's exuberant joy, tempered with wisdom. They both talked at once, voluble and excited; the wheat-ears trembled in Kato's hair, Grbits' white regular teeth flashed in his broad face, and Julian, a little bewildered, turned from one to the other with his unsmiling gravity.

'I mistrust the forbearance of Herakleion,' Kato said, a great weight of meditated action pressing on behind her words; 'a month's forbearance! In Athens innumerable rumours were current: of armed ships purchased from the Turks, even of a gun mounted on Mylassa—but that I do not believe. They have given you, you say, a month in which to come to your senses. But they are giving themselves also a month in which to prepare their attack,' and she plied him with practical questions that demonstrated her clear familiarity with detail and tactic, while Grbits contributed nothing but the cavernous laugh and ejaculations of his own unquestioning optimism.