Tsigaridis came forward into the room, his fishing cap between his fingers, and his white hair standing out in bunches of wiry curls round his face. Determination was written in the set gravity of his features, even in the respectful bow with which he came to a halt before Julian. Interrupted in their conversation, Eve had fallen, back, half lying, in her arm-chair, and Julian, who had been pacing up and down, stood still with folded arms, a frown cleaving a deep valley between his brows. He spoke to Tsigaridis,—

'You asked for me, Tsantilas?'

'I am a messenger, Kyrie.'

He looked from the young man to the girl, his age haughty towards their youth, his devotion submissive towards the advantage of their birth. He said to Julian, using almost the same words as he had used once before,—

'The people of Aphros are the people of your people,' and he bowed again.

Julian had recovered his self-possession; he no longer felt dazed and bewildered as he had felt before Eve. In speaking to Tsigaridis he was speaking of things he understood. He knew very well the summons Tsigaridis was bringing him, the rude and fine old man, single-sighted as a prophet, direct and unswerving in the cause he had at heart. He imagined, with almost physical vividness, the hand of the fisherman on his shoulder, impelling him forward.

'Kyrie,' Tsigaridis continued, 'to-day the flag of Herakleion flew from the house of your honoured father until you with your own hand threw it down. I was in Herakleion, where the news was brought to me, and there is no doubt that by now it is known also on Aphros. Your action can be interpreted only in one way. I know that to-day'—he crossed himself devoutly—'Father Paul, who was our friend and yours, has met his death; I break in upon your sorrow; I dared not wait; even death must not delay me. Kyrie, I come to bring you back to Aphros.'

'I will go to-night,' said Julian without hesitation. 'My father and my uncle are in Herakleion, and I will start from here before they can stop me. Have you a boat?'

'I can procure one,' said Tsigaridis, very erect, and looking at Julian with shining eyes.

'Then I will meet you at the private jetty in two hours' time. We shall be unnoted in the darkness, and the illuminations will be over by then.'

'Assuredly,' said the fisherman.

'We go in all secrecy,' Julian added. 'Tsantilas, listen: can you distribute two orders for me by nightfall? I understand that you have organised a system of communications?'

The old man's face relaxed slowly from its stern dignity; it softened into a mixture of slyness and pride and tenderness—the tenderness of a father for his favourite child. Almost a smile struggled with his lips. A strange contortion troubled his brows. Slowly and portentously, he winked.

'Then send word to Aphros,' said Julian, 'that no boat be allowed to leave the Islands, and send word round the mainland recalling every available islander. Is it possible? I know that every islander in Herakleion to-night is sitting with boon companions in buried haunts, talking, talking, talking. Call them together, Tsantilas.'

'It will be done, Kyrie.'

'And Madame Kato—she must be informed.'

'Kyrie, she sends you a message that she leaves Herakleion by to-night's train for Athens. When her work is done in Athens, she also will return to Aphros.'

Tsigaridis took a step forward and lifted Julian's hands to his lips as was his wont. He bowed, and with his patriarchal gravity left the room.

Julian in a storm of excitement flung himself upon his knees beside Eve's chair.

'Eve!' he cried. 'Oh, the wild adventure! Do you understand? It has come at last. Paul—I had almost forgotten the Islands for him, and now I must forget him for the Islands. Too much has happened to-day. To-morrow all Herakleion will know that the Islands have broken away, and that I and every islander are upon Aphros. They will come at first with threats; they will send representatives. I shall refuse to retract our declaration. Then they will begin to carry out their threats. PanaÏoannou—think of it!—will organise an attack with boats.' He became sunk in practical thought, from which emerging he said more slowly and carefully, 'They will not dare to bombard the island because they know that Italy and Greece are watching every move, and with a single man-of-war could blow the whole town of Herakleion higher than Mount Mylassa. Kato will watch over us from Athens.... They will dare to use no more than reasonable violence. And they will never gain a footing.'

Eve was leaning forward; she put both hands on his shoulders as he knelt.

'Go on talking to me,' she said, 'my darling.'

In a low, intense voice, with unseeing eyes, he released all the flood of secret thought that he had, in his life, expressed only to Paul and to Kato.

'I went once to Aphros, more than a year ago; you remember. They asked me then, through Tsigaridis, whether I would champion them if they needed championship. I said I would. Father was very angry. He is incomprehensibly cynical about the Islands, so cynical that I have been tempted to think him merely mercenary, anxious to live at peace with Herakleion for the sake of his profits. He is as cynical as Malteios, or any stay-in-power politician here. He read me a lecture and called the people a lot of rebellious good-for-nothings. Eve, what do I care? One thing is true, one thing is real: those people suffer. Everything on earth is empty, except pain. Paul suffered, so much that he preferred to die. But a whole people doesn't die. I went away to England, and I put Herakleion aside, but at the bottom of my heart I never thought of anything else; I knew I was bound to those people, and I lived, I swear to you, with the sole idea that I should come back, and that this adventure of rescue would happen some day exactly as it is happening now. I thought of Kato and of Tsigaridis as symbolical, almost mythological beings; my tutelary deities; Kato vigorous, and Tsigaridis stern. Eve, I would rather die than read disappointment in that man's eyes. I never made him many promises, but he must find me better than my word.'

He got up and walked once or twice up and down the room, beating his fist against his palm and saying,—

'Whatever good I do in my life, will be done in the Islands.'

He came back and stood by Eve.

'Eve, yesterday morning when I rode over the hills I saw the Islands lying out in the sea.... I thought of father, cynical and indifferent, and of Stavridis, a self-seeker. I wondered whether I should grow into that. I thought that in illusion lay the only loveliness.'

'Ah, how I agree!' she said fervently.

He dropped on his knees again beside her, and she put her fingers lightly on his hair.

'When Tsigaridis came, you were telling me that you believed in me—Heaven knows why. For my part, I only believe that one can accomplish when one has faith in a cause, and is blind to one's own fate. And I believe that the only cause worthy of such faith, is the redemption of souls from pain. I set aside all doubt. I will listen to no argument, and I will walk straight towards the object I have chosen. If my faith is an illusion, I will make that illusion into a reality by the sheer force of my faith.'

He looked up at Eve, whose eyes were strangely intent on him.

'You see,' he said, fingering the fringe of her Spanish shawl, 'Herakleion is my battleground, and if I am to tilt against windmills it must be in Herakleion. I have staked out Herakleion for my own, as one stakes out a claim in a gold-mining country. The Islands are the whole adventure of youth for me.'

'And what am I?' she murmured to him.

He looked at her without appearing to see her; he propped his elbow on her knee, leant his chin in his palm, and went on talking about the Islands.

'I know that I am making the thing into a religion, but then I could never live, simply drifting along. Aimless.... I don't understand existence on those terms. I am quite prepared to give everything for my idea; father can disinherit me, and I know I am very likely to be killed. I don't care. I may be mistaken; I may be making a blunder, an error of judgment. I don't care. Those people are mine. Those Islands are my faith. I am blind.'

'And you enjoy the adventure,' she said.

'Of course, I enjoy the adventure. But there is more in it than that,' he said, shaking his head; 'there is conviction, burnt into me. Fanatical. Whoever is ready to pay the ultimate price for his belief, has a right to that belief. Heaven preserve me,' he cried, showing his fist, 'from growing like father, or Malteios, or Stavridis. Eve, you understand.'

She murmured again,—

'And what am I? What part have I got in this world of yours?'

Again he did not appear to hear her, but making an effort to get up, he said,—

'I promised to meet Tsantilas, and I must go,' but she pressed her hands on his shoulders and held him down.

'Stay a little longer. I want to talk to you.'

Kneeling there, he saw at last that her mouth was very resolute and her eyes full of a desperate decision. She sat forward in her chair, so close to him that he felt the warmth of her body, and saw that at the base of her throat a little pulse was beating quickly.

'What is it, Eve?'

'This,' she said, 'that if I let you go I may never see you again. How much time have you?'

He glanced at the heavy clock between the lapis columns.

'An hour and a half.'

'Give me half an hour.'

'Do you want to stop me from going?'

'Could I stop you if I tried?'

'I should never listen to you.'

'Julian,' she said, 'I rarely boast, as you know, but I am wondering now how many people in Herakleion would abandon their dearest ideals for me? If you think my boast is empty—remember Paul.'

He paused for a moment, genuinely surprised by the point of view she presented to him.

'But I am different,' he said then, quite simply and with an air of finality.

She laughed a low, delighted laugh.

'You have said it: you are different. Of course you are different. So different, that you never notice me. People cringe to me—oh, I may say this to you—but you, Julian, either you are angry with me or else you forget me.'

She looked at the clock, and for the first time a slight loss of self-assurance came over her, surprising and attractive in her, who seemed always to hold every situation in such contemptuous control.

'Only half an hour,' she said, 'and I have to say to you all that which I have been at such pains to conceal—hoping all the while that you would force the gates of my concealment, trample on my hypocrisy!'

Her eyes lost their irony and became troubled; she gazed at him with the distress of a child. He was uneasily conscious of his own embarrassment; he felt the shame of taking unawares the self-reliant in a moment of weakness, the mingled delight and perplexity of the hunter who comes suddenly upon the nymph, bare and gleaming, at the edge of a pool. All instinct of chivalry urged him to retreat until she should have recovered her self-possession. He desired to help her, tender and protective; and again, relentlessly, he would have outraged her reticence, forced her to the uttermost lengths of self-revelation, spared her no abasement, enjoyed her humiliation. Simultaneously, he wanted the triumph over her pride, the battle joined with a worthy foe; and the luxury of comforting her new and sudden pathos, as he alone, he knew, could comfort it. She summoned in him, uncivilised and wholly primitive, a passion of tyranny and a passion of possessive protection.

He yielded to the former, and continued to look at her in expectation, without speaking.

'Help me a little, Julian,' she murmured piteously, keeping her eyes bent on her hands, which were lying in her lap. 'Look back a little, and remember me. I can remember you so well: coming and going and disregarding me, or furiously angry with me; very often unkind to me; tolerant of me sometimes; negligently, insultingly, certain of me always!'

'We used to say that although we parted for months, we always came together again.'

She raised her eyes, grateful to him, as he still knelt on the floor in front of her, but he was not looking at her; he was staring at nothing, straight in front of him.

'Julian,' she said, and spoke of their childhood, knowing that her best hope lay in keeping his thoughts distant from the present evening.

Her distress, which had been genuine, had passed. She had a vital game to play, and was playing it with the full resources of her ability. She swept the chords lightly, swift to strike again that chord which had whispered in response. She bent a little closer to him.

'I have always had this belief in you, of which I told you. You and I both have in us the making of fanatics. We never have led, and never should lead, the tame life of the herd.'

She touched him with that, and regained command over his eyes, which this time she held unswervingly. But, having forced him to look at her, she saw a frown gathering on his brows; he sprang to his feet, and made a gesture as if to push her from him.

'You are playing with me; if you saw me lying dead on that rug you would turn from me as indifferently as from Paul.'

At this moment of her greatest danger, as he stood towering over her, she dropped her face into her hands, and he looked down only upon the nape of her neck and her waving hair. Before he could speak she looked up again, her eyes very sorrowful under plaintive brows.

'Do I deserve that you should say that to me? I never pretended to be anything but indifferent to those I didn't love. I should have been more hypocritical. You despise me now, so I pay the penalty of my own candour. I have not the pleasant graces of a Fru Thyregod, Julian; not towards you, that is. I wouldn't offer you the insult of an easy philandering. I might make your life a burden; I might even kill you. I know I have often been impossible towards you in the past. I should probably be still more impossible in the future. If I loved you less, I should, no doubt, love you better. You see that I am candid.'

He was struck, and reflected: she spoke truly, there was indeed a vein of candour which contradicted and redeemed the petty deceits and untruthfulnesses which so exasperated and offended him. But he would not admit his hesitation.

'I have told you a hundred times that you are cruel and vain and irredeemably worthless.'

She answered after a pause, in the deep and wonderful voice which she knew so well how to use,—

'You are more cruel than I; you hurt me more than I can say.'

He resisted his impulse to renounce his words, to pretend that he had chosen them in deliberate malice. As he said nothing, she added,—

'Besides, have I ever shown myself any of those things to you? I haven't been cruel to you; I haven't even been selfish; you have no right to find fault with me.'

She had blundered; he flew into a rage.

'Your damned feminine reasoning! Your damned personal point of view! I can see well enough the fashion in which you treat other men. I don't judge you only by your attitude towards myself.'

Off her guard, she was really incapable of grasping his argument; she tried to insist, to justify herself, but before his storm of anger she cowered away.

'Julian, how you frighten me.'

'You only pretend to be frightened.'

'You are brutal; you mangle every word I say,' she said hopelessly.

He had reduced her to silence; he stood over her threateningly, much as a tamer of wild beasts who waits for the next spring of the panther. Desperate, her spirit flamed up again, and she cried,—

'You treat me monstrously; I am a fool to waste my time over you; I am accustomed to quite different treatment.'

'You are spoilt; you are accustomed to flattery—flattery which means less than nothing,' he sneered, stamping upon her attempt at arrogance.

'Ah, Julian!' she said, suddenly and marvellously melting, and leaning forward she stretched out both hands towards him, so that he was obliged to take them, and she drew him down to his knees once more beside her, and smiled into his eyes, having taken command and being resolved that no crisis of anger should again arise to estrange them, 'I shall never have flattery from you, shall I? my turbulent, impossible Julian, whose most meagre compliment I have treasured ever since I can remember! but it is over now, my time of waiting for you'—she still held his hands, and the smile with which she looked at him transfigured all her face.

He was convinced; he trembled. He strove against her faintly,—

'You choose your moment badly; you know that I must leave for Aphros.'

'You cannot!' she cried in indignation.

As his eyes hardened, she checked herself; she knew that for her own safety she must submit to his will without a struggle. Spoilt, irrational as she was, she had never before so dominated her caprice. Her wits were all at work, quick slaves to her passion.

'Of course you must go,' she said.

She played with his fingers, her head bent low, and he was startled by the softness of her touch.

'What idle hands,' he said, looking at them; 'you were vain of them, as a child.'

But she did not wish him to dwell upon her vanity.

'Julian, have I not been consistent, all my life? Are you taking me seriously? Do you know that I am betraying all the truth? One hasn't often the luxury of betraying all the truth. I could betray even greater depths of truth, for your sake. Are you treating what I tell you with the gravity it deserves? You must not make a toy of my secret. I have no strength of character, Julian. I suppose, in its stead, I have been given strength of love. Do you want what I offer you? Will you take the responsibility of refusing it?'

'Is that a threat?' he asked, impressed and moved.

She shrugged slightly and raised her eyebrows; he thought he had never so appreciated the wonderful mobility of her face.

'I am nothing without the person I love. You have judged me yourself: worthless—what else?—cruel, vain. All that is true. Hitherto I have tried only to make the years pass by. Do you want me to return to such an existence?'

His natural vigour rebelled against her frailty.

'You are too richly gifted, Eve, to abandon yourself to such slackness of life.'

'I told you I had no strength of character,' she said with bitterness, 'what are my gifts, such as they are, to me? You are the thing I want.'

'You could turn your gifts to any account.'

'With you, yes.'

'No, independently of me or any other human being. One stands alone in work. Work is impersonal.'

'Nothing is impersonal to me,' she replied morosely, 'that's my tragedy.'

She flung out her hands.

'Julian, I cherish such endless dreams! I loathe my life of petty adventures; I undertake them only in order to forget the ideal which until now has been denied me. I have crushed down the vision of life with you, but always it has remained at the back of my mind, so wide, so open, a life so free and so full of music and beauty, Julian! I would work—for you. I would create—for you. I don't want to marry you, Julian. I value my freedom above all things. Bondage is not for you or me. But I'll come with you anywhere—to Aphros if you like.'

'To Aphros?' he repeated.

'Why not?'

She put in, with extraordinary skill,—

'I belong to the Islands no less than you.'

Privately she thought,—

'If you knew how little I cared about the Islands!'

He stared at her, turning her words over in his mind. He was as reckless as she, but conscientiously he suggested,—

'There may be danger.'

'I am not really a coward, only in the unimportant things. And you said yourself that they could never invade the island,' she added with complete confidence in his statement.

He dreamt aloud,—

'I have only just found her. This is Herakleion! She might, who knows? be of use to Aphros.'

She wondered which consideration weighed most heavily with him.

'You were like my sister,' he said suddenly.

She gave a rueful smile, but said nothing.

'No, no!' he cried, springing up. 'This can never be; have you bewitched me? Let me go, Eve; you have been playing a game with me.'

She shook her head very slowly and tears gathered in her eyes.

'Then the game is my whole life, Julian; put me to any test you choose to prove my sincerity.'

She convinced him against his will, and he resented it.

'You have deceived me too often.'

'I have been obliged to deceive you, because I could not tell you the truth.'

'Very plausible,' he muttered.

She waited, very well acquainted with the vehemence of his moods and reactions. She was rewarded; he said next, with laughter lurking in his eyes,—

'Ever since I can remember, I have quarrelled with you several times a day.'

'But this evening we have no time to waste in quarrelling,' she replied, relieved, and stretching out her hands to him again. As he took them, she added in a low voice, 'You attract me fatally, my refractory Julian.'

'We will go to Aphros,' he said, 'as friends and colleagues.'

'On any terms you choose to dictate,' she replied with ironical gravity.

A flash of clear-sightedness pierced his attempt at self-deception; he saw the danger into which they were deliberately running, he and she, alone amidst fantastic happenings, living in fairyland, both headstrong and impatient creatures, unaccustomed to forgo their whims, much less their passions.... He was obliged to recognise the character of the temple which stood at the end of the path they were treading, and of the deity to whom it was dedicated; he saw the temple with the eyes of his imagination as vividly as his mortal eyes would have seen it: white and lovely amongst cypresses, shadowy within; they would surely enter. Eve he certainly could not trust; could he trust himself? His honesty answered no. She observed the outward signs of what was passing in his mind, he started, he glanced at her, a look of horror and vigorous repudiation crossed his face, his eyes dwelt on her, then she saw—for she was quick to read him—by the slight toss of his head that he had banished sagacity.

'Come on to the veranda,' she said, tugging at his hand.

They stood on the veranda, watching the lights in the distance; the sky dripped with gold; balls of fire exploded into sheaves of golden feathers, into golden fountains and golden rain; golden slashes like the blades of scimitars cut across the curtain of night. Eve cried out with delight. Fiery snakes rushed across the sky, dying in a shower of sparks. At one moment the whole of the coast-line was lit up by a violet light, which most marvellously gleamed upon the sea.

'Fairyland!' cried Eve, clapping her hands.

She had forgotten Aphros. She had forgotten Paul.

The fireworks were over. Tsigaridis pulled strongly and without haste at his oars across a wide sea that glittered now like black diamonds under the risen moon. The water rose and fell beneath the little boat as gently and as regularly as the breathing of a sleeper. In a milky sky, spangled with stars, the immense moon hung flat and motionless, casting a broad path of rough silver up the blackness of the waters, and illuminating a long stretch of little broken clouds that lay above the horizon like the vertebrÆ of some gigantic crocodile. The light at the tip of the pier showed green, for they saw it still from the side of the land, but as they drew farther out to sea and came on a parallel line with the light, they saw it briefly half green, half ruby; then, as they passed it, looking back they saw only the ruby glow. Tsigaridis rowed steadily, silently but for the occasional drip of the water with the lifting of an oar, driving his craft away from the lights of the mainland—the stretch of Herakleion along the coast—towards the beckoning lights in the heart of the sea.

For ahead of them clustered the little yellow lights of the sheerly-rising village on Aphros; isolated lights, three or four only, low down at the level of the harbour, then, after a dark gap representing the face of the cliff, the lights in the houses, irregular, tier above tier. But it was not to these yellow lights that the glance was drawn. High above them all, upon the highest summit of the island, flared a blood-red beacon, a fierce and solitary stain of scarlet, a flame like a flag, like an emblem, full of hope as it leapt towards the sky, full of rebellion as it tore its angry gash across the night. In the moonlight the tiny islands of the group lay darkly outlined in the sea, but the moonlight, placid and benign, was for them without significance: only the beacon, insolently red beneath the pallor of the moon, burned for them with a message that promised to all men strife, to others death, and to the survivors liberty.

The form of Aphros was no more than a silhouette under the moon, a silhouette that rose, humped and shadowy, bearing upon its crest that flower of flame; dawn might break upon an island of the purest loveliness, colour blown upon it as upon the feathers of a bird, fragile as porcelain, flushed as an orchard in blossom; to-night it lay mysterious, unrevealed, with that single flame as a token of the purpose that burned within its heart. Tenderness, loveliness, were absent from the dark shape crowned by so living, so leaping an expression of its soul. Here were resolution, anticipation, hope, the perpetual hope of betterment, the undying chimera, the sublime illusion, the lure of adventure to the rebel and the idealist alike. The flame rang out like a bugle call in the night, its glare in the darkness becoming strident indeed as the note of a bugle in the midst of silence.

A light breeze brushed the little boat as it drew away from the coast, and Tsigaridis with a word of satisfaction shipped his oars and rose, the fragile craft rocking as he moved; Eve and Julian, watching from the prow, saw a shadow creep along the mast and the triangular shape of a sail tauten itself darkly against the path of the moon. Tsigaridis sank back into an indistinguishable block of intenser darkness in the darkness at the bottom of the boat. A few murmured words had passed,—

'I will take the tiller, Tsigaridis.'

'Malista, Kyrie,' and the silence had fallen again, the boat sailing strongly before the breeze, the beacon high ahead, and the moon brilliant in the sky. Eve, not daring to speak, glanced at Julian's profile as she sat beside him. He was scowling. Had she but known, he was intensely conscious of her nearness, assailed again with that now familiar ghost, the ghost of her as he had once held her angrily in his arms, soft, heavy, defenceless; and his fingers as they closed over the tiller closed as delicately as upon the remembered curves of her body; she had taken off her hat, and the scent of her hair reached him, warm, personal she was close to him, soft, fragrant, silent indeed, but mysteriously alive; the desire to touch her grew, like the desire of thirst; life seemed to envelop him with a strange completeness. Still a horror held him back: was it Eve, the child to whom he had been brotherly? or Eve, the woman? but in spite of his revulsion—for it was not his habit to control his desires—he changed the tiller to the other hand, and his free arm fell round her shoulders; he felt her instant yielding, her movement nearer towards him, her shortened breath, the falling back of her head; he knew that her eyes were shut; his fingers moulded themselves lingeringly round her throat; she slipped still lower within the circle of his arm, and his hand, almost involuntarily, trembled over the softness of her breast.

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