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.'