'Nico has rescued me,' she said; 'but for him I should have been alone all day. I have taught him to dance.' She pointed to a gramophone upon a table. 'Where did that come from?' Julian said, determined not to show his anger before the islander. 'From the café,' she replied. 'Then Nico had better take it back; they will need it.' Julian said, threats in his voice, 'and he had better see whether his father cannot find him employment; we have not too many men.' 'You left me the whole day,' she said when Nico had gone; 'I am sorry I came with you, Julian; I would rather go back to Herakleion; even Nana has not come. I did not think you would desert me.' He looked at her, his anger vanished, and she was surprised when he answered her gently, even amusedly,-- 'You are always delightfully unexpected and yet characteristic of yourself: I come back, thinking I shall find you alone, perhaps glad to see me, having spent an unoccupied day, but no, I find you with the best-looking scamp of the village, having learnt from him to play the flute, taught him to dance, and borrowed a gramophone from the local café!' He put his hands heavily upon her shoulders with a gesture she knew of old. 'I suppose I love you,' he said roughly, and then seemed indisposed to talk of her any more, but told her his plans and arrangements, to which she did not listen. They remained standing in the narrow window-recess, leaning, opposite to one another, against the thick stone walls of the old Genoese building. Through the grating they could see the sea, and, in the distance, Herakleion. 'It is sufficiently extraordinary,' he remarked, gazing across the bay, 'that Herakleion has made no sign. I can only suppose that they will try force as soon as Panaïoannou can collect his army, which, as it was fully mobilised no later than yesterday, ought not to take very long.' 'Will there be fighting?' she asked, with a first show of interest. 'I hope so,' he replied. 'I should like you to fight,' she said. Swaying as he invariably did between his contradictory opinions of her, he found himself inwardly approving her standpoint, that man, in order to be worthy of woman, must fight, or be prepared to fight, and to enjoy the fighting. From one so self-indulgent, so pleasure-loving, so reluctant to face any unpleasantness of life, he might pardonably have expected the less heroic attitude. If she resented his absence all day on the business of preparations for strife, might she not equally have resented the strife that called him from her side? He respected her appreciation of physical courage, and remodelled his estimate to her advantage. To his surprise, the boat he had sent for Nana returned from Herakleion. It came, indeed, without Nana, but bearing in her place a letter from his father:--