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.'