'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.