The town house of the Davenants stood in the _platia_, at right angles to the club. On the death of old Mr Davenant--'President Davenant,' as he was nicknamed--the town and the country properties had been divided between the two inheriting brothers; Herakleion said that the brothers had drawn lots for the country house, but in point of fact the matter had been settled by amicable arrangement. William Davenant, the elder of the brothers, widowed, with an only son away for three-quarters of the year at school in England, was more conveniently installed in the town, within five minutes reach of the central office, than Robert, who, with a wife and a little girl, preferred the distance of his country house and big garden. The two establishments, as time went on, became practically interchangeable. The rue Royale--Herakleion was so cosmopolitan as to give to its principal thoroughfare a French name--was at this hour crowded with the population that, imprisoned all day behind closed shutters, sought in the evening what freshness it could find in the cobbled streets between the stucco houses. The street life of the town began between five and six, and the Davenants, father and son, were jostled as they walked slowly along the pavements, picking their way amongst the small green tables set outside the numerous cafés. At these tables sat the heterogenous elements that composed the summer population of the place, men of every nationality: old gamblers too disreputable for Monte Carlo; young Levantines, natives, drinking absinthe; Turks in their red fezzes; a few rakish South Americans. The trams screamed discordantly in their iron grooves, and the bells of the cinema tinkled unceasingly. Between the tramlines and the kerb dawdled the hired victorias, few empty at this time of day, but crowded with families of Levantines, the men in straw hats, the women for the most part in hot black, very stout, and constantly fanning their heavily powdered faces. Now and then a chasseur from some diplomatic house passed rapidly in a flaming livery. Mr Davenant talked to his son as they made their way along. 'How terrible those parties are. I often wish I could dissociate myself altogether from that life, and God knows that I go merely to hear what people are saying. They know it, and of course they will never forgive me. Julian, in order to conciliate Herakleion, you will have to marry a Greek.' 'Alexander Christopoulos attacked me to-day,' Julian said. 'Wanted me to go to Paris with him and see the world.' He did not note in his own mind that he refrained from saying that Madame Kato had also, so to speak, attacked him on the dangerous subject of the Islands.