Then, England, immutable, sagacious, balanced; Oxford, venerable and self-confident, turning the young men of the nation as by machinery out of her mould. Law-abiding England, where men worked their way upwards, attaining power and honour in the ripeness of years. London, where the houses were of stone. Where was Herakleion, stucco-built and tawdry, city of perpetually-clanging bells, revolutions, and Prime Ministers made and unmade in a day? Herakleion of the yellow islands, washed by too blue a sea. Where? Eve had never been to England, nor could he see any place in England for her. She should continue to live as she had always lived, among the vines and the magnolias, attended by a fat old woman who, though English, had spent so many years of her life in Herakleion that her English speech was oddly tainted by the southern lisp of the native Greek she had never been able to master; old Nana, who had lost the familiarity of one tongue without acquiring that of another; the ideal duenna for Eve. Then with a light step across the veranda a young Greek priest came into the room by one of the French windows, blinking and smiling in the light, dressed in a long black soutane and black cap, his red hair rolled up into a knob at the back of his head according to the fashion of his church. He tripped sometimes over his soutane as he walked, muscular and masculine inside that feminine garment, and when he did this he would gather it up impatiently with a hand on which grew a pelt of wiry red hairs. Father Paul had instituted himself as a kind of private chaplain to the Davenants. Eve encouraged him because she thought him picturesque. Mrs Robert Davenant found him invaluable as a lieutenant in her campaign of control over the peasants and villagers, over whom she exercised a despotic if benevolent authority. He was therefore free to come and go as he pleased. The population, Julian thought, was flowing back into his recovered world.