He could not think Kato unreal, though many of the phrases upon her lips were the same as he heard from the men in the club; he could not think her unreal, when her voice broke over the words 'misery' and 'oppression,' and when her eyes burned their conviction into his. He began to believe in the call of the Islands, as he listened to the soft, slurring speech of their people in her voice, and discovered, listening to her words with only half his mind, the richness of the grapes in the loose coils of her dark hair, and the fulvous colouring of the Islands in the copper draperies she always affected. It seemed to Julian that, at whatever time of day he saw her, whether morning, afternoon, or evening, she was always wearing the same dress, but he supposed vaguely that this could not actually be so. Like his father, he maintained her as a woman of genuine patriotic ardour, dissociating her from Herakleion and its club and casino, and associating her with the Islands where injustice and suffering, at least, were true things. He lavished his enthusiasm upon her, and his relations learned to refrain, in his presence, from making the usual obvious comments on her appearance. He looked upon her flat as a sanctuary and a shrine. He fled one day in disgust and disillusionment when the Premier appeared with his ingratiating smile in the doorway. Julian had known, of course, of the liaison, but was none the less distressed and nauseated when it materialised beneath his eyes. He fled to nurse his soul-sickness in the country, lying on his back at full length under the olive-trees on the lower slopes of Mount Mylassa, his hands beneath his head, his horse moving near by and snuffing for pasture on the bare terraces. The sea, to-day of the profoundest indigo, sparkled in the sun below, and between the sea and the foot of the mountain, plainly, as in an embossed map, stretched the strip of flat cultivated land where he could distinguish first the dark ilex avenue, then the ribbon of road, then the village, finally the walled plantation which was his uncle's garden, and the roofs of the low house in the centre. The bougainvillea climbing over the walls and roof of his uncle's house made a warm stain of magenta.