It was not that he did not appreciate the offer of his friend. The crowd alluded to were well enough no doubt--clerks and subordinate officials who had gradually formed a sort of international coterie who met in a wing of one of the consulates. Indeed, one of them lived in a house not far from himself on the hillside at Bairakli. But he was in a mood just now which made him reluctant to mix with those highly sophisticated beings. He wanted to go home. As he steered his launch through the entrance of the tiny harbour and made straight across the Gulf towards the eastern end, he was thinking that for the first time in his life he had a home. And she had done it! With a cool indomitable will she had set about it. He knew he could never have achieved this felicity by himself. She had held out her hand for money and he had handed it over to her. If she had not watched he would not have had nearly so much, she told him, and he believed her. That was the key to his mood. He crouched in the stern of his boat and kept his eyes upon the house, a white spot against the steep brown slope of the mountain. That house, rented from a poverty-stricken Greek who had left most of the furniture, and an old woman, who had lived all her life in the village, as servant, represented for Mr. Spokesly his entire visible and comprehensible future. This was another key to his mood. It was as though he had suddenly cashed in on all his available resources of happiness, hypothecating them for the immediate and attainable yet romantic present. By some fluke of fortune he could see that he actually held within his grasp all that men toil and struggle for in this world, all that they desire in youth, all that they remember in age. But he had no certainty of the permanence of all this, and he lived in a kind of anxious ecstasy, watching Evanthia each day with eager hungry eyes, waiting with a sort of incredulous astonishment for the first shadow to cross the dark mirror of their lives. As it must, he told himself. This could not last for ever. And sometimes he found himself trying to imagine how it would end. To-night he was preoccupied with the discovery that each day, as the end approached, he was dreading it more and more. He had tried to explain this to her as they walked in the garden under the cypresses and looked across the dark waters of the Gulf, and she had smiled and said: "Ah, yes!" She was still a mystery to him, and that was another grief, since he did not yet suspect that the mystery of a woman is simply a screen with nothing behind it. She smiled in her alluring inscrutable way and he held her desperately to him, wondering in what form the fate of their separation would appear.