"Remarkable is right," he muttered. He found himself withdrawing instinctively from the highly charged intellectual atmosphere of this community. As he ate his supper and drank the wine, he allowed his mind to return to his own more immediate affairs. It might very well be that civilization and even humanity would die out, but the urgency of the problem was not apparent to a man about to go out on a hazardous adventure with the woman he loved. Only that day he had worked with Mr. Cassar, the engineer, who had been making a silencer for the motor. Not that Mr. Spokesly was going to depend upon that. He had a mast and a sail, for he knew the wind was off shore and easterly during the night, and he could save his engine for the time when they had made the outer arm of the Gulf. Mr. Cassar agreed because he thought they might be short of gasolene in spite of the carefully stored supply. For Mr. Cassar had decided to go with his commander. It had been borne in upon Mr. Cassar that the family in Cospicua, for whom he was industriously providing, might perish of starvation while he grew rich beyond the dreams of avarice, if he could not send them any money--as he obviously could not so long as he remained where he was. Mr. Cassar was not at all clear as to the causes and extent of the war. All he knew was that he now earned more money, and he naturally hoped it would go on as long as possible. But he also knew enough of war to realize the limits set upon enterprise, just as at sea one had to submit to the ways of the elements. And he had inherited a placid contempt for everything Ottoman, which minimized in his mind the difficulties of departure. And it may have been also a sudden desire to see his wife in Cospicua. She had written him, in a mixture of Maltese and Italian, with many corrections and blots, which had caused the literary-minded censor in Saloniki much trouble, thinking they concealed a cipher; and she had implored him to come back to Valletta and get work in the dockyard. Then they could have a house in Senglea and the children could go to a better school. This was doubtless the underlying thought in Mr. Cassar's mind when he decided to go along with Mr. Spokesly. And Mr. Spokesly, before going over to the office of the Public Debt, to find Mr. Jokanian, had mentioned that he would be going back rather late to Bairakli.