And yet in the present situation what did it all amount to? With its well-known but inexplicable rapidity, rumour had already gone round the ship hinting at a trip to the Persian Gulf. If that were so, Mr. Spokesly, by all the laws of probability, would never be in Saloniki again. Yet he was quite confident that he would be in Saloniki again. He had no clear notion of what he proposed to do when he reached Alexandria, but he was determined to manage it somehow. He had a feeling that he was matched against fate and that he would win. He did not yet comprehend the full significance of what he called fate. He was unaware that it is just when the gods appear to be striving against us that they need the most careful watching lest they lure us to destroy ourselves. He was preoccupied with the immediate past; which he did not suspect is the opiate the gods use when they are preparing our destinies. And while he was sure enough in his private mind that he would get back to Saloniki somehow, the slow movement of the _Tanganyika_ as she came up on her anchor gave the episode an appearance of irrevocable completeness. He was departing. Somewhere among those trees beyond the White Tower, trees that shared with everything else in Saloniki an appearance of shabby and meretricious glamour, like a tarnished and neglected throne, was Evanthia Solaris. And the ship was moving. The anchor was coming up and the ship was going slow ahead. Mr. Spokesly looked down at the water that was gushing through the hawse-pipe and washing away the caked mud from the links and shackles. As far as he could see he was going back to Alexandria, back by devious ways to London, and Evanthia Solaris, with her amber eyes, her high-piled glossy black hair and swift, menacing movements, would be no more than an alluring memory. And as the anchor appeared and the windlass stopped heaving while the men hosed the mud from the flukes, Mr. Spokesly began to realize, with his new-found perception, that what he took to be confidence was only desire. He was imagining himself back there in Saloniki; a man without ties or obligations. He saw an imaginary Spokesly seizing Evanthia and riding off into the night with her, riding into the interior, regardless of French sentries with their stolid faces and extremely long bayonets. As he recapitulated the actual conditions he saw he had only been dreaming of going back there. He had drawn all the money he could and he owed Archy Bates a ten-pound note. Stowed away under his clothes in his cabin he had nearly an oke, which is about three pounds, of a dark brown substance which Mr. Dainopoulos had mentioned was worth eighty pounds in Egypt if it were adroitly transferred to the gentleman who had expressed his willingness to do business with the friends of Mr. Bates. Here lay the beginnings of that desire, it seemed. That eighty pounds might put Mr. Spokesly in a position to go where he liked. It might; but the chances were that Mr.