Each day we hoped for news of the _Batoum_'s date of sailing. Three times it was postponed; and, bored and wretched, we remained perforce in the miserable workshop. Unable to keep our minds as inactive as our bodies, we took the risk of leaving the window half open during the daytime, so that we might study our Russian textbooks, in readiness for Odessa. Seated on the shavings in a position to catch the shaft of light that streamed through the narrow panes, we passed many hours with the copying and learning of Russian phrases. When, after hours of study, our concentrative faculties became stale, the only alternative was to hope for success, and to live again in retrospect the extravagant happenings of the past few weeks. Most of the business usually associated with the crudest melodrama had been there, I reflected--spies, policemen, disguises, chases, female accomplices, and bluff. Decidedly it had been thrilling; but for the future I desired intensely to experience such thrills only at second hand. But even in this secluded room we were not to be spared the atmosphere of movie-horrifics. Another stock thrill was inflicted on us--The Face at the Window. There had seemed no likelihood of discovery from the street. Even if we bared the window from its iron shutter, nobody could see into the room without raising himself on the ledge, for the lower panes were coated with an opaque glaze. At mealtimes, therefore, we let in the daylight by withdrawing the shutter. One morning, after breakfast, when the Turkish officer had left his rooms, I saw White stiffen suddenly as we cleared the table. "Look natural," he whispered. "There's no time to duck." I picked up a plank of wood and tried to appear as if my business were carpentry; for over there, four yards away, a fez was rising slowly above the glazed portion of the window. White performed convincingly with a tape-measure, the nearest thing to his hand. The fez was the forerunner of a much-wrinkled forehead. Then came a pair of villainous eyes, a bent nose, and cheek-bones with light olive skin drawn tightly across them. The rest of the face remained hidden by the glaze. The Turk--for such he evidently was--have levered himself from the ground by means of the window-ledge. "Don't take any notice of the swine," White murmured. Outwardly calm, but inwardly nervous and shaking, I pretended to busy myself with the carpenter's tools, although it was difficult to withstand a shocked instinct to gaze at the Face. It remained for about two minutes of heart-throbbing tension, then disappeared, and left me gasping with the surprise and the shock of its visit. We heard somebody walking away from the building and down the hill toward Galata.