Lewis sat on his trunk and looked about him. There was a lithograph of King Otho on the wall and a large imaginative picture, turning black, representing the massacre of Suli, where the Greek women threw their children over a precipice rather than let them fall into the hands of the Turks. He examined the furniture; a bed, a chair, a cracked ikon, a water jar and a stove full of fruit stones dipped in resin. He looked at his dusty feet and suddenly the weariness of the week's journey came over him. Paris seemed to him all dewy, fresh and far away. Once more he was being punished for his eagerness for travel. This leap into a wild, romantic, uninhabited corner of the earth overwhelmed him. This feeling of oppression sent him to sleep. When he awoke he was rested, that is to say comforted; night was falling; Irene was near him on the terrace, before the window, her eyes fixed on the crest of a hill from which rose the mauve wall of a leper-house. "What are you thinking about, Irene?" She started, got up and came and knelt by him. "I was looking at this sea which never rises or falls (it was her business woman's way of saying "this tideless sea")." "I seem, like it, to be stagnating. I am so happy that I ask myself if I oughtn't to stop living. The wise thing would be to sell out now, at the top of the market." As the evening fell the grasshoppers made a deafening noise. From the mountain came the great holy scent of goat followed by a perfume of mint so hot and so aromatic that one thought one was wearing a sprig of it against one's chest all night. IV FOR six weeks Lewis lived on this islet where Irene was the only unwithered thing. In the mornings he put on a veil and went fishing, like Childe Harold, Warming himself like any other fly. On his return Irene would wait for him on the quay, surrounded by children with blue shaved heads, by beggars of the old school, black, shiny and wrinkled like olives. She would have been to talk to the refugees from Asia Minor; before the lazaret, outside their tents held down by stones against the Etesian winds, those prolonged winds which bring the warmth and the birds back from the South; they had been camping there for months; the women, still wearing their baggy trousers, spun flax; men, crouching by the fires, cooked mutton on wooden skewers. The meals eaten by Lewis and Irene were hardly less primitive. The fish he caught were fried in a few drops of oil. Sweet peppers. Fruit. Water. Lewis thought longingly of snipe stuffed with _foie gras_, and wanted to exchange their small table for a larger one. Irene apologized, quoting a Greek proverb: "A halfpenny-worth of olives and a pennyworth of light."