Up to this time the fourth soldier and Demetri had remained in the boat. They now landed and hauled their boat up on to the beach; then they turned to the smaller boat which the Pasha had provided in malicious sport for our more complete mortification. The soldier laid hold of its stern and prepared to haul it also out of the water; but Demetri said something--what I could not hear--and shrugged his shoulders. The soldier nodded in apparent assent, and they left the boat where it was, merely attaching it by a rope to the other. Then they walked to the rocks and sat down at a little distance from where I was, Demetri taking a hunch of bread and a large knife from his pocket and beginning to cut and munch. I looked at him, but he refused to meet my eye and glanced in every direction except at me. Suddenly, while I was idly regarding Demetri, the three fellows sprang on me. One had me by each arm before I could so much as move. The third dashed his hand into the breast-pocket of my coat and seized my revolver. They leapt away again, caught up the rifles they had dropped, and held them levelled towards me. The thing was done in a moment, I sitting like a man paralysed. Then one of the ruffians cried: ‘Your Excellency, the gentleman moved his hand to his pocket, to his pistol.’ ‘What?’ asked Mouraki, turning round. ‘Moved his hand to a pistol? Had he a pistol?’ My revolver was held up as damning evidence. ‘And he tried to use it?’ asked Mouraki, in mournful shocked tones. ‘It looked like it,’ said the fellow. ‘It’s a lie. I wasn’t thinking of it,’ said I. I was exasperated at the trick. I had made up my mind to fight it out sooner than give up the revolver. ‘I’m afraid it may have been so,’ said Mouraki, shaking his head. ‘Give the pistol to me, my man. I’ll keep it safe.’ His eye shot triumph at me as he took my revolver and turned again to Phroso. I was now powerless indeed. Demetri finished his hunch of bread, and began to clean his knife, polishing its blade leisurely and lovingly on the palm of his hand, and feeling its point with the end of his thumb. During this operation he hummed softly and contentedly to himself. I could not help smiling when I recognised the tune; it was an old friend, the chant that One-eyed Alexander wrote on the death of Stefan Stefanopoulos two hundred years ago. Demetri polished, and Demetri hummed, and Demetri looked away across the blue water with a speculative eye. I did not choose to consider what might be in the mind of Demetri as he hummed and polished and gazed over the sea that girt his native island. Demetri’s thoughts were his own. Let Mouraki look to them, if they were worth his care. There, I have made that confession as plainly as I mean to make it. I put out of my mind what Demetri might be planning as he polished his knife and hummed One-eyed Alexander’s chant.