"Is it not a shame," he said, "that the Capsina and I should have our eyes grow dim with the midnight watches and the Greeks be murdered all along the coast, as she herself said, while you lie here--no, away comes that blanket thing--and that we should burn our fingers making coffee for those fine ladies who lounge in bed? This shall not be, indeed it shall not. Christos, there are more uses for a slipper than to put on a foot; them shall you learn. Lord, what a wardrobe of clothes the lad has! it is enough for a Turk and his harem. Here is a red sash, if it please you, and a gay waistcoat; a razor, too--what in the name of the saints does the smooth-faced Christos want with a razor? Suleima will be wanting me to buy her a razor next, or perhaps the little Nikolas. Let go that rug, Christos, and be turned out of bed cool and peaceful, or sharper things will be done to you. Now be very quick, for I shall continue to drink coffee, and thus there may be none left in ten minutes, for I do not drink slowly." Mitsos, having once spoken of "the little wife" to the Capsina, spoke of her more than once again that morning, and to his secret surprise he found the girl extraordinarily sympathetic, and as if much pleased and interested in being told of her. And this was beyond measure an astonishing thing to him, for heretofore his intercourse with her had been either of adventure past or to come, or they had, as at first, been no more than two children at play. But any matter touching the heart had been so remote from the talk on the board that Mitsos had never thought of her as a human woman, one to whom these things could or rather must be of any concern. She, to her bitter cost, had seen him merely as a great, strong, and silly boy, boyish altogether, though to her a magnet for the heart; and of the more intimate lore of man and woman, so she had planned it, they were to learn together. And the surprise to him of finding that she was clearly willing to hear him talk thus was perhaps hardly less strong than the shock to her of finding that he had known too well what she had thought they would learn together. And thus, with a strange flush of pleasure to the boy and a new bond between them, he told her of the ride from Tripoli, the finding of Suleima at home. Only of the anguish of the night of the fire-ship he spoke not at all. There was no intimacy but one only close enough for that. So to all the admiration and affection he felt for the girl, this added a tenderness to his thoughts of her, and without knowing it the knowledge of the thing itself, which had severed them irrevocably in the Capsina's mind, was the very cause of a new tie binding Mitsos to her, and the strands of it were of a fibre more durable and more akin to that which she now despaired of than any that had bound them yet.