They sat in silence a while longer, and then the girl got up from where she was sitting and strolled towards the bows of the ship, which pointed up the gulf. She could see the ruddy-gray side of the fortress hill Palamede which stood up five hundred feet above Nauplia, but the town itself lay out of view behind a dark promontory which ran rockily out. The sea was perfectly calm and of a translucent brilliance, clear as a precious stone, but soft as the air above it. Fifteen fathoms below lay the sandy bottom of the gulf, designed, here and there, like a map, with brownish-purple patches of sea-weed, and between it and the surface, poised in the water, drifted innumerable jelly-fish and medusæ, shaped like full-blown balloons, with strange, slippery-looking strings and ropes trailing below them. Some were pink, some of a transparent and aqueous green, some rustily speckled like fritillary flowers, but all, as in a stupor of content, drifted on with the current of warm water settling into the bay. Now and then a shoal of quick fish would cross, turning and wheeling all together like a flight of birds, their burnished sides glittering in the sun-steeped water, or stopping suddenly, emblazoned, as if heraldically, on the green field. A school of gulls were fishing behind, dipping in and out of the water for chance fragments from the ship. Mitsos, lying at ease on the deck, with his pipe in his mouth and his cap pushed forward to shield his eyes from the sun, seemed to excel even the jelly-fish in content, and to the girl it appeared that she alone, of all created things, was of an uneasy heart. That evening they would reach Nauplia. News of their coming would before now have gone about, and she tingled at the thought of the welcome they would get together. Not only for her would those shouts go up, but for Mitsos with her, thus sounding with more than double sweetness to her ear. And when the shouting and acclamation were over she would go back to the ship, and Mitsos would go to Suleima. She hated this girl whom she had never seen, and mixed with her hatred was an overwhelming curiosity to see her.