Two days later the remnant of the Turkish force again started for Corinth. This time Dramali, who had abated a little his contempt for the Greek dogs, making up the complement in fearful haste, took the precaution to send forward an advance-guard during the night, who should find out if any of the passes were unoccupied. The Greeks under Niketas, who were in no hurry to engage the Turks again--for, since their escape was impossible, they could afford to wait--were still holding the pass which the Turks had attempted to cross two days before, and the reconnoitring party of Dramali found the road farther away to the east unoccupied. Niketas, when it was seen which way they were going, hastened across to secure a repetition of what had gone before, and making his way over the hills, again stopped the advance. But the road here was wider, lying between hills less easy to occupy, and the Turkish cavalry, by a brilliant charge, won their way through and escaped to Corinth, abandoning the remainder of the infantry and the rest of the baggage. On them the Greeks settled like a cloud of stinging insects, and that evening Constantine, the coffee-maker of paradise, exercised his functions in the house of his father, a refugee from Kydonies, who had taken service with Niketas. Thus the great scheme came to an end, a pricked bubble, a melting of snow in summer. No ships had yet appeared off Nauplia, and Dramali's invincible army, which waited for them, had come and gone. The eager, hungry eyes of those besieged in Nauplia starved and watched in vain, and to the hungry mouths the food was scantier. Slowly and inevitably the cause of the people, in the hands no more of incompetent leaders, was gaining ground against the intolerable burden of those heartless and lustful masters, and link by link the chain of slavery was snapping and falling as the husks burst and fall from corn already mature and ripe. CHAPTER XII