"I have been a brute, a brute!" she wailed. "I would have taken him from you if I could. I would have tempted him, only he was not temptable. Often and often I would have killed you, often I have killed you in my thoughts. How can you trust me? I am unclean. How can you let me touch the child? I shall defile it. Take it back! No, let me hold it a little longer. It does not know who I am. Do not teach it to curse me." Suleima laughed gently. "It is an ignorant little one, and knows little," she said, "but he can say 'father' and 'mother,' and one other word. How quiet the child is with you, Capsina. Sometimes he fights me as if I was a Turk. Wake, little Mitsos. Say 'Capsina.'" From the darkness came a little treble staccato pipe: "Cap-sin-a." "Mitsos taught him that," continued Suleima. "When he was home from the cruise with you, he would sit with the little one in his arms for an hour at a time, saying 'Capsina, Capsina,' to it. Ay, but it is a great baby I have for a husband!" The girl rocked the child to and fro gently. "Say it again, little one," she whispered, "say 'Capsina.' I know not why that is so sweet to me," she continued to Suleima, when the child had piped her name again, "but somehow it seems to put me more intimately with him and you. Surely he would not have taught the child my name if he was not my friend. So clearly can I see him doing it, sitting there by the hour smoking, and lazier than a tortoise. Indeed, he is a baby himself; we used to play child-games on the _Revenge_ when we sailed from Hydra, and laughed instead of talked." "He has told me," said Suleima--"he has told me often!" After that they sat for a while in silence. Now and then one of the women of the village would go by the illuminated square of the door, or one of the Greek sentries would pass on his round, whistling softly to himself. Otherwise the world was a stillness. The moon was risen, and little bars and specks of light filtered in through the roof of branch and bough. The body of the Turk, still lying where he had fallen, sprawled in the other corner, but neither of the women seemed to notice it. An extraordinary sense of effort over had possession of the Capsina; she had betrayed herself, and that to the one woman in the world to whom she would have thought it impossible to speak. Her pride, her strong, self-sufficient reserve, her secret, which she thought she would have died to keep, had been surrendered without conditions, and the captor was very merciful. She was tired of struggling, she had laid down her arms. And it was wonderfully sweet to hold Mitsos's child.... It was not easy for her to speak, but when a reserved nature breaks down it breaks down altogether, and when she spoke again she held nothing back.