three words--father, mother, Capsina. The two passed through the garden and into the veranda. The house-door was open, as Suleima had left it in her flight, and on the threshold she paused for the Capsina to enter first. "You are welcome," she said; and then, in the courteous phrase she had heard in Abdul's house; "The house is yours." Suleima would have made a bed for the Capsina in Father Andréa's room, who was away in Nauplia, but the girl asked if she might sleep with her, and instead they went together to Suleima's room. A big double mattress on a wooden frame was the bed; a little cot for the baby stood at the foot of it. Mitsos's great plank washtub stood in a corner, and there was a press for clothes. The moon shone full in at the window, making a great splash like a spill of milk on the floor, and there was no need for other light. [Illustration: "THE SPIRIT OF THE STILLNESS TOUCHED THE CAPSINA'S SOUL"] Suleima was tired and soon fell asleep, but the Capsina lay long with eyes closed, but intensely awake. A mill-race of turbulent, unasked-for thoughts whirled and dashed down the channels of her brain; she clinched her hands and bit her lips to keep them away--to keep her even from crying aloud. The blood and flesh of her, young, tingling, and alert, was up in revolt, lashing itself against the hard, cruel bars of circumstance. She ought never to have come here to sleep where he had slept; she had done a stupid and sweet thing, and she was paying for it heavily. At last she could stand it no longer, and rising very quietly for fear of disturbing Suleima, she dressed again and let herself out of the house. The hour of her weakness was upon her, and she lived back into the years of childhood, when one thing will make the world complete and its absence is an inconsolable ache. Like a child, too, she abandoned herself to the imperativeness of her need; nothing else would satisfy; nothing else was ever so faintly desirable. Yet she could only stretch out her hands to the night, every fibre of her tingling, and the silent cry, "I want, I want!" went up beseechingly, hopelessly, into the indifferent moonlight, a dumb, dry litany of supplication, not only to Heaven, but to all the cool sleeping earth; to tree, bush, stream--all that knew him. But after a while she saw and scorned herself. Where were all the great schemes and deeds in which she shared? Was their magnificence a whit impaired because she, an incomparably small atom, was in want of one thing? And by degrees made sane, and weary with struggle, she came to herself, and going back into the house, lay down again by Suleima; and when morning came Suleima was loath to wake her, for she slept so sound and peacefully, so evenly her bosom marked her quiet breathing.