Again and again she read them, then continued to look at them, not reading them, but as one looks at a familiar picture, half abstractedly. The lamp, unreplenished with oil, burned low; Michael sank on to his haunches, and then lay down. Through the open cabin door filtered a silvery grayness of starlight, but before the lamp had gone quite out the girl was asleep on the bare, unblanketed bed, her face turned upward as she had turned it to read the little pencil scratches. CHAPTER XV During the last two months the Greek fleet had been playing a waiting game, necessary but inglorious. The Sultan, as has been seen, had sent out in the spring a great army and a great navy, which were to relieve Nauplia simultaneously. Of the army the hills of the Dervenaki knew; the navy had cruised to Patras to take on board the new capitan pasha succeeding him who was the victim of Kanaris's fire-ship, and now in September it was coming back in full force, under its new commander, in tardy execution of its aim. It had left Patras before the news of Dramali's destruction had arrived, and the Turks still knew nothing of the miscarriage of the Sultan's scheme. Round it day by day, but out of distance of its heavy guns, hovered and poised the petrel fleet of the Greeks, neither attacking nor attacked. The Greek navy had been reorganized in the spring, and the supreme command given to Admiral Miaulis, still only in his thirtieth year, brave, honest, and judicious, and distracted by the endless quarrels and pretensions of his charge. It was no part of his purpose to give battle to the Turks on the open levels of the sea, but to wait till they turned into the narrower gulf outside Nauplia, where the cumbrous Turks would be hampered for sea-room, while his own lighter vessels, born to shifting winds and at home among shoals and the perils of landlocked seas, would reap the fruits of their breeding. All the latter part of August, a month of halcyon days in the open sea, they drifted and sailed in the wake of the Turks returning with Kosreff from Patras, and each day brought them but little nearer Nauplia. Often for two days or three at a time they would be utterly becalmed, sometimes taken back by the northward-flowing current, with sails flapping idly and mirrored with scarcely a tremor on a painted ocean.