"Not to Athens," said Kanaris. "A caique put in this evening. There has been a massacre of Turks, but little fighting. The Peiraeus, they say, was full of women and others who escaped from the houses of the Turks. Some have sailed to their homes; others are sailing. She was taken, was she not, at Spetzas? If she is still alive she may be there, or she may have heard you have gone to Hydra. I will help you, for she is cousin to me, and I will sail to Spetzas to-night while you wait here." Nikola took him by the shoulder, almost pushing him from the room. "Go then," he said. "Oh, be quick, man! Stay, do you want money? Take what you will; it is all for her." And he walked across the room to the hearth, and wrenched up two of the stones. Below opened a space some three feet square filled with little linen bags all tied up. He took out a handful of them. "Each is a hundred piasters," he said. "Take what you will; take three, four, all. For the time has come for me to use them." But Kanaris, with a strange feeling of tenderness and pity, kissed the old man's hand and refused. "I, too, will do something for my kin," he said, "She belongs to me as well as you." "No, no!" cried Father Nikola. "She belongs to no one but me--to me only, I tell you. I will pay you as I would have paid the Turk. Oh, take the money, but go." Kanaris shook his head. "Very well; she is yours only. I will go. Wish me good luck, father." But Father Nikola could not speak. He threw down the bags into their place again, and put back the stone. Then he went to his bedroom and took out his best clothes. He washed, trimmed his beard, and put on his purple cloak lined with fur, his big gold ring, and his buckled shoes. "I am an old man," he thought to himself, "but at least I can make myself less forlorn a sight for a woman's eyes. Ah, but no woman was ever like her!" And his old drooping mouth trembled into a smile. Sometimes when he went out he would notice, not with pain, but with hatred, that people shrank from him, that boys called him by opprobrious miser-names, but to-night, as he went down to the quay, he noticed nothing; he walked on air, unseeing. The crucial hour was at hand, the hour that would leave him rich and alone, or a primate no more, but with another. She was his wife; that vow at least he had not broken. He would not be hissed out of his office; blithely would he go; he would have to leave Hydra; he would shake the dust of it from his feet. He would ask pardon of Economos, whom he had foully schemed to murder; he would give all but bare livelihood to the service of the war; and he would be a happier man. The little well of tenderness and humanity, which had so long been choked by the salt and bitter sands of the soul in which it rose, suddenly swelled and overflowed. Surely God was very good. He had taken him again by the hand after decades of sour and hating years; He would lead him into a green and quiet pasture.