"Nikola," she said, and no more, and for a minute's space there was silence between them, and in that silence their souls lived back for one blessed moment to the years long past. Neither of them saw that the crowd had gone back a little, to give them room, that all were waiting in a pause of astonishment and conjecture round them, but standing off with the instinct of natural effacement, a supreme delicacy, to let these two long sundered have even in the midst of them a sort of privacy. Tombazes saw and guessed, and his honest red face suddenly puckered with an unbidden welling of tears. Nikola was waiting, as he had said, for some one; this woman was she. She was the taller of the two, and laid her hand on his shoulder. "I have come back, Nikola," she said, and her voice was sweeter and more mellow than the harbor bell. "I have come back old. But I have come back." Anguish more lovely than joy, joy fiercer than anguish pierced him. The bitter waters were turned suddenly sweet by some divine alchemy; his withered heart budded and blossomed. "The rest is nothing worth, little one," he said. "You have come back. I too am old." At that she smiled. "Little one?" she said, and with the undying love of love which is the birthright of women. "Am I still little one?" she said, and again she kissed him on the lips. "Let us go," he whispered. "Let us go home." The lane of faces parted right and left, and in silence they went up across the quay through the deserted streets to his house. Not till they had passed out of the sound of hearing did the silence grow into a whisper, and the whisper into speech. They crowded round Tombazes, but he could only wipe his eyes and conjecture like the rest. "Old Nikola!" he said; "fancy old Nikola! She can only be his wife. He said he was waiting for a person. Well, you call your sister your sister, and your relations your relations; you only call your wife, when you are not imagined to have one, a person. Old Nikola! That explains a great deal. We thought him a mere old miser, and a sour one at that. I make no doubt he was saving for the ransom. No, don't anybody speak to me. I--I--" and the warm-hearted old pagan primate turned suddenly away and blew his nose violently. No more was seen of Nikola that evening, but next morning his servant came to Tombazes, asking him if he would dine with him that day. The two met him at the door hand in hand, like children or young lovers, and Nikola, turning to his wife, said: "Ask Father Tombazes' blessing, little one; and give me also your blessing, father." Tombazes did so, and observed that Nikola was dressed no longer as a primate, but only as a deacon, and as they dined he told him all--how thirty years ago he broke his celibate vow and, as if in instant vengeance, before a month was passed his wife was carried off from Spetzas by the Turks; how he had moved to Hydra where the story was unknown, and how only yesterday she had come back again.