They stopped at Hydra a day, both to give the news and learn it. Nauplia was still blockaded; not a shot had been fired on either side. The Turkish garrison it was supposed were still not without hope that help would come; the Greeks, equally confident it would not, made no effort to storm the place, but waited till famine should do their work for them, and indeed the end could not be far off. Kolocotrones was not there; it was the earnest prayer of all the Greeks that he would be absent when the town fell, for otherwise it would be but little spoil that fell outside the brass helmet. And Christos Capsas, the once betrothed of the Capsina, who, with others like him, stopped at home at Hydra nominally to defend the place in case the Turks made a descent on it, spat on the ground. "He is a dirty, greedy ruffian," he said. He and his wife, slovenly and shrill-voiced, wearing the Capsina's wedding-gift, the heirloom girdle, and misbecoming it strangely, were dining with the girl on her ship, and she, looking across at Mitsos, saw his nose turned rather scornfully in the air. "Yet he is a brave man, Christos," said she. "Do you not think so? He runs risk cheerfully, anyhow." "For the sake of fatness and riches," grumbled Christos. The Capsina, who loathed Kolocotrones, suddenly found herself taking his part when Christos called him to account. She laughed, not very kindly. "Yet you are not thin, Christos," she said, "and they say you are getting rich. Ah, well, God makes some to stay at home, and others to go abroad, and thus to each is his work allotted. Now of the island what news?" "The news of Father Nikola, Father no longer. You have heard?" "No," said the Capsina. "He is like the lemon: the older and nearer to ripeness it gets, the sourer it grows. He must be nearly ripe in my poor thought." "Well, then, he has become the orange," said Christos. "I love him not, yet he is sour no longer." And he told the story of the return of his wife. The Capsina listened in silence. "An old man like that," she said, "and she, you say, also old. Will you love and be loved when you are gray-headed, Mitsos? And the two old folks have gone off on the brig together! How absurd it is, and how--how splendid!" "They go hand-in-hand," said Christos, "and when the boys laugh, they laugh too." "Nikola laughing!" said the Capsina. "I did not think he knew how." "Yes, with the open mouth," said Christos. The Capsina leaned forward across the table. "He loves this old woman, you say, as others love?" she asked. "His eye glows for her? He is hot and cold?" "That is what one does when one loves," put in the experienced Mitsos. "How did you know, Capsina?" She laughed. "Have I sailed with you for weeks, and not seen the thought of Suleima with you? May not I look at you now and then? And she loves him, gray-headed, sour old Nikola? That is hardly less strange."