They went out, and climbing the scaffolding of the rising wall, dropped down on to the stony moorland outside. The sun was risen, and a fragrant rooty smell of herbs and damp earth rose into the morning. The Capsina sniffed it with a great contentment. "How I know that smell," she said, "morning and the clean wind and the hills of Hydra all mixed. I have thought of Hydra much lately, and of the time when I was a toddling thing." "A long-stepping toddler, I expect," said Mitsos, and they descended the slope to the water. On the edge of the sea lay a ribbon of bare limestone rock, with deep fissures and ravines opening in it, and strewn about were fragments of rock as high as a man, looking as if some gigantic creature had got ready materials for his monstrous house and had stopped there. A little bay, some fifty yards across, with two jutting headlands, formed the extremest end of the promontory, and from here they got a wide sea-view left and right. Behind, the hill down which they had come rose steeply, crowned by its wall, but the custom-house, standing lower, and on the opposite slope below the ridge, lay concealed. "And this, too, is a very convenient place," remarked the Capsina. "There is a wide sea-view; there are many large and suitable rocks. In how many shots would you wager yourself to hit a crack between two of these at a mile's distance and from a rolling ship's deck, little Mitsos?" "In as many shots as there are hairs on my head. Why?" She looked at him, wagging her head in reproof. "Must I go on?" she asked. "Then in how many shots from between one of these cracks would you engage to hit a big ship at a mile's distance? Was there ever so slow a lad!" "God forbid!" said Mitsos. "In as many noses as there are on my face. You see what I mean." "I am not so slow as some," she said, glancing into his comely face, and in answer Mitsos smiled with eyes and mouth. He had never seen her so brilliant and good to look on. She had wound the brightly colored shawl round her head, the shawl he remembered her wearing one gray morning last year as they started from Galaxidi. But now the newly risen sun, wintry and luminously sparkling, bathed her from head to foot. She enchanted his eye, making captive of it, and he looked until the smile blossomed into a laugh. "Oh, Capsina, may there be many long years for you!" he cried. "To-morrow is the Noël. What shall be my gift to you on the Noël?" She paused a moment, uncertain of her answer. Then, "More of the gift you have always given me, dear Mitsos," she said, "your own help and comradeship, perhaps a little liking as well. Who knows?" "God knows how much," said the lad. The good moment finished. Her heart accused her of no disloyalty to Suleima, for from the heart she had spoken only of that she knew that Mitsos gave her, and flirted not with forbidden thoughts, and with that they went back to the work in hand. Yet it had been a good moment, even an excellent moment.