"Well?" she said. "It is this," said Kanaris, "though indeed it is no business of mine. Mitsos is but a lad, and, Capsina, what do you know of him? Surely this afternoon he was a stranger to you." Sophia smiled, and with a wonderful frank kindness in her black eyes. "And you, Kanaris," she said. "Did not a strange sea-captain come to Hydra one evening? Did he not talk with me--how long--ten minutes? And was not a bargain struck on his words? Was that so imprudent a job? By all the saints, I think I never did a better!" "But he is so young, this Mitsos," said Kanaris. "Am I so old? We shall both get over it." Kanaris filled his glass, frowning. "But it is different: you are the Capsina." "And he is of the Mainats. That is as good a stock as ours, though our island proverb says we are the prouder. And, indeed, I am not sure we are the better for that, for I would sooner have Mitsos here than, than Christos." The Capsina, it must be acknowledged, found an intimate pleasure in putting into plain words what Kanaris could not let himself conjecture in thought. "Christos?" he said. "Well, certainly. And if, he being a cousin of yours, I may speak without offence, it would be a very bold or a very foolish man who would wish to have Christos only to depend on in the sailing of a war brig." "And the sailing of my brig will be the work of Mitsos," said Sophia. "Oh, Kanaris, you have lost a pound, and how bitter you are made." Kanaris laughed. "Well, God knows he can sail a boat," he said. "My pocket knows it." "Then why look farther for another and a worse?" said the Capsina. Kanaris was silent; the Capsina had hinted before that she meant him to command the _Sophia_ in the next cruise, but he had yet had no certain word from her. And, indeed, his ambition soared no higher, and to no other quarter--to command the finest brig but one in the island fleet was no mean thing; but it is a human failing common to man to view slightingly any one who takes one's own place, even when it is vacant only through personal promotion. Kanaris's case, however, was a little more complicated, for the Capsina was to him what he had thought no woman could have been. His habit of mind was far too methodical to allow him the luxury of doing anything so unaccounted for as abandoning himself to another; but there were certainly three things in his soul which took a distanced precedence of all others. Ships were one, destruction of Turks another, and the Capsina was the third. In his more spiritual moments he would have found it hard to draw up a reliable table of precedence for the three.