For more than a week after they started they were the butt of violent and contrary winds, but the Capsina was impatient of delay no longer. Indeed, on the surface she was "the tranquil Capsina" to whom Mitsos had drunk, and he at any rate had no cause to know of the unrest that stormed below her tranquillity. They had set out from Hydra about eleven of the morning, and almost immediately after leaving the harbor they had taken a somewhat different course to the _Sophia_. She made a wider tack to port, while the _Revenge_ sailed closer to the wind, and after they had turned the southern end of the island, and there was open sea, with the main-land lying like a cloud to the west, Sophia and Mitsos left the bridge. Just as they went down she looked round: Kanaris was far away to the offing, Hydra was sinking down to the north, there was only sea and Mitsos. And with an uncontrollable impulse she held out her hands to him. "At last!" she cried, and before the pause was perceptible--"at last we are off!" She loved these fierce winds and heavy seas which kept them back; it was a fierce and intimate joy to her to wake at night and know that Mitsos was there, to wake in the morning for another day of that comradeship, which was in itself already the main fibre of her life. The huge gray seas from the south hissed and surged by them, with dazzling, hungry heads of lashed foam, now and again falling solid on the bows with a shower of spray, and streaming off through the scuppers back into the sea. The wind shrilled and screamed through the rigging; the buffeted ship staggered and stood straight again, then plunged head-foremost with a liquid cluck and crunch into the next water-valley; the bowsprit dipped in the sea, then raised itself scornfully with a whiff of spray twenty feet above the crest of the wave; and every wave that beat them, every squall that whistled aloft, every flash of raking sunlight that fled frightened across the deck was for the two of them; they stood side by side, wrapped in tarpaulins, and watched the beautiful labor of the ship; they sat in the swaying, rolling cabin, and it was like a game to pluck at the food as it bowed and coquetted away from their hands; like a game, too, the scramble and rush across the deck, laid precipitously towards the seas rushing by, or the house-roof climb up it as it rose staggering to the next billow, or the watching Michael as he toiled or slipped after them, sometimes sliding gravely down on his haunches, sometimes doing tread-mill work up the wet incline; but for one of them at least the game was one at which the stake was serious. They would amuse themselves with the most childish sports, watching themselves to see who could stand the longest on one foot when the ship was pushing and shouldering its way along through the cross sea, the one finding pleasure in such things because he was just a boy with a double portion of animal spirits, the other