Yanni put the chicken to boil, and while Mitsos fetched the horse, having nothing more to do, he amused himself by trying on the dress of the Turkish woman which they had found in the street. The big black bernous concealed the deficiencies of the skirt, which only came to his knees, and he had finished adjusting the veil, and had sat down chastely on a corner of the settee, when he heard Mitsos come up the street and call to him from the stable. So he got up and went on tiptoe out of the house and round to the other door, and Mitsos looking up saw a Turkish woman peeping in, who screamed in shrill falsetto when she saw him. For one moment he thought that somehow or other this was Suleima, but the next moment he had rushed after Yanni and hauled him in. "Is not my supper ready, woman?" he cried, "and why do you not attend to your master?" They ate their dinner in the best of spirits, for that the hated and despised Turk, whose destruction was their mission, should board and lodge them so handsomely seemed one of the best jokes. Mitsos every now and then broke into a huge grin as he made fearful inroads upon the food and wine, and Yanni kept ejaculating: "Very good chicken of the Turk. The best wine of the Turk; give me some lettuce of the Turk. I wish we could take the candlesticks, Mitsos; but perhaps two peasant boys with heavy silver sticks four feet high slung on their mules might attract attention." The moon had risen soon after sunset, and after dinner they sat smoking in the garden, which was planted with pomegranates and peach-trees, and fringed by a row of cypresses, which looked black in the moonlight. All was perfectly still but for the sleepy prattle of the stream below. Now and then a nightingale gave out a throatful of song, or some spray of asphodel, ripe to the core, cracked and scattered its seed round it. The cat prowled about the garden, now creeping through the shadow of the trees, or flattening herself out on the ground, and now making springs at some imaginary prey in the moonlight, and when they went up-stairs she preceded them, and, jumping onto Mitsos' bed, lay purring like a tea-kettle. CHAPTER III THE ADVENTURE OF THE FIRE-SHIP