Mitsos said nothing, but threw the ladder and rope on the wall and sprang up himself. "Yes, I have come," he said. "Ah, how I have been cursing this rain--may the saints forgive me!--but I cared not, and cursed." Suleima looked at him a moment. "Why, how smart you are!" she said. "Is it the Greek use that a man goes fishing in his best clothes? Oh, my clean fustanella!" she cried, looking sideways on him. Mitsos smiled. The best clothes had been a good thought, in spite of a momentary confusion. "Hush!" he whispered, "we will talk in the boat. I will hold the ladder. There, it is quite steady." The girl stepped lightly down the rungs, and Mitsos, directing her to sit still, threw the ladder and rope back and let himself down onto the side of the boat. "Where shall we go to-night?" he asked. The girl laughed gently--the echo, as it were, of a laugh. "Oh, out, out to sea," she said; "right away from this horrible place. Where shall I sit?" Mitsos took the pillow out of the net and put it for her at the stern of the boat. "See," he said. "I remembered that you said the net smelled fishy, and I have brought you my pillow to sit on. There--is there a more comfortable seat in all Greece?" She sat down, and the boy busied himself with the boat for a few minutes. He had to row out a dozen strokes or so until they got from under the lee of the wall, and the wind, catching the sail, slowly bulged it out taut; the boat dipped and bowed a moment and then began to move quickly forward towards the mouth of the bay. He stood a few seconds irresolute until Suleima spoke. "Well, have you finished?" she asked. "Yes. We shall run straight before the wind as far as you like." She pointed with her hand to the seat beside her. "Come and sit by me," she said. There was silence between them for several minutes--she with a smile hiding in the depths of her dark eyes; he, serious and tongue-tied. The air was full of the freshness of the night and of the sea, but across that there came to him some faint odor from her--a warm smell of a live thing, too delicate to describe. Then she drew from her pocket a small box and opened it. "See what I have brought you," she said--"Rahat-la-koom. How do you call it in Greece? Sweets, anyhow. Do you like sweets?" She took a lump of the sticky, fragrant stuff out of the box and offered it to Mitsos as a child offers sweets to another child. "Do you like it?" she asked again. "Abdul gave me the stuff last night. I was afraid when he gave it to me, but he did not stop. As I told you, I am not of the harem." Mitsos flushed. Suleima spoke with the _naïveté_ of a child, and yet somehow it made him ashamed to think that even he was sitting alone with her, and furious at the thought that that fat Turk, whom he had seen at Nauplia only a few days before, should dare to give her sweets.