But as long as Suleima was with him he stifled all these thoughts, while the boat skimmed seawards on the outward tack. They put about opposite the island and ran straight for the wall. The wind had freshened, and to Mitsos the boat seemed to be going terribly fast, for he grudged each moment. But he had quite lulled Suleima's disquietude, if not his own, and she lay with her head on his shoulder, half asleep, looking up now and then into his wide-open eyes, and pressing her arm more closely round his neck. He had to rouse her when he must get up to take in the sail, and she smiled at him sleepily like a child just wakened.
Then he fixed the ladder, and she climbed up, clung to him for a moment without words, for there was no need of speech between them, and went quickly and silently across the garden.
It was after two when Mitsos landed opposite his house, and he saw with some surprise that there were lights still burning. He opened the door, and, bending his head to pass under the low jamb, entered. Constantine and Nicholas were sitting there, Constantine silent, Nicholas talking eagerly, and Mitsos observed that he held his pipe unlit in his hand. His uncle sprang up when he came in.
"Ah, he is here! Mitsos, the time has come. You must go at once."
Mitsos looked at him a moment steadily and silently--their eyes were on a level--and then he turned aside and put down the fishing-creel in the corner. His decision, though the result of years, was the deed of only a moment.
"I am ready," he said; "tell me what I have to do."
Since August Nicholas had been travelling about the Peloponnesus, being received everywhere with a sober, secret welcome as one of the accredited leaders of the revolution. The Turks, through whose Kismet the truth of the ever-increasing rumors had begun to break, had long held him in indolent suspicion, but had taken no steps to counteract the report of his death, for they hoped--if Turks can be said to hope--somewhat ingeniously, but wholly mistakenly, that such news would prove to be a cooling draught to this ill-defined fever of revolution. The Greeks, however, as Germanos had said, knew "that Nicholas was not the sort of man who died," and Turkish ingenuity went strangely wide of its aim. In fact, it enabled Nicholas to move about more freely, and to take a liberal advantage of the fact that he was supposed to be beyond the reach of war and rumor of war. Indeed, in October, finding himself back at Corinth, where he had business with one of his fellow-workers, he had filled an idle afternoon with carving a little wooden cross on which he painted his name, and below, with a two-handled meaning, the text, "The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised." He was to leave Corinth that night, and after the dark had fallen he and his host went to the Greek cemetery and planted this eloquent little monument over a newly made grave. When it was discovered it caused a certain amount of intelligent amusement among the Greeks; but the Turks seemed to miss the point of the joke. Not even they would have dared to disturb a Greek cemetery, for the dead had in their eyes a sacredness which the living altogether lacked; and it remained there for a year, when subsequent events saw it planted over the most honored grave in Greece.