The wind dropped for a moment, the rushes were silent, and in the lull Mitsos heard a mule bell behind them no great way off. He sat up and peered across the vine-grown strip of plain which lay between them and the mountain, but the skeins of night mist hung opaque and pearly gray above it.
In a few minutes, however, the sound got sensibly nearer, and the two rose and moved a score of yards farther down the beach, for a footpath round the head of the bay to Nauplia led across the top of it. Then across the sound of the bell they could hear the pattering footsteps of the mule, and in a few minutes more it and its rider emerged from the path which lay through the vineyards onto the open ground at the head of the beach. Just then the rider checked his beast, dismounted, and tied some grass round the tongue of the bell in order to muffle it, and struck a light with a flint and steel which he caught in tinder, and blew it gently till it sufficed to light his short chibouk. His face was towards them, and in the glow of the kindled tobacco it stood out vividly from the dark. It was Nicholas.
He mounted again and rode on, but Mitsos sat still, breathing hard and vacantly, and seeing only Nicholas's face standing out like a ghost in the darkness. Suleima touched him gently on the arm.
"Who was it?" she said. "He did not see us."
"It was my uncle," said Mitsos, in a dry voice. "No, he did not see us."
Then his self-control gave way, and he flung himself back on the ground.
"I am afraid," he said--"I do not know what is going to happen. He has come for me. I know it."
"For you?" asked Suleima. "What do you mean?"
"I shall have to go," said Mitsos. "Holy Virgin, but I cannot. I know nothing about what he wants me to do. I only know that I may--that I shall have to go away; that I shall have to leave you and perhaps never see you again. Oh," he cried, "I cannot, I cannot!"
"Mitsos, do not talk like that," she said, half sobbing; "do not be so unkind."
Mitsos recovered himself and felt ashamed.
"Oh, dearest of all and littlest," he said, soothingly, "I am a stupid brute to frighten you. Everything will be all right--I will come back--it is sure that I will come back. Only I promised him to do what he told me, and help him in something--it does not matter what--and I expect he has come to tell me he wants my help."