"Yes. We shall run straight before the wind as far as you like."
She pointed with her hand to the seat beside her.
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.
"How silent you are, Mitsos!" she went on. "Tell me what you have been doing all this time. For me, I have done nothing--nothing--nothing. I have never been so dull."
"Are you less dull now?" he said. "Do you care to come out like this with me?"
"Surely, or else I should not come. I think I have even missed you, which is odd, for I never missed any one before. I care for none of those in the house, and some I hate."
"Promise you will never hate me," he said.
"That is a big thing to promise," she said, "for 'never' is the greatest of all words, greater even than 'always'; but I don't feel as if I should ever hate you. I liked you since the first, even before I had ever seen you, when you sang that song out of the darkness. It was very rash and foolish of you, for Abdul would make nothing of having a sailor-boy shot. Supposing I had been--well, some one else--I should have told Abdul, and thus there would have been no more songs for Mitsos."
"But because it was you, you did not?" asked Mitsos, awkwardly. "Yet if it had not been you, I should not have sung to you."