“We make the laws for others, never for ourselves. Hang it, man, what’s liberty if it can’t provide us with a backstairs to the Temple of Wrong, and can’t supply us with decent excuses for the evasion of principles?”
“There is an abominable looseness in yours,” remarked Selaka, in a doleful attempt at indignation.
“Come, Doctor,” Miltiades cried, clanking his spurs impatiently. “Whatever the laws of the State may be, the laws of honour demand that neither antagonist be a moment behind time. I have the pistols. Be so good as to hurry your movements.”
The doctor’s laggard air suggested the gathering of scattered limbs, and the necessity for adjusting them before a march could be effected. He looked ruefully at the impassible Agiropoulos, and resented his impertinent eyeglass and his irreproachable toilet. He looked at the stern and gallant captain, wavered, and fresh words of protest died in his throat.
“There is no fear of our being discovered and the affair stopped?” he asked, in the tone of one to whom such a contingency would appear the worst possible catastrophe.
“Oh, none whatever,” Miltiades replied, reassuringly.
“Oh!” ejaculated Selaka, with his heart in his boots.
Through a similar hour of agony Stavros had passed, and awaited them with a poor imitation of stoic bearing.
“If anything happens, don’t forget to send this letter to my brother,” Selaka entreated, as he tremblingly took the pistol from Miltiades.
“God have mercy on my soul,” he murmured, firing with closed eyes, and shot--not his enemy but himself.
Like a roseate jewel in a circle of sapphire, with opal and mauve and purple lights struck from it by the sun’s rays, lies Tenos upon the deep and variable bosom of the Ægean waters. The Greek islands seen from the sea are untiringly, unspeakably beautiful. Shadow and shine, delicate hues and strong ones melt into an inextricable haze, as do the sensations of the spectator, incapable of analysis as he watches them. Energy oozes out through the finger-tips, the pulses quiet in lazy delight, and the eye is filled for once with seeing. But the heart is tranquil, unutterably content, and of speech there is no need. Here at last is forgetfulness of sorrow and unrest. Here is the Eastern sage’s dream realised, out of the reach of the envenomed shafts of Fate,--floating indolently on a just stirred field of liquid blue, all land and sky and water is a harmonious blending of the purest tints. An infinitude of azure melts by tranquil degrees into milk-white; a flame as bright as the heart of a pomegranate and blinding as unshaded carmine, steals insidiously into the mountains of mauve, and changes them to pink.