ered it (and so did she) for many years, that one
ineffable flash of supreme happiness when their spirits joined.

They had been down the steep hillside and across the Cordelio road to
the shore where there stood a blue bath house built out over the water.
As they had scrambled and slid among the shingle and loose boulders, the
upper reaches of the mountains touched to glowing bronze by the setting
sun while they were in a kind of golden twilight, there came a call from
the next house and they saw a white figure at the heavy iron gate in the
garden wall. And by the time they were among the houses of the village
and stared at by the shy, silent housewives who were gathered about the
great stone troughs of the wash house, they were joined by Esther,
Evanthia's friend. And together the three of them, with towels and
bathing suits, went down to the blue bath-house as the sparse lights of
the city began to sparkle across the water.

Mr. Spokesly liked Esther. She traversed every one of his preconceived
notions of a Jewess and of a Russian, yet she was both. She had come
down from Pera with her Armenian husband, a tall, thin, dark man with a
resounding and cavernous nose, who held a position in what he called the
Public Debt. He had come over with her one evening and paid an extremely
formal call, presenting his card, which bore the words "Public Debt" in
one corner below his polysyllabic name. Mr. Spokesly liked Esther. She
was a vigorous, well-knit woman of thirty, with an animated
good-humoured face and capable limbs. He liked her broken English, which
was uttered in a hoarse sensible voice. He liked her because she was a
strong advocate of his. He heard her muttering away to Evanthia in a
husky undertone and he was perfectly well aware that she was taking his
part and proving to Evanthia that she would be a fool if she did not
stay by him. She would talk to him alone, too, and repeat what she had
said.

"You take her away," she urged. "Soon as you can. Me and my 'usban', we
go to Buenos Aires soon as we can. This place no good."

"I want her to," he said. "She says yes, too."

"She say yes? She say anything. She like to fool you. I know. I tell
her--you stay wis your 'usban'. Englishmen good 'usban's, eh?"

"Esther, tell me something. You think, when I say, Come, she'll come
with me? You think so?"

For an instant Esther's firmly modelled and sensible features assumed an
expression inexplicable to the serious man w