Mitsos got up and went forward. The Sophia was bowling along a mile to port, running, like them, straight before the wind and keeping the pace. On the starboard bow Scyros had just risen low and dim above the sea, but the horizon was sailless. The sun was near setting; and a golden haze, curtain above curtain of thinnest gauze, stretched across the western heaven. The sea seemed molten with light. High overhead swung a slip of crescent moon, still ashy and colorless. Above the sun stretched a thin line of crimson-carded fleeces of cloud; the wind was soft and steady. He went back to the girl and sat down again.
"It will be very fair weather," he said, and she answered not, but through her head his voice went ringing on and on persistently, like an endless echo, saying the words again and again.
They stopped at Hydra a day, both to give the news and learn it. Nauplia was still blockaded; not a shot had been fired on either side. The Turkish garrison it was supposed were still not without hope that help would come; the Greeks, equally confident it would not, made no effort to storm the place, but waited till famine should do their work for them, and indeed the end could not be far off. Kolocotrones was not there; it was the earnest prayer of all the Greeks that he would be absent when the town fell, for otherwise it would be but little spoil that fell outside the brass helmet. And Christos Capsas, the once betrothed of the Capsina, who, with others like him, stopped at home at Hydra nominally to defend the place in case the Turks made a descent on it, spat on the ground.
"He is a dirty, greedy ruffian," he said.
He and his wife, slovenly and shrill-voiced, wearing the Capsina's wedding-gift, the heirloom girdle, and misbecoming it strangely, were dining with the girl on her ship, and she, looking across at Mitsos, saw his nose turned rather scornfully in the air.
"Yet he is a brave man, Christos," said she. "Do you not think so? He runs risk cheerfully, anyhow."
"For the sake of fatness and riches," grumbled Christos.
The Capsina, who loathed Kolocotrones, suddenly found herself taking his part when Christos called him to account. She laughed, not very kindly.
"Yet you are not thin, Christos," she said, "and they say you are getting rich. Ah, well, God makes some to stay at home, and others to go abroad, and thus to each is his work allotted. Now of the island what news?"
"The news of Father Nikola, Father no longer. You have heard?"