He waited there till the priest joined him, and was surprised to see him cross himself as he passed by the door into the temple, and asked why he did so.
"It is a story of a devil," he said, "which folks tell about here. Whether I believe it or no, I know not, and so I am careful. We will make haste down this valley, for it is not good to be here after night."
The mists had risen again over the whole hill-side, but not thickly, and as they turned to go Mitsos looking back saw a strange shaft of light streaming directly out of the ruined door of the temple—the effect, no doubt, of the sun, which was near its setting, striking through some thin layer of cloud.
"Look," he said to the priest, "one might almost think the temple was lit from within."
Father Zervas looked round, and when he saw it dropped lamentably off his horse and onto his knees on the ground, and began muttering prayers, crossing himself the while.
Mitsos looked at him in surprise, and saw that his face was deadly pale, and a strangling anguish gripped at the muscles of his throat. The light cast through the temple door meantime had been choked by the gathering mists, and when Father Zervas looked up from his prayers it was gone.
"Quick, quick!" he cried to Mitsos; "it is not good to be here," and mounting on his pony he fairly clattered down the hill-side, and did not draw bridle till they had reached the main road from Andritsaena.
Mitsos followed, half amused, but conscious of a lurking fear in his mind, a fear bred by the memory of the winter evenings of his childhood when he used to hear strange stories of shapes larger than human, which had been seen floating like leaves in the wind round the old temples on the Acropolis, and cries that came from the hills of Ægina, where stood the house of the god, but no human habitation, at the sound of which the villagers in the hamlets below would bolt their doors and crouch fearfully round the fire, "making the house good," as they said, by the reiterated sign of the cross. Then as he grew older his familiarity with morning and evening and night in lonely places had caused these stories to be half forgotten, or remembered only as he remembered the other terrors and pains of childhood—the general distrust of the dark, and the storms that came swooping down from the gaunt hills above Nauplia. But now when he saw the flying skirts of Father Zervas waving dimly from the mist in front, and heard the hurried clatter of his pony's feet, he followed at a good speed, and in some confusion of mind. Zervas had stopped on reaching the high-road, and here Mitsos caught him up.
"Ah, ah!" he gasped, "but it is a sore trial the Lord has sent me, for I am no braver than a hare when it comes to dealings with that which is no human thing. It is even as Demetri said, for the evil one is there, the one whom he saw under the form of a young man, very fair to look upon, but evil altogether, a son of the devil."
And he wiped a dew of horror from his brow.