'Now you are indeed mocking me!' she said, bending her sharp-drawn eyebrows.

'No. Every one knows it who knows me. In [{389}] Europe, men do not always marry very young. It is not a fixed custom.'

'I have heard so,' Baraka answered, her anger subsiding, 'but it is very strange. If it be so, and if all things should happen as we said, which Allah avert, and if you desired me for your wife, I would marry you without doubt. You are a great man, and rich, and you are good to look at, as Saäd was. Also you are kind, but Saäd would probably have beaten me, for he beat every one, every day, and I should have gone back to my father's house. Truly,' she added, in a thoughtful tone, 'you would make a desirable husband for Baraka. But the man I seek must marry me if I find him alive, for I gave him the riches of the earth and he gave me nothing and departed, leaving me to die. I have told you, and you understand. Therefore let us not jest about these things any more. What will be, will be, and if he must die, it is his portion, and mine also, though it is a pity.'

Thereupon the noble little features became very grave, and she leaned back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap, looking out at the violet light on the distant volcano. After that, at dinner and in the evening, they talked pleasantly. She told him tales of her own land, and of her childhood, with legends of the Altai, of genii and enchanted princesses; and he, in return, told her about the great world in which he lived; but of the two, she talked the more, no doubt because he was not speaking his own language. Yet there was a bond of sympathy between them more [{390}] natural and instinctive than any that had ever drawn him and Margaret together.

When the sun was up the next morning and Logotheti came on deck to drink his coffee alone, he saw the magic Straits not many miles ahead, in an opalescent haze that sent up a vapour of pure gold to the pale blue enamel of the sky. He had been just where he was now more than once before, and few sights of nature had ever given him keener delight. On the left, the beautiful outline of the Calabrian hills descended softly into the still sea, on the right the mountains of Sicily reared their lofty crests; and far above them all, twice as high as the highest, and nobler in form than the greatest, Ætna towered to the very sky, and a vast cloud of smoke rose from the summit, and unfolded itself like a standard, in flowing draperies that streamed westward as far as the eye could reach.

'Let her go half-speed, Captain,' said Logotheti, as his sailing-master came up to bid him good-morning. 'I should like my guest to see the Straits.'

'Very good, sir. We shall not go through very fast in any case, for the tide is just turning against us.'

'Never mind,' Logotheti answered. 'The slower the better to-day, till we have Ætna well astern.'

Now the tide in the Straits of Messina is as regular and easy to calculate as the tide in the Ocean, and at full and change of the moon the current runs six knots an hour, flowing or ebbing; it turns so suddenly that small freight steamers sometimes get into difficulties, and no sailing vessel I have ever seen has a chance of [{391}] getting through against it unless the wind is both fresh and free.

Furthermore, for the benefit of landsmen, it is well to explain here that when a steamer has the current ahead, her speed is the difference between her speed in slack water and that of the current or tide, whereas, if the latter is with her, its speed increases her own.