By the time we reached the Speranza, the rain suddenly stopped:  I went down to my cabin to change my clothes, and had to shut the door in her face to keep her out.  When I opened it, she was there, and she followed me to the windlass, when I went to set the anchor-engine going.  I intended, I suppose, to take her to Imbros, where she might live in one of the broken-down houses of the village.  But when the anchor was not yet half up, I stopped the engine, and let the chain run again.  For I said, ‘No, I will be alone, I am not a child.’

I knew that she was hungry by the look in her eyes:  but I cared nothing for that.  I was hungry, too:  and that was all I cared about.

I would not let her be there with me another instant.  I got down into the boat, and when she followed, I rowed her back all the way past Foundoucli and the Tophana quay to where one turns into the Golden Horn by St. Sophia, around the mouth of the Horn being a vast semicircle of charred wreckage, carried out by the river-currents.  I went up the steps on the Galata side before one comes to where the barge-bridge was.  When she had followed me on to the embankment, I walked up one of those rising streets, very encumbered now with stone-debris and ashes, but still marked by some standing black wall-fragments, it being now not far from night, but the air as clear and washed as the translucency of a great purple diamond with the rain and the afterglow of the sun, and all the west aflame.

When I was about a hundred yards up in this old mixed quarter of Greeks, Turks, Jews, Italians, Albanians, and noise and cafedjis and wine-bibbing, having turned two corners, I suddenly gathered my skirts, spun round, and, as fast as I could, was off at a heavy trot back to the quay.  She was after me, but being taken by surprise, I suppose, was distanced a little at first.  However, by the time I could scurry myself down into the boat, she was so near, that she only saved herself from the water by a balancing stoppage at the brink, as I pushed off.  I then set out to get back to the ship, muttering:  ’You can have Turkey, if you like, and I will keep the rest of the world.’

I rowed sea-ward, my face toward her, but steadily averted, for I would not look her way to see what she was doing.  However, as I turned the point of the quay, where the open sea washes quite rough and loud, to go northward and disappear from her, I heard a babbling cry—­the first sound which she had uttered.  I did look then:  and she was still quite near me, for the silly maniac had been running along the embankment, following me.

‘Little fool!’ I cried out across the water, ‘what are you after now?’ And, oh my good God, shall I ever forget that strangeness, that wild strangeness, of my own voice, addressing on this earth another human soul?