“He is a selfish young egoist,” said Carlton to Mrs. Downs.  “As if I cared whether he was at the dinner or not!  Why couldn’t he have fixed it so I might have dined with his sisters alone?  We would never have missed him.  I’ll never meet her now.  I know it; I feel it.  Fate is against me.  Now I will have to follow them on to Athens, and something will turn up there to keep me away from her.  You’ll see; you’ll see.  I wonder where they go from Athens?”

The Hohenwalds departed the next morning, and as their party had engaged all the state-rooms in the little Italian steamer, Carlton was forced to wait over for the next.  He was very gloomy over his disappointment, and Miss Morris did her best to amuse him.  She and her aunt were never idle now, and spent the last few days of their stay in Constantinople in the bazars or in excursions up and down the river.

“These are my last days of freedom,” Miss Morris said to him once, “and I mean to make the most of them.  After this there will be no more travelling for me.  And I love it so!” she added, wistfully.

Carlton made no comment, but he felt a certain contemptuous pity for the young man in America who had required such a sacrifice.  “She is too nice a girl to let him know she is making a sacrifice,” he thought, “or giving up anything for him, but she won’t forget it.”  And Carlton again commended himself for not having asked any woman to make any sacrifices for him.

They left Constantinople for Athens one moonlight night, three days after the Hohenwalds had taken their departure, and as the evening and the air were warm, they remained upon the upper deck until the boat had entered the Dardanelles.  There were few passengers, and Mrs. Downs went below early, leaving Miss Morris and Carlton hanging over the rail, and looking down upon a band of Hungarian gypsies, who were playing the weird music of their country on the deck beneath them.  The low receding hills lay close on either hand, and ran back so sharply from the narrow waterway that they seemed to shut in the boat from the world beyond.  The moonlight showed a little mud fort or a thatched cottage on the bank fantastically, as through a mist, and from time to time as they sped forward they saw the camp-fire of a sentry, and his shadow as he passed between it and them, or stopped to cover it with wood.  The night was so still that they could hear the waves in the steamer’s wake washing up over the stones on either shore, and the muffled beat of the engines echoed back from either side of the valley through which they passed.  There was a great lantern hanging midway from the mast, and shining down upon the lower deck.  It showed a group of Greeks, Turks, and Armenians, in strange costumes, sleeping, huddled together in picturesque confusion over the bare boards, or wide-awake and voluble, smoking and chatting together in happy company.  The music of the tizanes rose in notes of passionate ecstasy and sharp, unexpected bursts of melody.  It ceased and be-an again, as though the musicians were feeling their way, and then burst out once more into shrill defiance.  It stirred Carlton with a strange turbulent unrest.  From the banks the night wind brought soft odors of fresh earth and of heavy foliage.