The hotel was formlessly vast, and brown—a dated wartime brown suggestive of inverted camouflage, as if it had been willfully disguised as a military installation. Upstairs, however, unlatching the shutters of a charming, old-fashioned room, she looked down over terraces and a pebbled beach to the sea and, once more, out to the blue Turkish coast. The open French windows formed, with their outside railing, a narrow balcony. She pulled up a chair and, leaning her arm on the rail and her chin on her arm, sat there in the winter sunshine, happy.

Clelia Kingslake was happy because, first of all, she was a Canadian. Fished out of the Annual Reports Pool at Headquarters, where she held a superior clerical post, flown to Rhodes at one day’s notice, arriving there to sunlight and sea, to trees in leaf, flowers in bloom, to the luxury of finding herself beside the Mediterranean—all this by itself might not have been thoroughly enjoyable to her strict northern soul had she not come to assist in a noble undertaking. She had been sent to serve the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean in their hour of need, and it was this that sanctioned her almost sensual pleasure in her surroundings as she sat gazing out from the Hotel of the Roses.

She was, in however modest a degree, the instrument of a great cause: in this setting redolent of antiquity she even risked to herself the word “handmaiden.” A dozen years earlier, in Toronto, she had diligently studied Italian in order to take her elderly mother to Rome. In the end, that summer, they had settled for Lake Louise, but she had kept up a little with the language. And this dormant ability had posted her now, miraculously, to an emergency mission newly established in the Mediterranean as an antidote to an international crisis.

An employee from the hotel was opening colored umbrellas on the stony beach below. One or two hardy guests were bathing, although the sea looked neither calm nor warm. Apart from occasional shouts of “Herrlich!” from the swimmers, the only sound was the rhythmic crunching of waves up the pebbled shore. “Sophocles long ago heard it on the Aegean,” quoted Miss Kingslake to herself, and the consummation of the familiar line in an actual experience, combined with fatigue from an overnight plane journey, brought a rush of tears to her eyes.

The telephone rang and she jumped up to answer. It was the concierge. Yes, he had put the call through to her office. No, no one wished to speak with her. However, there was a message: a Signor Grilli (the concierge permitted his voice a faint smile, for the name meant “crickets”) would come to see her at eight this evening.