‘Vromogatos!’ Kyria Alexiou cried.

Whose passion was bruising her.

‘Good appetite!’ Old Anthoula laughed.

Then the servant led her mistress away. In the late light the old woman’s young skin had the blue translucence of porcelain.

‘What was it, Kikitsa?’ Aleko Alexiou asked, because at least they shared a roof.

But his wife sat and crumbled bread.

And again a cat was gone. Rain beat into the empty box. The particles of soil set at a visible level on the empty dishes. Kyria Alexiou continued mooning in the empty wood. There was still the goat, certainly, whose name, Kyra Photini had learnt, was Arapina. Kyria Alexiou lowered her face on one occasion to the wooden mask of the black goat, but was unable to see into the eyes.

So the bereft kept to her roof. Her clothes were drabber than before, and hung. She could not bear the encumbrance of her drab, pricking clothes. She bought the raw-silk dresses which suddenly had caught her eye, and would dress herself listlessly in the accommodating garments, which moved so naturally with her body as she prowled about the marble roof, barefoot more often than not. The tones of evening would slant her eyes in heavy violet, morning gilded the refractory down at the nape of her neck, as Kyria Alexiou stood resting her fingertips on the polished parapet.

‘Silk flatters!’ Anthoula laughed.

She lowered her eyes from her mistress’s, which had grown uncommunicative.

Anthoula would bring bowls of warmed milk.

‘The milk is good. Drink,’ she advised. ‘It soothes.’

But Anthoula was crueller than she thought.

Some of it Kikitsa Alexiou told her friend Maro Hajistavrou as they sat in the saloni of her marble ship afloat on the light of Attica.

‘A tragic story,’ Maro Hajistavrou declared.

For one so remote, she even felt faintly moved. She could not resist peeping into the cleft between Kikitsa’s breasts, at the bluish lights which drowsed in the folds of the subtle dress.

Then Kikitsa cried out:

‘Less tragic if it had not been necessary!’

Her nails, her friend noticed for a moment, were embedded in the weave of the linen sofa. But only for a moment. For almost at once Maro Hajistavrou was overwhelmed by a gust of unspeakable joy or fear: Hymettus reeling mottled through the window beyond Kikitsa Alexiou’s shoulder.

‘Maroula! Maroul-lina! Don’t you remember?’

Maro Hajistavrou was drunk with the scent of flesh. Or heather.

‘No! No!’ she protested. ‘What should I remember?’

What indeed? It had been so strange. The two girls resting in the pocket between the cushions of rough heather.

‘Take love,’ Kikitsa Andragora had begun, drawing in the air with a blade of grass. ‘I could put a ring round it. But would you, too, accept what I had enclosed?’

Maro had been impressed, but terrified by what she only partly understood.

‘Or sky.’ Again Kikitsa described a circle with her blade of grass. ‘I would not dare suggest “heaven”. “Heaven” is so personal.’

Then Kikitsa had started laughing.