Aglaia was silent.

And Mrs Philippides sent for her maid at dusk. She did not apologize, because one could not apologize. Not to a brown girl from an island.

‘Bring your sewing,’ she said, softer, ‘and sit here a little. While I read. Because it is lonely.’

So they sat together, and it was most unorthodox, but there was nobody to know.

And that Mrs Philippides, of the house which stood behind the ficus hedge, would peer out through the large windows with the blistered shutters at the summer visitors, the rich from Athens whom one did not accept, and they would return her glances from under their hats. At the mercy of daylight she appeared a grey woman, but one whose bones refused to allow elegance to desert her.

In the absence of her husband she would walk at evening in the garden of the grandfather’s house, cracking almonds, and eating the sweet kernels. Usually she was attended by her maid, a thick-set girl with frizzy hair, whom she had brought back after a visit somewhere.

For Mrs Philippides, too, would stay away. After the gipsy, she left for Athens.

When the gipsy came Mr Philippides had been sitting with a glass of tea on the terrace. Kyria Assimina had brought the tea. Because undoubtedly Aglaia, the girl from Lemnos, had not yet arrived on the scene.

‘For a taliro, kyrie mou, I shall tell your fortune,’ the gipsy promised.

She had long leathery breasts under a cotton frock, and smelled of the smoke from charcoal fires, and a particular little cachou sold at the kiosk at the corner of the park.

‘But a hair! You must give me a hair,’ the gipsy insisted, ‘out of your chest.’

And the small, smooth Philippides searched.

How long the gipsy danced, bare in front and bare behind, amongst the rocks at Ayai Moni, only the saints knew. But dance she must have. She walked with a long, dancing step, and her clothes were too easy on her. The shabby bodies of some women are quick to lose possession of themselves. Mrs Philippides could just imagine the gipsy’s dance, the detached shadow of it, under the ripe, indifferent moon.

That is why Constantia was so annoyed at the gipsy’s prophecy, why she went, and why she might have stayed away – she might have gone to Paris – with her husband resurrected in a silver frame – but came back, bringing the girl from Lemnos for her own comfort.

‘You see,’ she said to her husband, ‘life arranges itself for other people as well as for you.’

Voices carried in the grey house.

On the night of her return, however, voices choked each other.

‘Ach!’ she cried. ‘Yanko! You are mad! Mad!’

Laughing for his madness. Fastening her teeth in it.

Kyria Assimina, who had not yet been dismissed, could not listen enough.

‘We shall leave, then. We shall go to Athens,’ he said at last, when he had given it enough thought.