Page:The vintage; a romance of the Greek war of independence (IA vintageromanceof00bensrich).pdf/166

 little monument over a newly made grave. When it was discovered it cansed a certain amount of intelligent amusement among the Greeks; but the Turks seemed to miss the point of the joke. Not even they would have dared to disturb a Greek cemetery, for the dead had in their eyes a sacredness which the living altogether lacked; and it remained there for a year, when subsequent events saw it planted over the most honored grave in Greece.

December and the first half of January Nicholas had spent in the country of his kin, south of Sparta, and it was from there he had fled in haste to Nauplia, for his presence in Maina, which was notably patriotic, had become too insistent to be disregarded, and the Turkish governor of Tripoli, Mehemet Salik, had demanded of the Greek bey of that district, Petros Mavromichales, usually known as Petrobey, that he should be given up on the old charge of brigandage. Petrobey, like Germanos, was of high rank, and the Turks seemed to have had no suspicion that he himself was a leader of the revolution; but, as a matter of fact, he and Nicholas, who was staying with him at the time, read the letter together and consulted what should be done.

Nicholas was disposed to shrng at it altogether, or merely to send back an answer that he was officially declared to be dead and buried—witness the grave and its monument; but Petrobey thought otherwise. His own usefulness to the cause was immensely increased by the fact that he at present stood outside suspicion, and he advised Nicholas to retire where they were not likely to look for him, while he himself would prosecute a vigorous and indubitably unsuccessful search elsewhere, as an evidence of his own unimpeachable fidelity. Had not Nicholas got a brother-in-law—his own cousin—at