My father, meanwhile, had taken a lantern and explored the interior.

“I know this place,” he announced quietly, as he reappeared, after two or three minutes, in the ruinous doorway; “it is called Paomia.  We can bivouac in peace, and I doubt if by searching we could find a better spot.”

We ate our supper of cold bacon and ship-bread, both slightly damaged by sea-water—­but the wine solaced us, being excellent—­and stretched ourselves to sleep under the ilex boughs, my father undertaking to stand sentry till daybreak.  Nat and I protested against this, and offered ourselves; but he cut us short.  He had his reasons, he said.

It must have been two or even three hours later that I awoke at the touch of his hand on my shoulder.  I stared up through the boughs at the setting moon, and around me at my comrades asleep in the grasses.  He signed to me not to awake them, but to rise and follow him softly.

Passing through the screen of ilex, we came to a gap in the stone wall of the garth, and through this, at the base of the hillside below the forest, to a second screen of cypress which opened suddenly upon a semicircle of turf; and here, bathed in the moon’s rays that slanted over the cypress-tops, stood a small Doric temple of weather-stained marble, in proportions most delicate, a background for a dance of nymphs, a fit tiring-room for Diana and her train.

Its door—­if ever it had possessed one—­was gone, like every other door in this strange village.  My father led the way up the white steps, halted on the threshold, and, standing aside lest he should block the moonlight, pointed within.

I stood at his shoulder and looked.  The interior was empty, bare of all ornament.  On the wall facing the door, and cut in plain letters a foot high, two words in Greek confronted me—­

PHILOPATRI STEPHANOPOULOI.

“A tomb?” I asked.

“Yes, and a kinsman’s; for the Stephanopouli were of blood the emperors did not disdain to mate with.  In the last rally the Turks had much ado with them as leaders of the Moreote tribes around Maina, and north along Taygetus to Sparta.  Yes, and there were some who revived the Spartan name in those days, maintaining the fight among the mountains until the Turks swarmed across from Crete, overran Maina and closed the struggle.  Yet there was a man, Constantine Stephanopoulos, the grandfather of this Philopater, who would buy nothing at the price of slavery, but, collecting a thousand souls—­ men, women, and children—­escaped by ship from Porto Vitilo and sailed in search of a new home.  At first he had thought of Sicily; but, finding no welcome there, he came (in the spring of 1675, I think) to Genoa, and obtained leave from the Genoese to choose a site in Corsica.”

“And it was here he planted his colony?”