was not an emotional speech, nor delivered with any empressement, but I took it for thanks and made the best of it. Then at last she sat down and rested her head on her hand; her absent reverie allowed me to study her closely, and I was struck by a new beauty which the fantastic boy’s disguise had concealed. Moreover, with the doffing of that, she seemed to have put off her extreme hostility; but perhaps the revelation I had made to her, which showed her the victim of an unscrupulous schemer, had more to do with her softened air. Yet she had borne the story firmly, and a quivering lip was her extreme sign of grief or anger. And her first question was not of herself.
‘Do you mean that they will kill this woman?’ she asked.
‘I’m afraid it’s not unlikely that something will happen to her, unless, of course – ’ I paused, but her quick wit supplied the omission.
‘Unless,’ she said, ‘he lets her live now, because I am out of his hands?’
‘Will you stay out of his hands?’ I asked. ‘I mean, as long as I can keep you out of them.’
She looked round with a troubled expression.
‘How can I stay here?’ she said in a low tone.
‘You will be as safe here now as you were in your uncle’s care,’ I answered.
She acknowledged my promise with a movement of her head; but a moment later she cried:
‘But I am not with you – I am with the people! The island is theirs and mine. It’s not yours. I’ll have no part in giving it to you.’
‘I wasn’t proposing to take pay for my hospitality,’ said I. ‘It’ll be hardly handsome enough for that, I’m afraid. But mightn’t we leave the question for the moment?’ And I described briefly to her our present position.
‘So that,’ I concluded, ‘while I maintain my claim to the island, I am at present more interested in keeping a whole skin on myself and my friends.’
‘If you will not give it up, I can do nothing,’ said she. ‘Though they knew Constantine to be all you say, yet they would follow him and not me if I yielded the island. Indeed they would most likely follow him in any case. For the Neopalians like a man to follow, and they like that man to be a Stefanopoulos; so they would shut their eyes to much, in order that Constantine might marry me and become lord.’
She stated all this in a matter-of-fact way, disclosing no great horror of her countrymen’s moral standard. The straightforward barbarousness of it perhaps appealed to her a little; she loathed the man who would rule on those terms, but had some toleration for the people who set the true dynasty above all else. And she spoke of her proposed marriage as though it were a natural arrangement.
‘I shall have to marry him, I expect, in spite of everything,’ she said.
I pushed my chair back violently. My English respectability was appalled.
‘Marry him?’ I cried. ‘Why, he murdered the old lord!’
‘That has happened before among the Stefanopouloi,’ said Euphrosyne, with a calmness dangerously near to pride.
‘And he proposes to murder his wife,’ I added.
‘Perhaps he will get rid of her without that.’ She paused; then came the anger I had looked for before. ‘Ah, but how dared he swear that he had thought of none but me, and loved me passionately? He shall pay for that!’ Again it was injured pride which rang in her voice, as in her first cry. It did not sound like love; and for that I was glad. The courtship probably had been an affair of state rather than of affection. I did not ask how Constantine was to be made to pay, whether before or after marriage. I was struggling between horror and amusement at my guest’s point of view. But I take leave to have a will of my own, even sometimes in matters which are not exactly my concern; and I said now, with a composure that rivalled Euphrosyne’s:
‘It’s out of the question that you should marry him. I’m going to get him hanged; and, anyhow, it would be atrocious.’
She smiled at that; but then she leant forward and asked:
‘How long have you provisions for?’
‘That’s a good retort,’ I admitted. ‘A few days, that’s all. And we can’t get out to procure any more; and we can’t go shooting, because the wood’s infested with these ruff – I beg pardon – with your countrymen.’
‘Then it seems to me,’ said Euphrosyne, ‘that you and your friends are more likely to be hanged.’
Well, on a dispassionate consideration, it did seem more likely; but she need not have said so. She went on with an equally discouraging good sense:
‘There will be a boat from Rhodes in about a month or six weeks. The officer will come then to take the tribute; perhaps the Governor will come. But till then nobody will visit the island, unless it be a few fishermen from Cyprus.’
‘Fishermen? Where do they land? At the harbour?’
‘No; my people do not like them; but the Governor threatens to send troops if we do not let them land. So they come to a little creek at the opposite end of the island, on the other side of the mountain. Ah, what are you thinking of?’
As Euphrosyne perceived, her words had put a new idea in my mind. If I could reach that creek and find the fishermen and persuade them to help me or to carry my party off, that hanging might happen to the right man after all.
‘You’re thinking you can reach them?’ she cried.
‘You don’t seem sure that you want me to,’ I observed.
‘Oh, how can I tell what I want? If I help you I am betraying the island. If I do not – ’
‘You’ll have a death or two at your door, and you’ll marry the biggest scoundrel in Europe,’ said I.
She hung her head and plucked fretfully at the embroidery on the front of her gown.
‘But anyhow you couldn’t reach them,’ she said. ‘You are close prisoners here.’
That, again, seemed true, so that it put me in a very bad temper. Therefore I rose and, leaving her without much ceremony, strolled into the kitchen. Here I found Watkins dressing the cow’s head, Hogvardt surrounded by knives, and Denny lying on a rug on the floor with a small book which he seemed to be reading. He looked up with a smile that he considered knowing.
‘Well, what does the Captive Queen say?’ he asked with levity.
‘She proposes to marry Constantine,’ I answered, and added quickly to Hogvardt:
‘What’s the game with those knives, Hog?’
‘Well, my lord,’ said Hogvardt, surveying his dozen murderous instruments, ‘I thought there was no harm in putting an edge on them, in case we should find a use for them,’ and he fell to grinding one with great energy.
‘I say, Charley, I wonder what this yarn’s about. I can’t construe half of it. It’s in Greek, and it’s something about Neopalia; and there’s a lot about a Stefanopoulos.’
‘Is there? Let’s see,’ and, taking the book, I sat down to look at it. It was a slim
