The action needed no explaining, for the young usurper had himself ordered that his father should be guarded by the dumb Ethiopians after the alarm of the previous night. The Emperor looked down at the girl's beautiful white face, but he took the letter from the soldier's steel cap and spread it out, and read it quickly, and then passed it to the minister at his elbow, who read it too.
He looked at Zoë again, but in his eyes her beauty was all gone at once. She was one of those monsters that were always conspiring against him, against his throne and his life; she was one of those thousands whom he saw nightly in his dreams of fear, stealing upon him when he was alone and helpless, to blind him and kill him, and to bear his crowned father to the throne high on their shoulders. Zoë might have been as lovely as Aphrodite herself, just wafted from the foam of the sea by the breath of spring; to Andronicus she would have been but one of the countless evil beings who for ever plotted his destruction.
But this one was in his power. He sat on his horse and looked down at her, and his loose lips smiled; yet her face was still and proud, and in her poor blue cotton slave's dress she faced him like a young goddess.
'Who sent you with this?' he asked in the deep silence, and every man there listened for her answer.
'Since you have read it, you know,' she answered, and there was no tremor in her voice.
'Take care! Where is this Venetian, this Zeno?'
'I do not know.'
'Take care, again! I ask, where is he?'
Zoë was silent for a moment, and though she did not take her eyes from the young Emperor's face she listened intently for a distant sound that did not come.
'I do not know where he is,' she said at last, 'but I think you will see him before long, for he is coming here.'