CHAPTER XXXVII DIPLOMACY
Mrs. May crossed rapidly and noiselessly to the door and closed it. Not that there was any need for caution, seeing that the primitive household had been abed long ago. But precaution is never wasted.
There was coffee in the grate kept hot by means of a spirit lamp. Mrs. May poured out a cup and handed it to her guest.
She lay back in her chair watching him with a keen glance and the easy, natural insolence, the cruel cutting superiority of the great over the small.
The man stood, his hands thrust into the folds of his loose sleeves, a picture of patient resignation.
"How did you get here?" the princess asked.
"At the great house in London I asked, O mistress," Ben Heer replied. "I came over, as thou knowest, to do certain work. There was yet another one with me. And when my work was done I came on to tell what thy slave had accomplished."
"You have proofs of what you say?"
"Else I had not been here. For two years we have followed up the track of the victim. It was as if we had searched for one single perch in the whole of a great lake of water. But we never tired and never slept both at the same time. Then at last we got near, and it came to the knowledge of the prey that we were upon him. That was long before the last cold weather that nearly starved us."
The man paused and shivered. The princess nodded with careless sympathy. She had never tried a winter in England, but she could imagine what it was.