It was a Poros voice, and Mattina clung desperately to the baggy blue breeches of Thanassi Nika, as the old sea-captain bent over her.
“They are! They are!” she cried wildly, “they are hunting me! Save me! Save me! And may all your dead become saints!”
“Why? Why? What is happening here? Are you not Aristoteli Dorri’s daughter? Who is hunting you?”
“The people of the house; the master … the mistress … they have called the men of the police; they will put me in prison!”
“What have you done?” asked the old man sharply.
“I have done nothing. On the soul of my father, I have taken nothing of theirs. But money was lost, and they say I took it. Save me! Take me from here!”
Capetan Thanassi looked up and down the road.
Farther up towards the grocer’s shop two or three men seemed hurrying towards them, but just at that moment a bright light flashed in their eyes, and a street car going to the square came to a stop a few paces away.
The old man lifted Mattina bodily to the step and followed her. The little platform was crowded, and as they stood there tightly wedged between many people, he put his finger on his lips so that Mattina should keep silent. Almost at once in the big lighted square they got down again, and before Mattina had time to think where they might be going, she had been run across the road, down a broad street, through a crowded waiting-room, down an endless flight of stone steps, and was seated once more in a railway carriage, which started almost as soon as Capetan Thanassi threw himself down puffing and panting on the seat beside her.
“Well,” he said, wiping his forehead with a big red handkerchief, “it is not a good thing to be hunted and to run; but to let these Athenians, here, seize hold of Aristoteli Dorri’s daughter, and call her a thief! That could not be! Now, listen to me, little one! If you have done anything crooked, that is between God and your soul, but for me it is sufficient that I knew your father. My caique[28] leaves to-night, now, with the turn of the wind. I shall put you in it and take you back to your own country, and once there,… we shall see what can be done.”