"Colonel Kabilovitsch!" cried he, doffing his turban as if it had been a Christian cap.[48] "Your men are playful fellows, as frolicksome as a cat with a mole."
"But why are you here, my boy? and why this disguise?" interrupted Kabilovitsch.
The explanation was given in a few words;—on the one side the story of the slaughter at the village, and the adventures of Morsinia and Constantine; on the other of how the news of the Turkish raid reached the camp at Sfetigrade about noon, and the rescuing party had started at once under Kabilovitsch's command, and ridden at breakneck speed during the entire night in the hope of meeting the Turks before they emerged from the narrow valley.
Learning now that they were too late for this, Kabilovitsch halted his command, and with Constantine sought the place where Morsinia was in waiting. When the old man heard that the first assailants of the hamlet had been Albanians in disguise his rage was furious; and through his incautious words Morsinia learned more of her relation to the voivode Amesa than her reputed father had ever told her; for the mystery of her family had never been fully explained in her hearing. It had heretofore been deemed best that the girl should not be made the custodian of her own secret, lest her childish prattle might reveal it to others. Yet she had guessed the greater part of the problem of her identity. But Kabilovitsch was now led by the new curiosity which his inadvertent expressions had awakened in her, as well as by the remarkably discreet and cautious judgment she had displayed, to tell her the entire story of her own life. This was not, however, until orders had been passed through the troop for rest, and the fires hastily kindled along the roadside had prepared their refreshing breakfasts.
Removed from the hearing of all others, Kabilovitsch rehearsed to Morsinia and Constantine what the reader already knows of her extraction and early residence in Albania. He advised her to extreme caution against the slightest reference to herself as the young Mara de Streeses, and that she should insist upon her identity as the daughter of the Servian peasant Milosch and the sister of Constantine.
Morsinia buried her fair face in the gray beard of the old man, as years ago she had done when they sat upon the door-stone of their Balkan home, and sobbed as if his words had orphaned her. In a few moments she looked up into his fine but wrinkled face, and drawing it down to hers, kissed him as she used to do, and said lovingly,
"I must believe your words; but my heart holds you as my father: for father you have been to me, and child I shall be to you so long as God gives us to one another."
The old man pressed her temples between his rough hands, and looked long into her deep blue eyes, as he said slowly,
"Ay, father and mother both was I to thee, my child, from that terrible night, sixteen years ago. My rough arms have often cradled thee. But now you have a nobler and stronger protector in our country's father, the great Castriot. To him you must go; for it is no longer safe in these lonely valleys. Under his strong arm and all-watchful eye you will be amply protected. There are nameless enemies of the old house of De Streeses whom we must avoid as vigilantly as we avoid the Turks."
It was determined that Constantine should make a detour with her, and approach Sfetigrade from the south, giving out that they were fugitives from the lower country, which the enemy had also been raiding.