“Does it make no difference with your sympathies,” he asked with some earnestness, “whether a man is in the right or in the wrong? Would you have had no sympathy for the Greeks at Marathon?”
She raised her eyebrows, and with a faint shrug replied, “I am sure I don’t know. Was that an important battle?”
“Very.”
“In South Africa?”
Pats thought, at first, this question was in jest. She looked him serenely in the face, however, 27and he saw nothing in her eyes but the expectation of a serious answer to a simple question. Before he was ready with a reply, she inquired:
“Were you at that battle?”
He was so bewildered by this question, and from such a woman, that for a moment he could not respond. Father Burke, however, in his calm, paternal voice, gave the required facts.
“The battle of Marathon was fought about twenty miles from Athens between the Greeks and invading Persians nearly five hundred years before Christ.”
“Ah, yes, to be sure!” she murmured, indifferently, her eyes looking over the sea.
Pats, who was sitting in front of his two companions, regarded her in surprise. As she finished speaking, he turned away his head, but still watching her from the corners of his eyes. Her own glance, with an amused expression, went at once to his face, as he anticipated. He laughed aloud in a frank, boyish way as their eyes met. “I knew you had some sinister motive in that speech. You almost fooled me.”