It was "he" the master—Araktseieff himself. Daimona was more furious than ever. Rushing down the entrance steps into the courtyard beneath, she stood, gasping for breath, before the new-comer.
"Why did you hound back my people? They were pursuing a thief who had robbed me! He brought me false stones and stole the real ones. I will have him brought back—the thief."
But the master of the house paid no attention to her. When he was abusing some one, whoever it might be, he had no thought for anything else. His face was crimson as he alighted from his carriage, holding in one hand a stout knotted stick, in the other a flask by its strap.
Daimona thought him informed of the whole affair, so, seizing him by the collar of his cloak, she continued:
"It was Zsabakoff—do you hear?—Zsabakoff! You surely have not given him the flasks yet?"
"Flasks?" retorted Araktseieff, amazed. "I've only got this one; and I can't offer you anything from it, for it's empty."
"Oh, the devil take you! The three hundred thousand flasks, I mean, that the army are to have in the Turkish War."
And now he was more astonished than ever.
"Three hundred thousand flasks? War? Give yourself time to breathe. What have you been drinking to-day?"
The woman cursed and raved. In a medley of words she mixed up weeks and months, copecks and flasks, diamonds worth two thousand rubles, Missolonghi and Omer Brione Pasha, and stormed on so long that at length her lord and master, in a fury, flinging his empty flask at her, pushed her aside; whereupon Daimona, to recover her wounded feelings, fell upon the jeweller, and struck his head with the corpus delicti, the paste tiara. Why had he said that a yellow diamond was not as good as a white one? It was all his fault that the thief had stolen the real one and made off with it.