"Sit down!" said Raoul sharply, "or it will be a living leg next time; and the time after that a wooden head!" He sat watching Eddin getting to his feet with a shame-faced laugh:
"No use," said Raoul in a friendly voice, "it can't be done, Colonel."
"I notice it can't," remarked Eddin, laughing. "Well sir, you have entertained us very pleasantly with your historical inappropos. Is there to be a denouément perhaps?"
"Did you expect one?"
Eddin shrugged: "A firing-squad, possibly. But of course I don't insist."
Raoul shook his curly head: "No, Colonel Eddin; no firing-squad. No Turkish atrocities, no Bulgarian murders, no boche bestialities." He turned contemptuously on Constantine:
"You laid plans in Berne to entrap the leaders of the Ægean League. You forged instructions sent to me by Monsieur Venizelos. You attempted to foment an uprising in Naxos because you foresaw the trouble it would bring between two of the Allied powers—between Italy and Greece!
"Also you conceived and encouraged a plot to attempt the capture of yourself and your wife because you believed that Greece, although now rid of you, would resent such an attempt; and that chivalrous America would be shocked at the kidnaping of a woman—even such a notorious one as your Hohenzollern wife."
He eyed him for a moment: "You are the cheapest back-stairs scullion who ever grafted, Tino," he said. "But remember this little couplet the next time you go gaily grafting:
"'Grecian gift and Spanish fig
Help the fool his grave to dig!'"