“But it would be as bad for me.”
“I don’t know—perhaps not.” Eirene looked at her in wonder. “At any rate, you would have only yourself to blame.”
“Here is Maurice,” said Eirene. “Now remember.”
Very unwillingly Zoe obeyed her instructions, and succeeded in catching Maurice by himself the next morning.
“Eirene is particularly anxious that I should tell you something,” she said. “She is Eirene Féofan, the girl the Professor told us about, our very distant cousin, and the next heir after you and me.”
Maurice sat in stupefied silence for a moment. “Did you ever?” he remarked slowly at last. “To think that we have had her with us all this time without finding it out!”
“I found it out long ago,” said Zoe calmly.
“No, really? How?”
“Why, of course, I had been trying to place her ever since we first met. It was clear she came from Scythia, but I didn’t think she could belong to the Imperial family, for how could she have got away, and why should she be wandering about on a solitary mission? Then, one evening, in the cave, we were talking, do you remember? and it came out that she knew the Professor, and that she sympathised with the Greeks against the Slavs, and that she was expecting a kingdom in her own right. She simply couldn’t be any one but Eirene Féofan.”
“But I heard it all, and never twigged.”