“That is what you are,” said the Professor, with a bow.
“Zoe Theophanes, de stirpe imperatorum,” she murmured under her breath.
“Don’t be ecstatic, Zoe,” said Maurice sharply. “What difference can it make, our knowing this? It’s quite clear that our grandfather knew it, and it made no difference to him.”
“Yes, he knew it,” agreed Professor Panagiotis, glancing from the pedigree on the table to the decorations of the room, in which the family crest, a golden eagle with its feet resting on two gates, was unobtrusively repeated again and again. Zoe had been her grandfather’s assistant in designing the frieze and the carvings of the high mantelshelf, little guessing the meaning attaching to them in the old man’s mind, or that the two gates were those of Rome and of Czarigrad.
“He spent his life quietly here, doing his duty to his tenants,” persisted Maurice, as though combating something that had been said.
“He did,” responded the Professor; “but when he reached manhood, and learned for the first time of his lofty ancestry, the present kingdom of Morea had long been established under a German prince. In the crisis of 1862, his countrymen, ignorant of his existence, made no attempt to summon him to their head, and a constitutional reticence—resembling, shall I say, that of his grandson?—withheld him from putting himself forward, so that the crown passed without opposition to the present Cimbrian ruler.”
“I presume you are not suggesting that I should deprive King William of Morea of his throne?” asked Maurice, with an angry laugh.
“No,” said the Professor emphatically. “The Morean kingdom, grievously as it has disappointed the hopes fixed upon it, may be disregarded until the day comes for it to take its place among the federal States of the revived Empire. It is Unredeemed Greece which claims your attention—the only portion of Europe still groaning under the Roumi yoke.”
“I see; you are an Emathian agitator,” was the chilling answer.
“I am and I am not,” replied the Professor. “I am an Emathian Greek, cherishing warm hopes of the deliverance of my country; but I have nothing in common with those bands of miscreants which, financed and directed by interested committees in Thracia and Dardania, have brought the name of Emathia into discredit throughout Europe by their wholesale assassinations. I hold them in the utmost detestation. Even the Roumis are less to be feared.”