“No, I am to meet them when I land. But have they told you nothing of their plans?”
“Nothing. I was lounging about on the Riviera, desperately dull, when your brother’s letter reached me. He merely said that things were moving in Emathia, and reminded me of my old promise to back him up. It was only a joke at the time, but as I am forbidden the tropics, and can’t face an English spring, it seemed good enough now, so here I am.”
His glance forbade her to pity him, and Zoe looked hastily away. “Then you have a great deal to learn,” she said, making room for him beside her. “Lord Armitage, if you will bring that deck-chair closer, we can talk without being overheard.”
“Lord Armitage?” asked Wylie.
“Oh, you didn’t know?” groaned the bearer of the title. “Second cousin three times removed dies to bother me, and leaves me the family honours—me, if you please. I have to chuck my work, and buy pictures instead of making them, and if I go into a studio, there’s no hope of getting the old chaff, for the fellows hang on my words with bated breath, because I’m a patron of art! So that’s why I’m here.”
“You will be the Byron of Emathian independence,” said Zoe encouragingly. “Think of the halo of respectability that the presence of an English nobleman and his yacht will throw over our proceedings!”
Something in Armitage’s face warned Wylie that aspirations less abstract than a yearning for Emathian independence had drawn him into the adventure, and he smiled grimly to himself. Zoe looked a little hurt.
“You are laughing at our having to begin again from the very beginning,” she said. “Seven years does seem a long time to waste, I suppose—especially as when we saw you last we were full of golden anticipations, thinking that in a few months Maurice and Eirene would at any rate be on their way to a throne. The blow fell the very same day, you know.”
“You think your brother should have decided differently?”
“Never for one moment. But I am not sure that Eirene doesn’t—sometimes. It was really very galling to see Professor Panagiotis fling himself heart and soul into the cause of the rival claimant, the instant Maurice had refused his terms.”