“Well?” demanded Zoe, with keen curiosity.
“I should have given him over to the Emathians and told them to treat him as they thought right. And—a good many of them have been brigands, you know.”
“Eirene, you must be mad! You make my blood run cold.”
“I made up my mind to do it. The Powers must learn that we are in earnest. But it was not necessary.”
“I should think not!” Zoe spoke with good-humoured tolerance. “Don’t try to be mediæval another time, Eirene; you haven’t the physique for it. Your amiable predecessor, the Empress Isidora, would have handed over an innocent man to torture without a qualm, no doubt, but we poor moderns don’t possess her nerves. Now I am going to take Con for a walk and leave you perfectly quiet. But do, for goodness’ sake, put these ideas out of your head.”
Eirene struggled up from her pillow. “I won’t have you take Constantine to the camp without me!” she cried. “He will be playing with the children and getting fever. Oh!” and she lay down again with a moan of pain.
“I am not going near the camp,” said Zoe patiently, covering her up. “We are going to look for orchises on the cliffs. One of the fishermen’s children at Ephestilo gave me a great bunch the other day, which she said grew just beyond there, and Con is longing to find them.”
“You’ll let him fall over,” protested Eirene faintly, “or the Roumis will land——”
“Ephestilo is the last place they will choose if they do, for Colonel Wylie and the Emathians are practising coast defence there this very morning. And the place for the orchises is in the next bay, where no one could land if they tried. And I shan’t let him fall over the cliff, Eirene. You know he’s always good with me,—not that he gets much chance of showing it,—and of course we won’t even go near any dangerous places.”
Eirene, vanquished, turned her face to the wall with another groan, and Zoe pulled the makeshift curtain they had arranged over the doorless doorway so as to deaden the light, and went out to find her little nephew, who was waiting for her in the gallery. He was a quiet, serious child, reproducing, to her secret joy, in bodily and mental characteristics the sobered Maurice of these later years, with hardly a trace of Eirene. A cause of contention from his very birth, he had developed a longing for peace and quietness strange in a child, and was always on the alert to escape from his mother’s exacting devotion to follow his father about, content to remain unnoticed if he might hold his hand. Eirene resented bitterly what she chose to consider this perverseness, and Maurice was constrained to discourage as much as possible his little son’s desire for his society. “Not to-day, old man,” he had said this same morning. “Poor mamma is ill, and will want Con.”