An affirmative was trembling upon Danaë’s lips, but Zoe, out of pure sympathy and nervousness, threw herself into the breach, remembering the girl’s earlier exploits.
“Think, Kalliopé, and tell us exactly how it was. Not just when they had a quarrel now and then, perhaps, but as it was generally. To us,” with a gallant attempt to bring the matter home to her handmaid’s mind, “what you have said is horrible, and makes us think the Lord Romanos one of the worst of men.”
“Does it, lady?” in intense astonishment. “I said it for his glory. I could not bear any one to know how he was in thrall to her. But she bewitched him, one knows that.”
“This seems a new view of affairs,” observed Wylie. “He was not cruel to her, then?”
“Cruel, lord? If you had seen them as I so often saw them, he so mild and anxious to please her, and she frowning and ill-tempered! But that is always the way with witches. Only the unfortunate who is bewitched can see any beauty in them, but he pines away for love.”
Danaë had carried the inquiry into such new regions that Maurice returned with difficulty to a previous question. “The Princess was writing a letter on the morning she was murdered, you say, Kalliopé; but it can’t be found. Have you any idea what became of it?”
“I have it in my room, lord—hidden in my mattress.” Again she had the pleasing consciousness of having caused a sensation.
“Go and fetch it at once,” said Maurice, in a tone which sent her flying. Once in her own room, the letter was easily found, but as she pulled it out of its hiding-place, her fingers came in contact with one of the golden plaques of the Girdle of Isidora. A moment’s pause, and she took it out also, fastening it round her waist under her apron, as she had done before. Things seemed so strange to-day that it might possibly be needed. Then, parrying Linton’s questions, she went sedately back to the Prince’s house, and handed the letter to Maurice.
“I kept it, lord, because I thought my little lord might grow up and none know who he was, nor believe me when I told them. But if I said, ‘Here is writing in the hand of his mother,’ they could doubt no more.”
The proof seemed less obvious to her hearers than to herself, but Maurice took the paper gravely. “This is addressed to you, Cavaliere,” he said, handing it to him. Seizing it eagerly, the Cavaliere read it through, arriving at the abrupt ending with obvious disappointment.