Danaë was horrified. “But no one knows about it, lord—especially no man.”
“Not even the lad who hides in a doorway to get speech with one particular girl? If not, how do I know?”
The memory of certain experiences of Angeliké’s made Danaë hesitate to repeat her negative. She hung her head miserably, and the Prince laughed.
“Aha, little one! There was a certain pretty Praxinoë twenty years ago——” The Lady withdrew herself slightly, with a little motion of disgust, and his laugh became embarrassed. “Well, she drove me from Strio and cost me my father’s favour, so perhaps the less said about her the better. Go back to the old women, little one, but grow not into a Fate or a Grey Sister like them, and take good care of the little lord. Sing him the island songs, that he may grow up with the sound of the sea in his ears.”
“Your foot is on my head, lord,” responded Danaë, in a choking voice, as she turned away. Her whole heart went out to this handsome, tired-looking brother of hers, who had loved the stones of Strio throughout twenty years of exile. How gladly would she have fought and died to win him his principality, and how willingly now would she submit to contumely and harshness to save him from the clutches of the beautiful, cold-hearted, discontented woman at his side, who was living on his very life-blood!
“That girl won’t be bad-looking, when you have brushed her up a little, Olimpia,” said the Prince, in French again, when she was gone. The same little shudder of repulsion as before answered him, and he turned round quickly. “Alas, my beautiful one! you should not have married Apolis the poet if you did not expect him to discern beauty wherever it was to be found.”
“You are right. I should never have married Apolis the poet—nor Romanos the Prince either,” she answered, in a strangled voice. “Nor would I have done it if I had dreamt how it was to turn out.”
“I thought, we had agreed it was useless to enter upon this subject again for the present,” said the Prince, with polite weariness.
She fired up at once. “Agreed? I never agreed. You said it was useless, but how can it do any good to leave things as they are? The longer you delay to acknowledge me publicly as your wife, the more difficult it will be. Even now, how will you account for the two years that I have lived concealed here?”
“It is more than difficult. It is impossible,” he said through his teeth.