“Nay, lord, I have never been out of Therma in my life. I speak but as the people in our street speak.”
“Well, friend Petros, what have you to say?” asked Prince Theophanis. “Why were you chasing the girl?”
“For no pleasure of my own, I assure you, lord,” responded Petros, with excellent indignation. “The ungrateful minx may say what she likes, but I came merely because I was sworn by the holy cross to do it, and I wish I had never promised. All the morning I was busy helping—busy, I mean—” he paused, embarrassed.
“Helping the murderer to escape, I suppose?” said the blue-eyed man, and he brightened up.
“There is no deceiving the Lord Glafko, I know that of old. Well, lord, my unhappy comrade found means to entreat me to seek out this girl and the child, his son, and see that they did not starve, so I tracked them as far as this. Your excellencies can see that compassion alone made me do it. The girl has the tongue of a demon, and the brat is too young to work. I have nowhere to put them, but I came, and you see my reward.”
“The girl will be wanted as a witness, surely?” said the Prince.
Petros shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, as to that, there will be witnesses enough,” he said. “But it will relieve me of her. The police will clap her into prison and keep her safe.”
“My Prince!” cried Danaë frantically, “you will not let them throw me into prison, and rob me of the child entrusted to me with her last breath by my dying sister?”
She stopped abruptly, for the dramatic instinct was leading her into possible pitfalls, but the two Englishmen were consulting apart for a moment, and had not noticed the slip. An Emathian prison, though better than in Roumi days, was not an ideal training-school for a respectable girl.
“The place is overrun with servants already,” said the blue-eyed man.