“Not a bit of it. We take her home—the little serpent!—and cherish her in our collective bosom, keeping a sharp look-out as to her possibilities of stinging. In other words, we’ll put her where she can see everything—in the nursery, if I can get Zoe to agree—and take good care that she tells nothing but the truth. The more she lives in our very midst, the easier it will be to supervise her correspondence and her comings and goings.”
“I don’t see making things easy for her, Wylie.”
“Why, what harm can she do, provided she tells the truth? We have nothing to be ashamed of. And surely it’s better to have our spy labelled, than not to know who could be trusted and who not?”
“Wylie, I don’t like it. The child—it occurs to me—what if there is some design against your boy?”
Colonel Wylie’s face showed signs of wavering for a moment, then regained its decisive lines. “Can’t help that, Maurice. If Zoe and I and Linton can’t look after the child, why, we deserve to lose him. At any rate, there’s no plan of substitution, for this baby would be a puny creature beside him. But I’ll warn Zoe, of course, and get her help in keeping a watch on the girl. We must sift this thing to the bottom, for it’s all part and parcel of the disloyalty which I am convinced Romanos is plotting, and which you won’t believe in.”
“And if the papers confirm the girl’s story in the morning?”
“Why shouldn’t he have had the whole thing made up and inserted? No, perhaps that’s a little too much. I will beg the young woman’s pardon if it is so.”
But the papers were entirely on Wylie’s side in the morning, containing not a word of any such tragedy as Danaë had described. On the other hand, the landlord’s wife beckoned him mysteriously aside, and expressed it as her opinion that there was something very queer about that girl who said she was going to Klaustra to wait on the Princesses. She had cried out in the night so loud as to wake the servant-girls who slept with her, and one of them who understood Greek said that her cries were all of knives and blood, and her own share in some dreadful deed. The others had teased her to tell them about it, but she refused to say a word, and they were now sending her to Coventry in consequence. The news was perplexing, for Wylie could scarcely believe the girl to be such a practised plotter as even to support her story by the simulation of nightly terrors. In the faint hope of clearing up the mystery, he tried to take her by surprise.
“Why did you call out in the night that your sister’s death was your fault, Kalliopé?” he asked her.
The questioning of the girls had prepared Danaë for further curiosity, and she answered demurely, “Alas, lord! it is true. I stirred up my sister to scold her husband when he came home drunk, or she would have received him meekly, and he would not have killed her.”