“You may think so now, my lady, but you do not know,” said Danaë in a tone which clearly promised Zoe immunity from unpleasant truths so far as it lay with her.
“I can’t make anything of her!” Zoe told her husband afterwards. “She is very pretty, and she seems to have taken a fancy to me, but I am beginning to think you can’t believe a word she says.”
“Her flights of fancy are certainly surprising,” agreed Wylie.
“Yes; as if any mother could be so unnatural! But meanwhile, who is the child, and what are we to do about him? And another thing, Graham: I don’t believe the story of the Frank lady a bit. There is a great likeness between Kalliopé and the child—I have seen it several times. They both remind me of some one else, too, but I can’t think who it is. It is most mysterious.”
“Well, the likeness—if it is not a mere imagination of yours—makes it probable that the tale of the Frank lady is only invented to add to the child’s importance. Otherwise——”
“You think we ought to put the whole thing into the hands of the Therma police?”
“Not while she tells a different story every day. I still think that it’s to the secret police we owe her presence here at all. Therefore I should say wait a little, and see if we can arrive at any residuum of truth by the time her invention is exhausted.”
“But it’s so dreadful to feel that everything one asks her leads her to tell fresh falsehoods!” lamented Zoe. “She doesn’t seem to have an idea that it’s wrong.”
This was quite true. That falsehood should be a sin—as bad as eating meat on a fast-day, or neglecting to salute an icon—was absolutely incomprehensible to Danaë. Moreover, the fact that her new acquaintances so regarded it did not in the least raise them in her estimation. She thought of them, not as occupying a pinnacle of lofty if austere morality, but as fools, and the impression was deepened by a conversation she held with Linton, who laboured faithfully to awaken her to a sense of her lamentable moral condition. They had been watching from the verandah the stream of claimants and suppliants who sought the presence of Prince Theophanis every morning, and Danaë remarked on this accessibility. So far as she could see, his guards let them enter impartially in the order of their coming, and no one obtained first place by means of a bribe.
“Well, I should think not!” cried Linton, in vigorous if colloquial Greek. “Colonel Wylie would have something to say to any man who took a bribe.”