She looked at him for a moment as though gauging the possibilities of a struggle, and he bore the scrutiny with a display of white teeth and a pleasing consciousness of the armoury of weapons in his belt. Then she turned without a word, and marched in her stateliest manner across the courtyard. Once back in her own room, she took off the good clothes which she had bought out of her wages during her sojourn at Klaustra and her coin-decorated cap, and put on the worn and dirty garments in which she had come from Therma. Unfastening her hair, she deliberately rearranged it in one long thick plait and one ridiculously short one, and twisted a handkerchief round her head. Then she walked down the stairs again and into the kitchen, and presented herself before the astonished eyes of Artemisia and her underlings.
“I am come to work here,” she said.
Amazement checked Artemisia’s utterance for a moment, but she made a gallant attempt to rise to the occasion. “Well, this is an honour, and an unexpected one!” she remarked slowly. “The gracious Lady Zoe did not tell me she was going to give me more help, or I should have asked her to send anyone rather than a child-stealer from the islands. Oh, don’t eat me, please, Lady Kalliopé! I am not a baby, you know.” A snigger from the underlings. “I suppose the Lady Zoe thought there were no children to steal down here. And you have come to work, have you? How sweetly kind of you, lady mine! But they don’t do any work in the islands, do they—except robbing guests and murdering them?”
“Let the islands alone,” said Danaë gruffly. “If you were a guest there, you would be safe even after saying that.”
“Until I had crossed the threshold, I suppose? Once I was outside I might expect a knife in my back. What are you girls laughing at?” with a change of subject disconcerting to the group of gigglers. “Don’t you see that the Lady Kalliopé has come to show us all how to work? Give her that bowl of onions, Sonya, and let us see how they peel them in the islands.”
After that, Danaë would have suffered tortures rather than resign the bowl of onions to anyone else. The tears ran down her cheeks, but she persisted in the task, and when it was over received an ironical compliment from Artemisia, and was set to clean saucepans. While this was being done, Linton appeared at the kitchen door, with rather a scared face.
“So that’s where you’ve got to, you naughty girl, giving me such a turn, thinking you’d made away with yourself, as you well might!” she cried, catching sight of Danaë. “What’s taken you down here I don’t know, but you come straight away upstairs again. My Lady says you can sit in your own room and have your meals there, and I’m to find you some needlework.”
Danaë raised her black eyes, sombre enough now, and looked straight at her. “I stay here,” she said.
“Oh, very well!” cried Linton, with suspicious readiness, “I’m sure I’ve got no objection. If Kalliopé prefers your company to mine, Artemisia, I hope you’re more flattered than I should be. You keep an eye on her, that’s all. Don’t let her give you the slip.”
“Not I, my most beloved Sofia,” responded Artemisia. “She’ll get a crack on the head with a rolling-pin if she tries it.”