'Wiser,' he added, 'she would identify herself with it.'
He began to banter horribly,—
'Ah, child, Eve, child made for love, daily bless your cousinship! Bless its contemptuous security. Smile over the confabulations of Kato and your cousin. Smile to think that he, she, and the Islands are bound in an indissoluble triology. If there be jealousy to suffer, rejoice in that it falls, not to your share, but to mine, who am old and sufficiently philosophical. Age and experience harden, you know. Else, I could not see Anastasia Kato pass to another with so negligible a pang. Yet the imagination makes its own trouble. A jealous imagination.... Very vivid. Pictures of Anastasia Kato in your cousin's arms—ah, crude, crude, I know, but the crudity of the jealous imagination is unequalled. Not a detail escapes. That is why I say, bless your cousinship and its security.' He glanced up and met her tortured eyes. 'As I bless my philosophy of the inevitable,' he finished softly, caressing her hand which he had retained all the while.
No effort at 'Impossible!' escaped her; almost from the first she had blindly adopted his insinuations. She even felt a perverse gratitude towards him, and a certain fellowship. They were allies. Her mind was now set solely upon one object. That self-destruction might be involved did not occur to her, nor would she have been deterred thereby. Like Samson, she had her hands upon the columns....
'Madame Kato lives in this house?' asked Malteios, as one who has been following a train of thought.
She shook her head, and he noticed that her eyes were turned slightly inwards, as with the effort of an immense concentration.
'You have power,' he said with admiration.
Bending towards her, he began to speak in a very low, rapid voice; she sat listening to him, by no word betraying her passionate attention, nodding only from time to time, and keeping her hands very still, linked in her lap. Only once she spoke, to ask a question, 'He would leave Herakleion?' and Malteios replied, 'Inevitably; the question of the Islands would be for ever closed for him;' then she said, producing the words from afar off, 'He would be free,' and Malteios, working in the dark, following only one of the two processes of her thought, reverted to Kato; his skill could have been greater in playing upon the instrument, but even so it sufficed, so taut was the stringing of the cords. When he had finished speaking, she asked him another question, 'He could never trace the thing to me?' and he reassured her with a laugh so natural and contemptuous that she, in her ingenuity, was convinced. All the while she had kept her eyes fastened on his face, on his rosy lips moving amongst his beard, that she might lose no detail of his meaning or his instructions, and at one moment he had thought, 'There is something terrible in this child,' but immediately he had crushed the qualm, thinking, 'By this recovery, if indeed it is to be, I am a made man,' and thanking the fate that had cast this unforeseen chance across his path. Finally she heard his voice change from its earnest undertone to its customary platitudinous flattery, and turning round she saw that Julian had come into the room, his eyes already bent with brooding scorn upon the emissary.