"But I am not with you—I am with the people! The island is theirs and mine. It is not yours. I will have no part in giving it to you."
"I wasn't proposing to take pay for my hospitality," said I. "It'll be hardly handsome enough for that, I'm afraid. But mightn't we leave that question for the moment?" And I described briefly to her our present position.
"So that," I concluded, "while I maintain my claim to the island, I am at present more interested in keeping a whole skin on myself and my friends."
"If you will not give it up, I can do nothing," said she. "Though they knew Constantine to be all you say, yet they would follow him and not me if I yielded the island. Indeed, they would most likely follow him in any case. For the Neopalians like a man to follow, and they like that man to be a Stefanopoulos; so they would shut their eyes to much, in order that Constantine might marry me and become lord."
She stated all this in a matter-of-fact way, disclosing no great horror of her countrymen's moral standard. The straightforward barbarousness of it perhaps appealed to her a little; she loathed the man who would rule on those terms, but had some toleration for the people who set the true dynasty above all else. And she spoke of her proposed marriage as though it were a natural arrangement.
"I shall have to marry him, I expect, in spite of everything," she said.
I pushed my chair back violently. My English respectability was appalled.
"Marry him?" I cried. "Why, he murdered the old lord!"
"That has happened before among the Stefanopouloi," said Euphrosyne, with a calmness dangerously near to pride.
"And he proposes to murder his wife," I added.