“You don’t say!” said Brentin, looking scared. “What the plague is he doing in Athens? We shall have all our trouble over again.” And then, thinking he was not very polite, he added, “And how are you? All right?”
“No thanks to you!” grunted Teddy, at which the unfeeling Brentin began to chuckle.
“Somebody’s scratched your face well for you,” he laughed. “Looks like marriage lines!”
We lay very still, hoping against hope Thompson wouldn’t think the Erechtheum worth a visit; but the fact was he had looked in the carriages outside and questioned the driver, and, from the cloaks and what the man had said, made up his mind it was our party. So, after peeping in at the Parthenon, he came straight across; we heard his footsteps, the divisional tread, closer and closer. Then he tumbled over a column, swore, and the next moment was inside surveying us, huddled together like a covey of partridges, with an expression I don’t find it at all easy to describe—it was such a mixture of everything.
Poor creature, he had evidently suffered! His face was drawn, his beard unshaved, and his forlorn eyes looked defiantly out from under a heavily lined brow. His mouth was tight and grim, and yet about the compressed lips there was an air of satisfaction, almost of unholy mirth. When he saw us, ran his glance over us and noted we were all there, netted for the fowler, flame leaped to his sombre eyes. There was dead silence while he stepped majestically, solemnly forward, threw his plaid shawl on a column, and unbuttoned his dusty frock-coat.
“And how are you?” said Brentin, coolly. “Come to see over the Acropolis?”
Thompson glared at him, and without replying sat down on his shawl.
“How did you get here? Had a good voyage? Sakes alive, man, what a hole in your boot!”
“Poor man!” whispered Lucy, “how fearfully tired and ill he looks.”
At so unexpected an expression of sympathy, the detective’s expression suddenly changed. Poor wretch, he was worn out, hungry, and depressed; humiliated and miserable, I suppose, at being so egregiously outwitted; for his lip trembled, and, putting his face in his dog-skin hands, he actually began to cry. I never felt so ashamed of myself, so sorry for a man, in my life.