“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.

“Perhaps he will get rid of her without that.”  She paused; then came the anger I had looked for before.  “Ah, but how dared he swear that he had thought of no one but me and loved me passionately?  He shall pay for that.”  Again it was injured pride that rang in her voice, as in her first cry.  It did not sound like love, and for that I was glad.  The courtship had probably been an affair of state rather than affection.  I did not ask how Constantine was to be made to pay, whether before or after marriage.  I was struggling between horror and amusement at my guest’s point of view.  But I take leave to have a will of my own, even sometimes in matters that are not exactly my concern, and I said now, with a composure that rivalled Euphrosyne’s:  “It is out of the question that you should marry him.  I’m going to get him hanged, and, anyhow, it would be atrocious.”

She smiled at that, but then she leant forward and asked: 

“How long have you provisions for?”

“That’s a good retort,” I admitted.  “A few days; that’s all.  And we can’t get out to procure any more; and we can’t go shooting, because the wood’s infested with these ruff—­I beg pardon—­with your countrymen.”

“Then it seems to me,” said Euphrosyne, “that you and your friends are more likely to be hanged.”

Well, on a dispassionate consideration, it did seem more likely; but she need not have said so.  And she went on with an equally discouraging good sense: