Demetrius held his men under control with an iron hand.  If ever the pirate ship was filled with sights and sounds unseemly for a lady’s eyes and ears, there were none of them now.  Cornelia was a princess, abjectly waited on by her subjects.  Demetrius’s attention outran all her least desires.  He wearied her with presents of jewellery and costly dresses, though, as he quietly remarked to Agias, the gifts meant no more of sacrifice to him than an obol to a rich spendthrift.  He filled her ears with music all day long; he entertained her with inimitable narrations of his own adventurous voyages and battles.  And only dimly could Cornelia realize that the gems she wore in her hair, her silken dress, nay, almost everything she touched, had come from earlier owners with scant process of law.

Demetrius was no common rover.  He had been a young man of rare culture before misfortune struck him.  He knew his Homer and his Plato as well as how to swing a sword.  “Yet,” as he remarked with half jest, half sigh, “all his philosophy did not make him one whit more an honest man.”

And in his crew of Greeks, Orientals, and Spaniards were many more whom calamity, not innate wickedness, so Cornelia discovered, had driven to a life of violence and rapine.

Demetrius, too, gave no little heed to Artemisia.  That pretty creature had been basking in the sunshine of Agias’s presence ever since coming on shipboard.  It was tacitly understood that Cornelia would care for the welfare and education of Pratinas’s runaway, until she reached a maturity at which Agias could assert his claims.  The young Hellene himself had been not a little anxious lest his cousin cast obstacles in the way of an alliance with a masterless slavegirl; for of late Demetrius had been boasting to his kinsman that their family, before business misfortunes, had been wealthy and honourable among the merchant princes of Alexandria.  But the worthy pirate had not an objection to make; on the contrary, he would sit for hours staring at Artemisia, and when Agias demanded if he was about to turn rival, shook his head and replied, rather brusquely:—­

“I was only thinking that Daphne might be about her age, and look perhaps like her.”

“Then you do not think your little daughter is dead?” asked Agias, sympathetic, yet personally relieved.

“I know nothing, nothing,” replied his cousin, a look of ineffable pain passing over his fine features; “she was a mere infant when I was arrested.  When I broke loose, I had to flee for my life.  When I could set searchers after her, she had vanished.  Poor motherless thing; I imagine she is the slave of some gay lady at Antioch or Ephesus or Rome now.”

“And you do not know who stole her?” asked Agias.