“Excuse me?”

The gentleman’s clever eyes scrutinized him keenly.  Then he also spoke in English.

“Perhaps you do not understand?  I asked your name because you are very like a Samavian I know,” he said.

“I am Marco Loristan,” the boy answered him.

The man looked straight into his eyes and smiled.

“That is not the name,” he said.  “I beg your pardon, my boy.”

He was about to go on, and had indeed taken a couple of steps away, when he paused and turned to him again.

“You may tell your father that you are a very well-trained lad.  I wanted to find out for myself.”  And he went on.

Marco felt that his heart beat a little quickly.  This was one of several incidents which had happened during the last three years, and made him feel that he was living among things so mysterious that their very mystery hinted at danger.  But he himself had never before seemed involved in them.  Why should it matter that he was well-behaved?  Then he remembered something.  The man had not said “well-behaved,” he had said “well-trained.”  Well-trained in what way?  He felt his forehead prickle slightly as he thought of the smiling, keen look which set itself so straight upon him.  Had he spoken to him in Samavian for an experiment, to see if he would be startled into forgetting that he had been trained to seem to know only the language of the country he was temporarily living in?  But he had not forgotten.  He had remembered well, and was thankful that he had betrayed nothing.  “Even exiles may be Samavian soldiers.  I am one.  You must be one,” his father had said on that day long ago when he had made him take his oath.  Perhaps remembering his training was being a soldier.  Never had Samavia needed help as she needed it to-day.  Two years before, a rival claimant to the throne had assassinated the then reigning king and his sons, and since then, bloody war and tumult had raged.  The new king was a powerful man, and had a great following of the worst and most self-seeking of the people.  Neighboring countries had interfered for their own welfare’s sake, and the newspapers had been full of stories of savage fighting and atrocities, and of starving peasants.

Marco had late one evening entered their lodgings to find Loristan walking to and fro like a lion in a cage, a paper crushed and torn in his hands, and his eyes blazing.  He had been reading of cruelties wrought upon innocent peasants and women and children.  Lazarus was standing staring at him with huge tears running down his cheeks.  When Marco opened the door, the old soldier strode over to him, turned him about, and led him out of the room.

“Pardon, sir, pardon!” he sobbed.  “No one must see him, not even you.  He suffers so horribly.”

He stood by a chair in Marco’s own small bedroom, where he half pushed, half led him.  He bent his grizzled head, and wept like a beaten child.