The man with the beard was looking very angry.  His eyes were savage and his dark skin reddened.  Marco thought that he looked at him as if he hated him, and was made fierce by the mere sight of him, for some mysterious reason.

“Two days before you left Moscow,” he said, “three men came to see your father.  They looked like peasants.  They talked to him for more than an hour.  They brought with them a roll of parchment.  Is that not true?”

“I know nothing,” said Marco.

“Before you went to Moscow, you were in Budapest.  You went there from Vienna.  You were there for three months, and your father saw many people.  Some of them came in the middle of the night.”

“I know nothing,” said Marco.

“You have spent your life in traveling from one country to another,” persisted the man.  “You know the European languages as if you were a courier, or the portier in a Viennese hotel.  Do you not?”

Marco did not answer.

The Lovely Person began to speak to the man rapidly in Russian.

“A spy and an adventurer Stefan Loristan has always been and always will be,” she said.  “We know what he is.  The police in every capital in Europe know him as a sharper and a vagabond, as well as a spy.  And yet, with all his cleverness, he does not seem to have money.  What did he do with the bribe the Maranovitch gave him for betraying what he knew of the old fortress?  The boy doesn’t even suspect him.  Perhaps it’s true that he knows nothing.  Or perhaps it is true that he has been so ill-treated and flogged from his babyhood that he dare not speak.  There is a cowed look in his eyes in spite of his childish swagger.  He’s been both starved and beaten.”

The outburst was well done.  She did not look at Marco as she poured forth her words.  She spoke with the abruptness and impetuosity of a person whose feelings had got the better of her.  If Marco was sensitive about his father, she felt sure that his youth would make his face reveal something if his tongue did not—­if he understood Russian, which was one of the things it would be useful to find out, because it was a fact which would verify many other things.

Marco’s face disappointed her.  No change took place in it, and the blood did not rise to the surface of his skin.  He listened with an uninterested air, blank and cold and polite.  Let them say what they chose.

The man twisted his pointed beard and shrugged his shoulders.

“We have a good little wine-cellar downstairs,” he said.  “You are going down into it, and you will probably stay there for some time if you do not make up your mind to answer my questions.  You think that nothing can happen to you in a house in a London street where policemen walk up and down.  But you are mistaken.  If you yelled now, even if any one chanced to hear you, they would only think you were a lad getting a thrashing he deserved.  You can yell as much as you like in the black little wine-cellar, and no one will hear at all.  We only took this house for three months, and we shall leave it to-night without mentioning the fact to any one.  If we choose to leave you in the wine-cellar, you will wait there until somebody begins to notice that no one goes in and out, and chances to mention it to the landlord—­which few people would take the trouble to do.  Did you come here from Moscow?”