Not daring to face the question boldly, he beat about the bush, and tried to pass adroitly from the subject of dinner to that of marriage.

“Florou,” he said, “your meat is overdone.”

The old woman made no reply, but looked up at the sun as if to suggest that the fault lay not with her, but with her master’s tardiness.

He paid no attention to her mute reproach.

“In fact,” he went on, “the dinner isn’t fit to eat to-day.”

“You’ve eaten it, though.”

Florou was in the habit of resorting to this argument as unanswerable.  Usually her master laughed and said that he had eaten his dinner because he was hungry, and not because it was good.  To-day, however, her phrase irritated him, less on account of the words themselves, than from an inward consciousness that this day of all others he had no right to complain of her culinary art.

In his vexation he forgot how he had planned to lead up to the subject of his marriage, and had to finish his dinner in silence; but while Florou was carrying the dishes away, he thought of a new pretext for coming back to the absorbing topic.  He noticed for the first time a hole in the tablecloth that had been there a long time.

“See there!” said he, putting his finger through it.  “My house needs a mistress,—­there’s no other remedy for such a state of things.  I must have a wife!”

Florou shrugged her shoulders as though she thought her master had lost his wits.

“Do you understand me?  I must get married.”

The old woman smiled.

“What are you laughing at?  I have quite made up my mind to marry.”

Florou stared.

“I’m going to get married, I tell you!”

“And who’ll have you?”

“Who will have me!” he cried, fairly choking with rage.

Almost beside himself at the old woman’s effrontery, he wanted to crush her with angry eloquence; but her stolidity baffled him, and he went up to his room without a word.  When he was alone, his anger soon cooled; but he found himself repeating those cruel words, and as he said them over, he began to fear that Florou was not so far wrong.

He recalled his friend’s first disavowal of any thought of him as a suitor, and the father’s strange hesitation.  And then, why didn’t Liakos come; what was keeping him so long?  If his mission was successful, he would have brought the news at once.  The question was very simple, the answer “yes” or “no”; it surely must be “no,” and the judge was keeping back the evil tidings.

How silly he had been to expose himself to a rebuff on the impulse of the moment—­what perfect folly!  What business had he to get into such a scrape?  But no, he had only done his duty; he had proved to his preserver the sincerity of his friendship and the depth of his gratitude.  But why didn’t Liakos come?  Why didn’t he hurry back and end this suspense?

The unhappy man looked at his watch again and again, and was astonished each time at the slowness of the hands; they seemed hardly to move at all.  He sat down, then jumped up again and looked out of the window,—­no Liakos!  He tried to read, but could not keep his thoughts from straying, and shut the book petulantly.  He was in a perfect fever.