ith a movement of her head; but a moment
later she cried:

"But I am not with you--I am with the people! The island is theirs and
mine. It is not yours. I will have no part in giving it to you."

"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 comp