And now, while Mr. Spokesly stood at his window gently rubbing his chin and looking down into the dew-drenched garden, Evanthia was lying in another room, smoking a cigarette and meditating. She had a very astute and clearly defined plan in her mind, and she lay thinking how it could be carried out. Unhampered by so many of our modern educational distractions and complexes, her mental processes would have exacted the admiration of the London School of Mnemonics. The apparent impossibility of leaving Saloniki and reaching Constantinople meant nothing at all to her. It had always been an almost impossible task to go anywhere if one were a woman. Women, in her experience, were like expensive automobiles. They were always owned by somebody, who drove them about and sometimes ill-treated them and even rode them to destruction, and who lost them if they were not carefully guarded. Moreover, the parallel, in her experience, went farther, because she observed that nobody ever thought less of them because they were costly to run. Evanthia was now like an ownerless machine of which no one perceived the value or knew how to start. She had been getting accustomed to the notion that independence had its pleasures and defects. She lay thinking with quiet efficiency, until her cigarette was burned down, and then suddenly sprang out of bed. With extraordinary speed and quietness, she rolled up her great masses of black hair, slipped into a yellow kimono and Turkish slippers, and went downstairs. The contrast between her pose, with nothing save the slow curl of smoke coming from the deep pillow to show she was alive, and the sharp vitality of her movements in the kitchen, was characteristic. She could not help doing things in a theatrical way. Mr. Dainopoulos was much nearer the mark than even he knew, when he said in his caustic way that Evanthia imagined herself a queen. There were times when she thought she was an empress walking down ivory staircases strewn with slaughtered slaves. She had a way of striding to the door when she was angry and turning suddenly upon him, her head lowered, her amber eyes full of a lambent, vengeful glare. Mr. Dainopoulos would remain as impassive as a dummy under this exhibition of temperament, but his attitude was artistically correct. She might be exasperated with him, but she really regarded him as a dummy. He represented the cowed and terror-stricken vassal shrinking from the imperial anger. And now she moved in a majestic way here and there in the great stone kitchen, making black coffee and spooning out some preserved green figs into a plated dish. This she arranged on a tray. In imagination she was a great lady, a grand-duchess perhaps, taking refreshment to a secret lover. She loved to figure herself in these fantastic rôles, the rôles she had seen so often at the cinemas. The exaggerated gestures and graphic emotions came naturally to a girl at once theatrical and illiterate. She walked