It was not an emotional speech, nor delivered with any _empressement_, but I took it for thanks and made the best of it. Then at last she sat down and rested her head on her hand; her absent reverie allowed me to study her closely, and I was struck by a new beauty which the fantastic boy’s disguise had concealed. Moreover, with the doffing of that, she seemed to have put off her extreme hostility; but perhaps the revelation I had made to her, which showed her the victim of an unscrupulous schemer, had more to do with her softened air. Yet she had borne the story firmly, and a quivering lip was her extreme sign of grief or anger. And her first question was not of herself. ‘Do you mean that they will kill this woman?’ she asked. ‘I’m afraid it’s not unlikely that something will happen to her, unless, of course--’ I paused, but her quick wit supplied the omission. ‘Unless,’ she said, ‘he lets her live now, because I am out of his hands?’ ‘Will you stay out of his hands?’ I asked. ‘I mean, as long as I can keep you out of them.’ She looked round with a troubled expression. ‘How can I stay here?’ she said in a low tone. ‘You will be as safe here now as you were in your uncle’s care,’ I answered. She acknowledged my promise with 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’s not yours. I’ll 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 the 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.