(For a moment after the man had spoken, Rodvard felt as though he were falling.) He looked at Lalette (and saw the same black fear was in her also), but the step was taken, they could only hope to carry matters through at the port office. Hinze was a thin man in a sailor’s jacket, who looked over his shoulder back at the captain as he led them down the cobbles to a brick building that Lalette remembered all too well. “You will find it a good voyage. The ship is tight as an egg, but the food not too good,” said he. There was a doorman in his coop, who directed Hinze down a hall, whereupon the girl clutched Rodvard’s arm and said; “I do not like this. I—” (A silly remark, he thought.) “We cannot run away now,” he said. “It is the only chance”; and Hinze was back to say that the protostylarion would entertain them at once, there could be only a moment of waiting. They looked at each other apprehensively; Lalette leaned against a wall and closed her eyes, and a man came down the hall to call them in. Rodvard led the way into a room where a little man sat behind a desk with lines of disobligingness set round his mouth. He said; “You wish to leave the dominion of Mancherei for the barbarous Green Islands?” “It is because of a family matter,” said Rodvard. “My wife and I—” The protostylarion looked at Lalette’s hair, down in the maiden-sweep, then quickly at Rodvard and back to her face. Wrinkles shot up the middle of his forehead. “Wife? Wife? What is your profession? Where is your certificate of employ?” He came up out of his seat (like a small bear, Rodvard thought), peering the more intently at the girl. “Ah, I have it! I know! You are the one I registered for the Myonessae. The Dossolan; and a witch, too. Guards! Guards!” His voice went treble; two or three armed men tumbled into the room. “An inquiry!” said the protostylarion, flinging up his arm to point at the couple as Hinze shrank back. “These two for an inquiry! I accuse her of being a runaway Myonessan!” The face was distorted (the thought behind it one of the purest delight and triumph). “Be careful with her; she is a witch!” Rodvard was gripped above the elbow and jerked stumbling to the door, catching only a glimpse of Lalette’s despairing face. Outside, people stopped and goggled as the two were hurried along and into a carriage, with a guard beside each. “I am sorry,” began Rodvard, but one of the guards said; “Close your clack; no talking among prisoners.” (His eyes spoke a brutality that would have taken pleasure in a blow.) They came to a structure with a battlemented gate, like a small fortress; an odor of sewage emanated from it. A pair of guards brought forward bills in salutation to those entering. Rodvard and Lalette were swung into a gate-house, where a man lounged at a window—an officer by his shoulder-knot. One of the guards said; “These two are in for an inquiry. Authority of the Protostylarion Barthvödi. He says to be careful of the woman, she’s a witch.”