It was quite dark already. Mattina was never allowed a candle in her room, nor even a floating wick in a tumbler of oil. "As though," her mistress had said, "it were necessary to burn good oil for a serving maid to pull off her clothes and tumble on to her mattress." As a rule she was so tired and sleepy, she did not mind; but now she was very frightened indeed, and fear is always worse in the dark. She lay there, where she had been flung, huddled up against the wall, her eyes hidden in the bend of her arm. Prison! They would send her to prison! She had heard of a man in Poros, Andoni, the joiner, who had broken open the money box of Sotiro, the coffee-house keeper, in the night, and he had been kept ten years in prison! She did not know how much money he had taken; she had never heard. How long would they keep her in prison if they thought she had stolen twenty-five drachmæ; it was a great deal of money! And what would they do to her in prison? Was it a dark place under the ground? Oh, why was her father, her own "babba," not alive to beat off the men of the police who would soon be coming to fetch her? For a long time she cried and sobbed on the mattress without moving. When she opened her eyes she could distinguish nothing in the room, the darkness was like a thick black veil covering everything. There were voices, but they seemed distant; the house seemed still, with the stillness that brings terror with it. Suddenly the dark seemed full of big hands with hooked fingers stretching out to clutch at her. She ran wildly to the door and shook it, screaming aloud. "Oh, my mother! My mother! Manitsa![26] Where are you?" VIII In the meanwhile, her mistress, downstairs, was urging her husband to go to the police station. "Just think of the little thief," she was saying. "And I who kept her out of charity, though she broke a fortune in plates, because I thought that at least she had 'clean hands.'" "I wonder," said an elderly man who had not yet spoken, and who was Taki's godfather, "where the girl can have found this twenty-five drachmæ note?" "I put it myself on my chest of drawers under my pincushion this morning," explained Mattina's mistress. "When I came to go out with the children it was missing; and she, the little hypocrite, helped me to look for it everywhere." "Had the girl been alone in your room, since you had put the money there?" inquired the elderly man.