"I give thee again my much misused word, Marsyas. Believe me, thou hast forced more truths out of me than any ever achieved before. Cypros will make thee her inquisitor when next she suspects me of warmth toward a maiden!" Marsyas lifted the prince's hand and pressed it to his lips. Without further word, he went out of the chamber and returned to the city. He sought out the counting-room of Peter the usurer, and found within a commotion and a gathered crowd. The old man himself stood in a steward's place behind a grating of bronze, with lists and coffers about him. Without stood a brown woman, in a strange dress sufficiently rough to establish her state of servitude, and she bore in her hands a sheep-skin bag that seemed to be filled with coins. About her was a group of men of nationalities so diverse and so evidently perplexed that Marsyas immediately surmised that they had been summoned as interpreters for a stranger whom they could not understand. The brown woman was passive: the usurer behind his grating in such a state of great excitement and anxiety that moisture stood out on his wrinkled forehead. His eyes were on the sheep-skin bag; evidently the brown woman was bringing him money, and his fear that the treasure would escape made the old man desperate. "Have ye forgotten your mother-tongues?" he fumed at the polyglot assembly, "or are ye base-born Syrians boasting a nationality that ye can not prove? Hold! Let her not go forth, good citizens; doubtless she hath come from a foreign debtor to repay me! Close the doors without!" Marsyas pressed through the crowd to the grating, and the old man discovered him. "Hither, hither, my friend," he exclaimed. "See if thou canst tell what manner of stranger we have here." The young Essene had been examining the woman; with a quick glance, now, he inspected her face. Dark the complexion, the eyes olive-green as chrysolite, mysterious and hypnotic; the features regular as an Egyptian's, but stronger and more beautiful; the physique refined, yet hardy. The mystic air of the Ganges breathed from her scented shawl. The young man's training in languages was not overtaxed. "What is thy will?" he asked in the tongue of the Brahmins. "To exchange Hindu money for Roman coin," was the instant reply. Marsyas turned to Peter. "This is an Indian woman," he explained. "She wishes to exchange coin of her country for Roman money." "Good!" the old man cried, rubbing his hands. "We shall oblige her. Foreign coins are so much bullion; yet, we pay only its face value, in Roman moneys! Good! I shall melt it, and deliver it to the Roman mint! Good! But--but how shall I know one of these outlandish coins from another?" "I can tell you," Marsyas answered.