Zoë smiled, for she was proud to love a man whom ten men would not dare to kill.
'Then the only way to save him is to free Johannes?' she said. 'Yes,' she went on, not waiting for an answer, 'I think you are right. Even if we got them their ten thousand ducats they would not let him out as long as Andronicus is at Blachernæ.'
'That is the truth of it,' Gorlias answered. 'Neither more nor less. Messer Carlo's life depends upon it.'
'Then it must be done, come what may. Thank God, I have a life to risk for him!'
'You have two,' said Gorlias quietly. 'You have mine also.'
'You are very loyal to Johannes, even to risking death. Is that what you mean?'
'For Messer Carlo, then?' Zoë asked. 'You owe him some great debt of gratitude?'
'I never saw him until quite lately,' Gorlias answered. 'You need not know why I am ready to die in this attempt, Kokóna Arethusa.'
Some one knocked at the outer door; Zoë clapped her hands for her maids, and one of them went to the entrance. The voice of Zeno's man spoke from outside.
'The Tartar is fast asleep already,' he said, 'and I can hear the secretary moaning as if he were in great pain; but I cannot see him through the window. He must be somewhere in the room, for it is his voice.'
Zoë made a movement to go towards the door, but Gorlias raised his hand.
'I will see to it,' he said, 'I will have the fellow taken back to his quarters.'
Zoë bit her lip for she knew that it would be cruel and cowardly to hurt even such a ruffian as Tocktamish, while he was helpless under the drug Gorlias had given him. But the words he had spoken rankled deep, and it was not likely that she should forget them.
Half an hour later poor little Omobono was in his bed, and Zeno's man was giving him a warm infusion of marsh-mallows and camomile for his shaken nerves. The money-bags and the papers had been restored to the strong box in the counting-house, and Tocktamish the Tartar, sunk in a beatific slumber, was being carried to his quarters in a hired palanquin by four stalwart bearers.
That was the end of the memorable feast in Carlo Zeno's house.
But Zoë sat by the open window, and her heart beat sometimes very fast and sometimes very slow; for she understood that the plight of the man she loved was desperate indeed.