Mayhem in Greece

Robbie's geography, if decidedly sketchy about other parts of the world, was hard to fault on the ancient world, and he at once realized that these ports and islands formed a chain from western Greece right round the Peloponnesus and up the coast of Turkey. The fact that the hotel bookings, starting at Patras on March 31st, were for progressive dates, confirmed his idea that the Bratislava was making a trip right round Greece, dropping off groups of her passengers as she went.

He was only half-way through copying the list when he was startled by a sudden noise. It came from the outer office. There had been a faint clang of metal, then the sound of a door being slammed. It could only be the door to the street. Next moment, faint but clear, he head Krajcir's voice: 'Everything's ready for you, so it won't take long.'

Robbie's hands suddenly became damp and beads of sweat burst out on his forehead. For some reason, Krajcir had come back to the office and had brought another person with him. There were two of them, and he was trapped there.

7

A Dreadful Half-hour

Robbie's heart missed a beat. Saliva suddenly ran hot in his mouth. Here was a premature and ignominious end to his activities as a secret agent. In a matter of moments, Krajcir would find him there and telephone for the police. He would be handcuffed, like any thief, and hauled off to the station. What would happen then? He had taken nothing, but there could be no disputing that he had broken in. How else could he have got there? Besides, they would discover that a pane had been removed from the window. It would be assumed that he had intended to burgle the place. What deience could he possibly offer? None. He would be sent to prison, have to mix with crooks and bullies, perform degrading tasks, suffer acute discomfort, live on revolting food, perhaps for several months, and for ever afterward be branded as a gaol-bird.

Stimulated by the shock of imminent discovery, his normally slow brain was whirling like a teetotum. Those appalling thoughts raced through it in a matter of seconds. Next moment, the impulse to escape such a fate automatically took charge. Any attempt to get out through tjie window must obviously fail. Long before he could possibly get it open and wriggle through it again, Krajcir would be upon him, seize him by the legs and haul him back. But there was the clothes closet.

With one sweep of his big hand, he swept the papers on which he had been working back into the folder, then thrust it into the drawer of the desk. Turning, he took two long strides on tiptoe, opened the closet door, slipped inside and pulled it to behind him.

He was only just in time. The door of the office opened as that of the closet swung to and, had the light been on, Krajcir must have caught sight of its movement. From fear that the sound of the door shutting would give him away, Robbie had not closed it completely. Next moment, through the two-inch gap that remained, he saw the light flash on, and heard the man who was with Krajcir ask:

'Have you much for me this week?'

'About the usual,' Krajcir replied. 'But there is nothing from Rhodes.'

The other grunted. 'Our man there is in the Radar ship. Perhaps it has been moved or gone off on some exercise, so that he was prevented from getting ashore.'

'Hello!' Krajcir's voice came again with a note of surprise.

'What's this?'

His companion gave an abrupt laugh. 'A torch, and rather a nice one. But what about it?'

Robbie, still in a dither, was fighting to control his breathing. At the word 'torch', the sweat turned cold on his forehead. Of course; he had left his torch on Krajcir's desk. He had not even had time to switch it off. Had it not been partly masked, and its beam dimmed by the strong electric light above the desk, they must have noticed it before. Now that they had, it was a complete give-away. They could not fail to realize that they had disturbed an intruder, and that he muvt be hiding somewhere close at hand. Certain now that his discovery was imminent, he wrung his big hands in an agony of apprehension, as he listened to the ensuing conversation.

^But it's not mine,' Krajcir said in a puzzled voice.

'Then it must belong to one of your staff.'

No, I'll swear it wasn't here when I left the office an hour ago.

Besides, it's still switched on. Someone must have broken in.'

The door was padlocked when we arrived and all the windows were closed, so no one could have.'

'But how can one account, then, for a lighted torch being left on my desk?'

'You probably switched it on yourself when you picked it up. Anyway it's obvious that the safe has not been tampered with, and nothing else seems to have been disturbed. You are simply imagining things. One of your staff must have left it there, and you failed to notice it before. That's all there is to it. Now let's get to work. I'm beginning to need my dinner.'

As Robbie breathed again, there came the clink of keys, then the sound of the heavy door of the safe being swung open. For a few minutes there was a rustling of papers, then Krajcir's companion asked:

T take it you will have no difficulty in finding accommodation for Barak's people?'

'I don't think so. Had it been later in the season I might have, but the tourist rush is some weeks from its peak yet. Anyhow, it is only a matter of fixing up the various groups for a couple of nights until they can move on to the villas and farmhouses we are taking for them. That reminds me, though, I meant to put in the safe the particulars Barak gave me, but it slipped my memory.'

They wouldn't convey anything to your staff. Anyone who saw them would only take them for ordinary tourist bookings.'

That's true. Even I have not been let into what it's all about, and that's none of my business. But Barak did stress to me that I was to treat the matter as top secret, so I may as well pop them in the safe while it is open.'

There came the sound of a drawer being pulled out, then a swift exclamation from Krajcir. 'Devil take it! Somebody has been here.'

'Are you sure? Has someone been at your papers?' The other man's voice now held quick concern.

'Yes, look here. These are the notes I took from Barak, and someone has been making a copy of them. I know that round, childish hand. By God, I've got it! That's the writing of the Englishman.'

'What Englishman?'

'The young fellow that Comrade Minister Havelka sent me.'

'You mean the British Ambassador's nephew?'

'Yes. He's quite useless. In fact he's such a dreamer that I'm not quite sure that he's all there. But I was ordered to give him a job.'

Even gripped as he was in an agony of apprehension, Robbie winced. He might be a bit slow at some things, but that did not justify anyone branding him as an idiot. Yet perhaps he was. Who but an idiot would have got himself involved in this sort of thing? And what a mess he had made of it. Not only had he left his torch behind, but also the notes he had taken—and they were in his writing, so he had given himself away completely.

'He was enough "all there" to copy your papers,' snapped Krajcir's companion. 'No doubt he only acted the part of a halfwit in order to lull any suspicions you might have of him.'

As Robbie had never acted any part, and was quite incapable of being anything but his ordinary, simple self, this brought him no consolation. Feeling as though he had the Sword of Damocles suspended above his head, he held his breath while waiting to learn what would happen aext.

'I was not warned that he might be a spy,' Krajcir retorted angrily. 'But why, having taken these notes, should he have left them here?'

'Perhaps our arrival disturbed him.'

'That's it! His torch, left on the desk still alight! You must be right. And he couldn't have got away. We should have seen or heard him.'

Robbie stiffened. Every muscle in his body became taut, like those of a condemned man awaiting immediate execution. Next moment, the blow fell. Two swift steps sounded outside the cupboard door, then it was wrenched open.

For a few seconds Krajcir glared at him, then he snarled: 'So, Mister Englishman; you are a spy, eh? How did you get in here?'

'I—er—well, if you must know, through the window,' Robbie admitted lamely.

'You are in the British Secret Service, yes?'

'No, oh no,' Robbie swiftly protested. 'I assure you, Pan Krajcir, that I'm not.'

'Do not lie to me. You broke in here not to steal but to spy. We have evidence of it.'

'Yes, I know: It was silly of me to leave my torch on your desk . . . and the notes I'd taken.'

Krajcir took a pace back, and said harshly: 'Come out of there. You will sit down at my desk and write a full confession.'

This was something for which Robbie had not bargained. To be convicted was one thing, to confess was quite another. If he denied the charge, quite a lot of people might believe that the Czechs had used the fact that a young Englishman had taken a job with them to fake a charge against him, so that they could make anti-British propaganda out of the case. But to confess would give people no option about what to think. It would never be believed that he had gone into this on his own. They would take it as certain that his uncle had been behind the whole business, and lay the blame at his door for whatever happened to his nephew. Sir Finsterhorn had inspired no great devotion in Robbie but, all the same, he was not quite so simple as to fail to see the implications in this choice. Steeped as he was in the traditions of chivalry, since he had got himself into this mess nothing would have induced him to allow blame for it to be attributed to anyone else.

Stepping out of the cupboard, he slowly shook his head. 'No, Pan Krajcir, I'm afraid I couldn't do that.'

With set mouth, the other man stared at him, then spoke. Whereas Krajcir's voice had been imbued with anger and impatience, this one's held quiet authority. Till now, he had remained concealed behind the cupboard door. On stepping past it, Robbie got his first sight of him. Instantly, he recognized the square, bald-headed figure that he had last seen with Barak at Toyrcolimano. It was the First Secretary, Nejedly. He said:

'You will do as you are told, or take the consequences.'

Robbie's mouth twisted into a nervous, unhappy smile. 'You mean, you will send for the police?'

'Yes. Were you in my country, I could have you shot for what you have done. Here matters are different, but at least punishment can be secured for law-breakers who have been caught red-handed, as you have. Still, I am not a hard man; so I give you a choice. If you sit down, write a confession that I shall dictate, and sign it, I will let you go. If you refuse, you will spend tomorrow in a cell, and on Monday find yourself sentenced to a term of imprisonment.'

It was an offer that might have tempted many people, but not a young dreamer of dreams who thought of Bayard, that chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, as a man of only yesterday.

'No, thanks,' Robbie replied. 'You want me to implicate my uncle, don't you? But he had nothing to do with this, and I'm not playing.' As an afterthought he added: 'I don't mean to let you have it all your own way, either. After all, I'm one of the staff here. I shall say that I left something and came back—er— came back hoping to find Pan Krajcir still working in his office. Then . . . well, then, he wasn't here but I found a window open and so got in to get it. Yes, and I'll say that Mr. Krajcir asked me to make a copy of those notes for him before I left.'

The bald-headed Nejedly gave him a smile of contempt. 'You poor fool. Is it likely that, in a N.A.T.O. country, we would charge you with espionage? Even if convicted, with the sympathy of the West in your favour you would get off with only a token sentence. No. If you elect to go to court, it will be on a charge of having broken into the place and burgled it.'

'But I have stolen nothing!'

'Oh yes, you have.' Nejedly produced his notecase. From it, he took a thousand drachma note and two five hundreds. Holding them up, he went on: 'Comrade Krajcir will mark these. He will say that for some time he has had reason to believe that you have been stealing small sums of money from the till. This afternoon he laid a trap for you, by letting you see him put these away inside his bank paying-in book, then leaving you alone for a few minutes in this room. After the office was closed, he asked me to come back with him to see if you had taken the bait. Evidently you had feared to do so before the office closed. But you had left a window unlatched, and come back for it. Thus we were lucky enough to catch you red-handed.

Robbie's tanned face paled slightly. There seemed no way in which he could counter this tissue of lies or prove them false. He was learning fast that he was no match for men like Nejedly. Meanwhile, the First Secretary was going on:

'We shall add that you resisted us. Comrade Krajcir is a patriot. He will willingly give a little of his blood for his country. I, too, will sacrifice my shirt. I will tear it open, then give Pan Krajcir a tap on the nose. Just enough to make it bleed. Then we shall be able to charge you with robbery with violence, and ensure that you receive a good stiff sentence. Come now, is it to be like that, or will you sit down and write a confession?'

The word 'violence' begot an idea in Robbie's mind. He had never struck anyone in his life, but why should he not start now? The odds were two to one against him but, if he was going to be charged anyway with assaulting them, he might as well have the fun of doing it. Besides—sudden happy thought—if he hit them hard enough, there was just a chance that he might manage to escape before their shouts brought help.

Nejedly, bald, moonfaced, and with slit eyes that suggested he might have a dash of Tartar blood, was stockily built with powerful shoulders and long arms. He was standing about six feet from Robbie and between him and the door to the outer office. Krajcir, his gold tooth showing in a servile but none-too-happy grin at his superior's announcement that he should submit to having his nose punched in the service of his country, was standing on Robbie's right, and nearer to him. He was the elder and, Robbie decided, the less dangerous of the two, so the best plan seemed to be to try to put him out of action first. Drawing back his right fist, he swung it hard at the side of Krajcir's face.

Had Robbie ever been taught to box, his superior height and strength would have enabled him to make short work of the two Czechs, but he had never even had to put up his fists to defend himself in a school playground. Instead of the blow taking Krajcir under the side of the jaw and knocking him out, it landed on his cheek, merely jerking his head round and causing him to stagger back against the wall.

When Robbie struck out, Nejedly was holding a brief-case. Swiftly he set it down on Krajcir's desk and sailed in, not with his fists but with his feet. As he ran forward, his right foot shot out. It caught Robbie a frightful crack on the shin. He let out a yelp and lifted the injured leg in the air. With surprising agility for one with his figure, Nejedly jumped back a pace then kicked out with his left foot at Robbie's other leg.

Had that second savage kick landed, it would have brought Robbie down. But Krajcir, his cheek bright red from the blow he had been struck, had now rounded on his aggressor. As he lurched forward to strike Robbie, he cannoned into Nejedly. Both the kick and the blow failed to find their mark. That gave Robbie a moment's breathing space. With no plan, and only brute strength to aid him, he came lumbering forward, flailing his big fists indiscriminately at the two Czechs.

One blow caught Krajcir on the forehead. Momentarily dazed, he again fell back against the wall. Another blow landed on Nejedly's shoulder. It had such force behind it that it knocked him sideways, and he almost fell. For a moment, there was a clear space of several feet between them. Seizing his chance, Robbie made a dash for the door. He was half-way there when Nejedly recovered sufficiently to grab his wrist. At that instant, Robbie had one foot raised for his next stride. The sudden jerk on his wrist threw him off balance. His head thrown back and, clutching vainly at the air with his free hand, he heeled over sideways. Before he could recover, he cannoned into Nejedly and they both crashed to the ground. Robbie came down on top. As he fell his bent elbow, with all his weight behind it, came down on Nejedly's stomach, temporarily driving the breath out of his body.

¹ With an agonizing groan, the Czech doubled up and, for the space of a few heartbeats, Robbie had him at his mercy. A Commando-trained agent would have put him out of the game for good by giving him one hard sock under the jaw. But Robbie had imbibed the tradition that one never hits a man when he is down. Slightly horrified by the sight of the bulging eyes and gasping mouth in the moon-like face beneath him, he stared at it for those few vital heartbeats, then struggled to his knees.

By then, Krajcir had recovered his wits. With a shouted curse, he launched himself from behind Robbie and grabbed him round the neck. Taken by surprise, Robbie felt himself being jerked backwards with his legs twisted under him. Kicking his legs free, he grasped Krajcir's wrists and broke his grip. Robbie was now flat on his back with Krajcir behind him, still standing. The Czech could not use his hands; so he gave a swift, sideways kick that caught Robbie in the ribs.

Robbie choked out an 'Ouch!' of pain, and let go of Krajcir's wrists so suddenly that the latter staggered back. Nejedly was now sitting up, but still gasping for breath. Rolling over, Robbie lurched to his feet. Krajcir was between him and the door. As Robbie came at him, his eyes showed sudden fear. He ducked a windmill swipe from one of Robbie's fists, and avoided the other by closing with him.

For a few moments they swayed in a clinch, stamping to and fro on the floor and panting for breath. But Robbie was far the stronger. Shifting his grip he broke Krajcir's hold, then seized him round the wrist. With one great heave, he lifted the Czech right off his feet and hurled him from him. Krajcir's ankle twisted under him as his foot came down on the floor. With a squeal of pain he half spun round, then toppled sideways. As he fell, his head hit the edge of the closet door. With a moan, he subsided in an ungainly heap and lay whimpering there.

No time was given to Robbie to savour his victory. Nejedly was on his feet again, and had armed himself by snatching up a heavy, ebony ruler from Krajcir's desk. As Krajcir slumped to the floor, Nejedly hit Robbie a stunning crack on the back of the head with the ruler. Robbie's eyes bulged. Then, against a curtain of blackness, he saw flashing stars and whirling circles.

With a groan, he lurched round. Nejedly was coming at him again. His sight cleared only just in time for him to glimpse the ruler held high. It was about to smash down into his face. Instinctively, he lifted a hand to ward off the blow. His hand caught Nejedly in the chest, halting the forward lunge of his shoulders. The jolt was sufficient to deflect his aim, and the ruler thudded down on Robbie's upper arm.

Again Robbie staggered back, but was brought up sharp by the edge of Krajcir's desk. The sudden impact below his buttocks nearly sent his legs flying outward from under him. As his head and shoulders went back, he thrust his right hand behind him for support. It landed on the semi-circular handle of Nejedly's heavy brief-case. Grasping it firmly he flung himself forward from the desk, drawing the brief-case after him in a wide, semicircular sweep. More by luck than judgment, it struck Nejedly on the side of the head and sent him spinning. The ruler flew out of his hand and, with outflung arms, he measured his length on the floor.

Robbie did not wait to see if he had knocked him out. Having temporarily got the better of both of his enemies, he took a deep breath and dashed for the door. In an instant, he was through it. A moment later, he had wrenched open the outer door of the agency and was in the courtyard. Still half dazed by the blow Nejedly had struck him on the back of the head, and much too excited by his first fight to think of anything but getting away, he ran as fast as his legs would carry him down the passage, out into the street and, dodging at considerable risk between two cars, across the road.

An angry shout from the policeman on point duty brought him to his senses; but by then the danger of his being run down was past. It was only then, too, that he realized that he was still clutching Nejedly's brief-case. A glance back at the far pavement showed him that he was not being pursued and, at a quick walk, he made his way round to the Grande Bretagne.

Up in his suite, he took stock of his injuries. His head was still aching abominably and, on gingerly feeling the place where he had been hit, he found it sticky with blood. He wondered uneasily if his skull was split and he ought to call in a doctor, but that would have meant answering some very awkward questions,

The wound did not seem to be bleeding much, so he decided to bathe it with cold water and leave it at that for the present. Now that he had stopped running and walking, his leg also began to pain him severely. Turning up his trouser leg, he found that Nejedly's kick had broken the skin over his shin bone; so there was blood there, too, and the flesh all round was already colouring up into a first-class bruise.

Old Nanny Fisher had taught him that cuts should always be washed clean with soap and water as soon as possible; so, stoically clenching his teeth against the pain, he scrubbed his leg ruthlessly, thoroughly washed his head, then bound a handkerchief round the one and made a towel into a turban for the other.

On his way from the bathroom through the narrow hallway of his little suite, he picked up the brief-case which he had thrown down there and carried it into the sitting-room. It was not locked, so he fished all the papers out of it and put them in a pile on his desk. His rough handling of himself when cleansing his wounds now paid a dividend, as by contrast they were throbbing only mildly, and, as soon as he realized what the papers were, he became so excited that he forgot his pain altogether.

There were some two dozen documents in all. Each was in an envelope addressed to Krajcir and marked 'Private', and the postmarks on the envelopes showed that they had come from different parts of Greece. The majority were handwritten, but a few were typed. The greater part were in Czech, but several were in Greek, three in English and two in German. None of them was addressed to a person, and their only signature was a number which differed in each case.

Inexperienced as Robbie was in such matters, after glancing through only a few it was plain to him that these were the reports of a network of secret agents. Except in particulars, they varied little. All of them were concerned with shipping, and principally naval shipping. From them could be built up a complete picture of the secret movements of every N.A.T.O. warship, American, British, Greek and Turkish, in the waters of the northeastern Mediterranean. Movements of oil tankers and supply ships were also covered. Where warships had been in, or lying off, ports, estimates were given of the number of men given shore leave, the state of their morale, and such political opinions as the majority of them appeared to hold. In a few cases, the names were given of men who nursed grievances against their officers, or who there was reason to believe were secretly pro-Communist.

It was evident that, for some reason, the Czechs considered it safer to have these secret reports sent to their Travel Agency rather than their Legation, and that Nejedly collected them from Krajcir once a week.

Robbie was naturally delighted with his haul. Although it was only a side-product of the mission he had set himself, he felt that indirectly it might prove a great help to him. That none of the names and addresses of the writers of the reports was given obviously detracted greatly from their value but, even so, it seemed certain that they would be of considerable interest to N.A.T.O. Intelligence, if only as a means of informing it of this great network of spies which was being run by the Czechs, no doubt at the orders of their Russian masters.

Sir Finsterhorn and Euan Wettering had poured scorn on Robbie's proposal that he should become a secret agent. Now he saw a rosy picture of himself casually presenting the results of his first coup, and of their regarding him with awe and a new respect. Blissfully he envisaged his uncle patting him on the shoulder, encouraging him to go on with his mission, and promising him the official help that had previously been denied.

So pleased with himself was Robbie that, his pains by now reduced to no more than dull aches, and feeling a little peckish from having skimped his dinner, he decided to celebrate by treating himself to an epicure's supper. One of the discoveries he had made while living at the Embassy was caviare and, having no idea how costly it was, he always regretted that it was doled out there in quite small portions. Picking up the house telephone, he rang down for six portions to be sent up to him with plenty of hot toast, then he ordered a bottle of French champagne to wash it down.

Scooping up the collection of reports, he thrust them back into the brief-case and snapped it shut. Then he went into his bedroom to tidy himself up. He had been sitting in his shirt and pants, but the collar of the shirt had become dirty and creased as a result of his fight and the cuffs had got wet when he washed his hair. Now he changed it for a clean one of white silk and, as he felt in festive mood, he put on a dinner jacket and black trousers. But he kept the towel wrapped round his head in the form of a turban from fear that, if he removed it, that might start his scalp bleeding again.

Perhaps it was the rather rakish air that the turban gave him but, as he glanced at himself in the mirror, it suddenly struck him that he was quite a fine-looking fellow. Yet his next thought saddened him a little. Although he might appear a fine figure of a man to himself, it was clear that women did not find him in the least attractive, for not one of them—that is, of anywhere near his own age—had ever taken more than a passing interest in him.

Theoretically, he had nothing to learn about sex. Some years before, while on holiday with his Aunt Emily at Scarborough, he had gone into a second-hand bookshop and bought several books on mythology. Seeing that he was a young man with plenty of money, the bookseller had persuaded him to add to his purchases a two-volume edition of Forberg's Manual of Classical

Erotology which had the English as well as the Latin texts. He had had only the vaguest idea what the word 'Erotology' meant, but the bookseller had assured him that Forberg was a great authority on the customs of the Ancients, and that he certainly ought to add a copy to his collection.

When he got back to his hotel, he was surprised to find that the 'customs' referred to were not, as he had expected, accounts of betrothals and marriage rituals, possibly embellished with stories of the love affairs of the Immortals, but dealt entirely with the physical relations between men and women. Leaving nothing whatever to the imagination, Forberg described in detail every conceivable way in which a couple might gratify their passions. Further, to Robbie's astonishment and disgust, it then disclosed to him that certain people were not content with making love in a natural manner, and gave descriptions of homosexual practices. Finally, it gave an account of orgies held by the Emperor Tiberius on Capri, in which numbers of the guests indulged in the most extraordinary gymnastics.

Robbie was, therefore, even better primed in the 'facts of life' than many young men of his age, although he had never found an opportunity of making use of his knowledge. That was not because he had not wanted to, and at times he was troubled by a strong urge to demonstrate his virility. But he had been hopelessly handicapped by his extreme shyness where girls were concerned, and had not the first idea how to start an affaire.

To those he met socially he would not have dreamed of even hinting at the provocative thoughts they sometimes aroused in him, and the younger ones soon found him too dull to bother with. Had he but known it, during the past year a few married women he had met while at the Embassy had seen in his stalwart figure the makings of a very satisfactory lover; but he had proved so gauche and tongue-tied that, after a while, they, too, had decided that he was too much of a bore to be worth seducing. There had remained the possibility of scraping acquaintance with some pretty piece strolling in the park or sitting on her own in a cafe, and he had often contemplated some such adventure but, at the last moment, his courage had always failed him.

Yet, all thoughts of sex apart, he enjoyed basking in the company of pretty girls, and secretly it tormented him that he could find so little to say to them that he had never succeeded in making a friend of one. Being so inept with them and never having been known to ask a girl to lunch or dine was one of the things with which Euan Wettering had frequently taunted him. The memory of Euan's jibes made him flush now, and he would have given a very great deal to have had a girl friend whom he could have rung up there and then and asked out to supper, instead of having to celebrate on his own.

He had only just finished dressing when the door-bell of his suite rang. The chambermaid who turned down his bed had a passkey, but the waiters were not allowed keys; so, assuming that the supper he had ordered had been brought up, he walked out into the narrow hall and opened the door.

There, within a foot of him stood Krajcir, and with him was the taciturn, blue-jowled Comrade Cepicka who, the previous Monday, had piloted him from the Czech Legation to the Travel Agency. Cepicka, looking more than ever like an ex-Gestapo thug, was wearing a long cloak. Half-hidden by it, he held an automatic, and he was pointing it at Robbie's stomach.

8

'Stop Thief! Stop Thief!'

For once, Robbie's mind worked swiftly. Before either of the men had time to put a foot in the door, he slammed it in their faces. Turning, he dashed into his sitting room, slammed the door of that, too, and shot the bolt.

Panic-stricken, he gazed wildly round him. What was he to do? Cepicka, having pointed a gun at him, showed that they meant business. He ought to have realized that they would stop at nothing to get back Nejedly's brief-case. When he was taken on at the agency, he had been asked for his private address, and it had not occurred to him that it might be a wise precaution to conceal from Krajcir that he was living at the Grande Bretagne. He recalled Krajcir raising his eyebrows and remarking on the incongruity of a young man who was staying at the most expensive hotel in Athens applying for such a poorly paid post. By then, he was becoming used to lying to the Czechs so he had said that his uncle made him a generous allowance, but had threatened to cut it off unless he found himself a regular job.

The sound of a sharp crack put an abrupt end to his brief meditations. Angrily he upbraided himself for wasting even seconds recalling the past. What did the reason matter for their having been able to run him to earth so quickly? They were after him, and with a gun. The sound he had just heard could only mean that they had already forced the lock on the outer door. Cepicka looked the kind of man who was used to doing that sort of thing. No doubt he had come well prepared with a pocketful of implements. In another few moments, they would have forced their way into the sitting room.

There was only one thing for it. To telephone down to the office was no use. His enemies would have broken in long before help could reach him. Grabbing the brief-case, Robbie pulled wide the French window of the room, and ran out on to its narrow balcony. Alongside the balcony was an iron fire-escape. Throwing a leg over the balcony railing, he grasped a rung of the ladder with his free hand, then swung himself out on to it. The ladder led down to a courtyard in which goods were delivered at the back of the hotel. As Robbie's room was on the third floor, he had quite a long way to go, and the speed of his descent was considerably hampered by the brief-case.

When he was about two-thirds of the way down, he heard a shout from above. Looking up, he saw the foreshortened silhouettes of Krajcir and Cepicka framed in his lighted window. Both of them were leaning over the balcony rail, and Cepicka called down to him in a guttural voice:

'Stop! Stop! Stay where you are, or I shoot!' Robbie's heart gave a lurch. As the courtyard, now a dozen feet below him, was pitch dark, his figure was so indistinct against it that only a lucky shot could have hit him. But he was unaware of that, and imagined himself as a target in a shooting gallery. He was, moreover, too inexperienced to realize that secret agents may threaten their enemies, but are not such fools as to shoot them—except if cornered themselves—in places where there is a high risk that the shot will be heard and they are very likely to be caught. The idea of a bullet smacking into the top of his head terrified him. Swiftly he decided that allowing himself to be shot was not going to prevent their getting back the brief-case; and that, while it was one thing to lie for one's country, it was quite another to die for it to no good purpose. Halting in his tracks, he called up hastily:

'All right! Don't shoot. I won't go any further.' It was then that his enemies blundered. Instead of ordering him to bring the brief-case back up to his room, they climbed out on to the fire-escape to come down and get it.

Krajcir was nearer the ladder, so got on to it first. While he descended the first dozen rungs, Robbie watched him, motionless, his mind entirely occupied with the bitter thought of having to surrender his prize. Suddenly, as he stared upward, it came to him that he was no longer covered. Even if Cepicka, while clinging to the ladder with one hand, tried to shoot him with the other, he would find it impossible, because Krajcir's bulky body formed a barrier between them.

Robbie gave a quick glance over his shoulder. The courtyard was quite small, and there was not a gleam of light in it. He could only just make out the entrance to a narrow passage that led from it to the street. Deciding that he would be very unlucky if he failed to reach it before the others got to the bottom of the ladder, he went down another five rungs on tip-toe. That brought him to the bottom section of the ladder, an eight-foot length which, as a precaution against burglars, was held horizontal by weights so that it could not be mounted from below. As he stepped on it, the weights lifted and its lower end swung down, hitting the ground with a loud clang.

Krajcir and Cepicka both paused in their descent and shouted something at him. But he was now committed to his attempt. Still clutching the brief-case, he slithered down the last few feet, stumbled on reaching the ground, recovered and dashed headlong for the entrance to the passage.

It was about two hundred feet in length. As he shot out of it into the street, he took a swift look over his shoulder. The darkness hid all sign of movement, but he knew that his enemies were after him. He could hear their running feet pounding across the stones of the courtyard.

Cannoning into an old gentleman who upbraided him for his clumsiness, he darted across the empty road. A moment later, a stream of traffic, just released from the cross-section a hundred yards away, filled it and temporarily masked him from the sight of his pursuers. Turning left, he headed for Stadium Street, knowing that there would be plenty of people there, and hoping to elude his enemies by mingling with the crowd. His long, swift strides quickly brought him to the corner.

Dodging in and out of the throng of pedestrians, he made his way down the broad boulevard. It was much lighter there, so he could see the stroller's faces clearly while thrusting his way through the gaps between them. As he did so, he wondered why so many of them gave him looks of astonishment. Suddenly he caught sight of his reflection in a shop window and gave a gasp of dismay. His head was still wrapped in its turban of towelling. In combination with his dinner-jacket suit, it made him a ludicrous sight. A moment later, somewhere in his rear he heard shouts in Greek of:

'Stop thief! Stop thief!'

He did not for an instant doubt that those cries applied to him. That accursed turban, bobbing along among the crowd, had given him away. Krajcir or Cepicka must have spotted it, and were after him again. He broke into a run, knocking people right and left as the cry 'Stop thief!' was taken up by a dozen voices. One man tried to clutch him, but Robbie fended him off with a shove that send him reeling into the gutter. As if by magic, the other men and girls coming in his direction stepped aside hastily to give him passage, rather than attempt to grapple with such an obviously desperate character.

Breathless, but still running like a champion, he reached the broad side-street opposite Klafthmonos Square, which links Stadium Street with Venizelou Street. At the junction a traffic policeman, his attention attracted by the shouting blew his whistle. Robbie dived round the corner out of the policeman's view, and raced on. But now that the police were about to join the hunt against him, he felt that his chances of escape were hopeless. In spite of all the lucky breaks he had had, matters had come full cycle. He was back where he had been when threatened by Nejedly in the agency; about to be dragged off to the police station and charged with theft.

But to prove theft, evidence of theft had to be produced. Nejedly had intended to make a false statement and, with Krajcir as his witness, use marked banknotes for that purpose. Now it would not be money but the brief-case which he would be charged with stealing. If only he could get rid of that, there would be no evidence against him.

As though by a special dispensation of the gods at his patroness Athene's request, tlje idea had no sooner entered his head than he realized that he was passing a site on which a new building was going up. Steel scaffolding already framed three skeleton floors while, at street level, a hundred and fifty foot frontage was screened from the pavement only by a temporary arrangement of crossed poles. Short, broad Korai Street, into which he had wheeled, was comparatively deserted. In a matter of seconds, he had scrambled over one of the low barriers, and was plunging about amongst heaps of sand, loose stones and rubble.

His pursuers had seen him dash round the corner but, by the time they came opposite the new building, he was well inside it. In there, it was as dark as it had been in the courtyard. The lights in the street hardly penetrated the gloom, revealing only dimly a forest of square cement pillars that rose from a floor that had been only partly boarded over.

There was now shouting in the street outside. Hastily he sought a place in which he could conceal the brief-case. The dim cavern in which he crouched presented only stark, vaguely-sensed rectangles, with not a contour among them that might afford a hiding-place. Its only irregularity lay in the floor. In some places there were piles of boards, in others open sections where joists and the stretches of concrete between them still lay exposed. That left him no choice. Kneeling down, he thrust the brief-case as far as he could under one of the boarded-over areas, then unwound his towel-turban and pushed it between two other joists that had boards nailed down on them.

The shouting out in the street had made him fear that, at any moment, he would be discovered, but apparently no one had seen him jump the barrier, for the noise passed and gradually died down. While running he had felt no pain from his injured leg, but now, as he crouched behind one of the big, square pillars, still trying to regain his breath, it began to throb as though being hit rhythmically with a hammer.

In an attempt to divert his thoughts from it, he strove to think out his next move. On consideration, now that he could no longer be incriminated by possession of the brief-case, he saw no reason why he should not make his way back to the Grand Bretagne. He could tell the hall porter that thieves had broken into his room; that he had valuable jewels there, so feared another raid; and, in case Cepicka tried to pay him a second visit, arrange for a man to stand guard all night outside his suite. All the same, he thought it wise to continue to lie 'doggo' for a while, until anyone who had seen him being chased was well clear of the vicinity.

Accordingly he remained where he was, his eyes closed and striving to ignore the painful throbbing in his leg, for what he reckoned to be a good twenty minutes. Then, straightening himself up, he tiptoed across the firm part of the floor to the barrier, and peered out. People were, passing only intermittently. Taking advantage of a moment when no one was near enough to notice him, he slipped out on to the pavement.

Turning right, he walked quickly up the slope toward Venizelou Street then, at the corner, turned right again along it. As he did so, a shout went up from the opposite corner. To judge time when in darkness and a state of great anxiety is very difficult, and he had not bothered to put on his wrist watch again after taking it off to wash his head. Instead of remaining in hiding for twenty minutes, he had been lost to his pursuers for less than ten.

They had known that he must have gone to earth somewhere near-by, and were still keeping a watch for him. He gave a startled glance in the direction from which the shout had come. Cepicka, Krajcir and a policeman were standing in a group on the corner. Although he had got rid of his tell-tale turban, they had spotted him. Both the Czechs were pointing in his direction. Once more he took to his heels.

For a moment, Fortune relented and favoured him. A stream of traffic cut off his enemies. That gave him a good, flying start. Again he plunged through the crowd, scattering people right and left. As he darted between them, he tried to console himself with the thought that if he were caught, they would not now be able to charge him with stealing the brief-case. But by the time he had covered a hundred yards, it struck him that Krajcir might still trump up against him a charge of having stolen money from the agency. As he thought of that, his worst fears were realized. He heard the shrilling of the policeman's whistle. And again the cry was raised: 'Stop thief! Stop thief!'

Desperately he raced on, dodging some groups of pedestrians and thrusting aside the few men who half-heartedly attempted to tackle him, as though all his life he had played rugger with enthusiasm. He was still heading for the Grande Bretagne, although he now had little idea what he was going to do should he succeed in reaching it. The hall porter would certainly not be able or willing to save him from arrest by the police; yet he continued his wild career towards the hotel, as though to get the*e was an end in itself.

The blocks between Stadium Street and Venizelou Street are separated by a number of side streets. In almost every case, as he crossed them, the lights favoured him by letting traffic through that temporarily checked his pursuers. But by the time he reached Gian Smats Street, the last he had to cross before reaching the hotel, a mob of fifty people, headed by the policeman, was close on his heels.

The traffic was now against him. Only some desperate measure could save him from immediate capture. A private car, with two suitcases on its roof, and a man and girl inside, must have run him down if he had attempted to cross the road at that moment. He waited ten seconds. The policeman stretched out a hand to seize him by the collar. At that very instant, he took a flying leap and grabbed the roof rack of the passing car.

It carried him round the corner and, as traffic in Greece takes the right-hand side of the road, in the direction in which he had been heading. The girl screamed and the man cursed him. The car had been moving at a good pace, but its driver applied his brakes and, after fifty yards, brought it to a halt. While being dragged by the car. Robbie's feet had been bumping along the ground. As it pulled up, he let go of the luggage rack, stumbled, regained his balance and ran round in front of it on to the pavement. Right in front of him now was the Grande Bretagne's side entrance, which led to the hotel's banqueting and ball rooms.

Robbie gave a swift glance to his right. Thirty yards away, the policeman was coming on full tilt. He had now been joined by another, and they headed an excited crowd of idlers who had taken up the chase. Weil to the front, Robbie glimpsed Cepicka, his scowling face now bright red with his exertions. Robbie knew that he could not hope for protection from the management of the hotel, but his nine days' stay there had given him a thorough knowledge of its ground-floor geography. With the new lead he had gained, he thought there was a sporting chance that he would be able to elude his pursuers in its maze of rooms and passages and, perhaps, find a hiding place before they could catch up with him.

As he dived for the big, glass double doors, the hall porter on duty there was just coming out. They collided violently. Robbie was swung round so that he faced towards Constitution Square. Suddenly his glance lit on a familiar sight. His uncle's Rolls was standing a few yards in front of the car on to which he had leapt. Beside it, staring at him in amazement, stood his uncle's chauffeur, Tompkins.

Thrusting the hall porter aside, he sprinted towards the Rolls. Tompkins, an old soldier with all the prejudices against 'foreigners' and their police of a Briton of his class, sized up the situation instantly. His not to reason why, his boss' nephew was in trouble. In a brace of shakes, he had both doors of the car open, and had scrambled into the driver's seat. With a gasp,

Robbie flung himself into the back and slammed the door behind him.

The clutch slid in, the big car slid forward. Robbie righted himself on the seat, leaned forward and cried huskily: 'Well done, Tompkins! Back to the Embassy, and for God's sake step on it.'

'O.K., Mr. Robbie,' came the unruffled reply. None of the servants at the Embassy ever called Robbie 'Mr. Grenn'. Perhaps it was his never-failing cheerfulness, simplicity and kindliness, but it never occurred to them to condemn the useless life he led, and they took a far better view of him than did his uncle.

Squirming round, Robbie looked out through the back window of the car. What he saw made him bite his lip. He was not out of the wood yet. The two policemen had commandeered the car on which he had taken such a risky lift, and it was giving chase. Behind it, Cepicka was just jumping into a taxi, and another car had made a quick turn out of the line of oncoming traffic, with the evident intention of joining in the hunt. If the Rolls was checked by traffic lights and those cars came up with it, he might still be cornered and arrested.

The Rolls had shot across the corner of Constitution Square and entered the broad Vasilissis Sofias Boulevard, so it was now a straight run and only a quarter of a mile to go. But a lorry emerged from one of the turnings opposite the Royal Palace, forcing Tompkins to slow down. Holding his breath, Robbie continued to stare out of the back window. The driver of the car carrying the policemen was crouched over the wheel, getting every ounce out of his engine. It raced up to within a few yards of the Rolls. Robbie could clearly see the face of the girl beside the driver. It was white and wide-eyed with excitement. One of the policemen was leaning out of the left rear window, yelling at them to halt.

Tompkins swerved the Rolls and it passed the tail of the lorry, missing it by inches. As they cleared it, he put his foot hard down on the accelerator and the great silver car leapt forward again. Now that they had left the centre of the city behind, there was little traffic. In less than a minute, they covered the few hundred yards that brought them to within a stone's throw of the Embassy.

'Not the front entrance,' called Robbie quickly. 'Round to the garage. We can drive straight in there.'

'Just as you wish, Mr. Robbie; though you've no need to worry. We're well ahead of them now,' Tompkins replied with a laugh.

The Rolls sped on, passed the little Byzantine church on the corner, turned into Ploutarchou Street and, turning again, ran smoothly up the slope leading to the garage. Robbie slipped out to open the gates. He was still pulling them wide when the two pursuing cars and the taxi drew up in the street. Their occupants all got out and formed a little cluster on the pavement. Scowling

d 93 angrily, the two policemen demanded that Robbie go with them to the station. Cepicka, speaking atrocious Greek, joined in with threats and curses, while the people in the last car, who had joined the chase for fun, stood by, goggle-eyed, to witness the outcome of the matter.

Robbie only smiled and shook his head. He knew, and the police knew, that he was now technically on British soil. They dared not infringe diplomatic privilege by coming in and removing him forcibly.

Tompkins ran the car into the garage and Robbie helped him shut the gates. The little crowd outside was now getting back into its cars, but Robbie was no longer smiling. He had escaped by taking sanctuary in the Embassy but, if he put a foot outside it, he would again make himself liable to arrest. He dared not leave it. And how was he going to explain to his uncle his presence there?

9

Midnight Conference

When they had shut the garage gates, Tompkins said with a smile: 'Seems you got yourself in a spot of trouble, Mr. Robbie.'

'Yes,' Robbie agreed; then he added after a brief pause: 'They ... I think they mistook me for a pick-pocket.' Much as he hated having to lie to Tompkins, he could not possibly tell him the truth. A moment later, he remembered that he was wearing a dinner jacket which rendered most unlikely the explanation he had given, but Tompkins' only comment was:

'Well, we saw them off all right. Bit of luck for you, though, that I'd just dropped your uncle at the G.B.'

'Just dropped him!' Robbie echoed. 'I thought you must have taken some guests back to the hotel after a dinner party. Surely it's very late for him to have gone out?'

Tompkins looked at him in surprise. 'No later than usual for a reception, Mr. Robbie. The invites are mostly for nine-forty-five, and H.E. likes to show up round ten o'clock.'

Robbie had believed it to be at least midnight. So much had happened to him since he had, with the rest of the staff, left the agency at eight o'clock. It seemed impossible that all the nerve-racking experiences he had been through had been crammed into less than two hours; yet he could not doubt that Tompkins was right.

However, what Tompkins had told him held one ray of comfort. As his uncle was out at a reception, he could enter the house without fear of running into him. Having thanked the chauffeur warmly for rescuing him, he walked the length of the garden and entered the Embassy by a side door that led to the servants' quarters. In her sitting room he found the middle-aged lady of Anglo-Greek descent who acted as housekeeper.

A little hesitantly, he said: 'Good evening, Mrs. Gonis. I . . . er, expect you're a bit surprised to see me, but I didn't have a chance to let you know that I was coming back tonight. Could you get someone to make up the bed in my old room?'

She gave him a motherly smile. 'Oh, I've kept it made up, Mr. Robbie, hoping you'd be back any time. We were all of us quite worried about your going off like that on your own.'

'That's awfully nice of you.' He smiled back. 'Then I think I'll go up there right away.'

'Have you had your supper?' she enquired.

'No, as a matter of fact, I haven't,' he admitted. 'But I don't want to put you to a lot of trouble.'

'It will be no trouble at all. There's some of that moussaka you're so fond of in the larder. One of the girls can soon heat it up in a glass dish, and there's a big piece of the cassata in the fridge left over from dinner. I'll send them up on a tray with a carafe of wine to the little writing room, and you can have them on the table there.'

Robbie's worries had not impaired his appetite, and a quarter of an hour later he was tucking into the moussaka. It was his favourite Greek dish, a sort of shepherd's pie, but made with slices of aubergine between the layers of mince and on top, instead of potato, a thick crust of eggs and toasted cheese.

While waiting for his supper, he had been conning over the decidedly alarming situation in which he found himself. Although he had escaped arrest, he feared that that was very unlikely to be the end of the matter. It seemed certain that the Czechs would press the police to take action against him and that, if not tonight, certainly tomorrow, a police chief would turn up to demand some form of satisfaction from Sir Finsterhorn. His uncle would undoubtedly be furious and, being a stickler for justice, might even order him out of the Embassy, so that justice could take its course.

If only he had been able to retain the brief-case with those papers in it, he felt that things would have been very different. At least, he would have had that valuable prize to hand over as a set-off against any awkwardness that his escapade might cause between the Greek Government and the British Embassy. Unorthodox as his actions had been, his uncle could hardly have thrown him to the lions after he had pulled off a coup of which any real Secret Service agent might be proud. But he had had to abandon the brief-case, and he very much feared that his uncle might think that he had invented the whole story about it, in the nope that it might get him out of his mess.

By the time he was digging into the vanilla ice with its inner layer of chocolate and core of frozen cream, rich with bits of marron glace, angelica and glace cherries, his spirits had gone down to zero. He felt convinced that his uncle would sacrifice him to the accepted concept of an Ambassador's duty and insist on handing him over to the Greeks to stand his trial. Again awful visions of a bleak prison and its incredible discomforts harrowed his thoughts.

His immediate problem, he felt, was to decide on what he should say to his uncle next morning. Should he come clean and tell the whole, unvarnished truth, or should he seek refuge in another tissue of the lies that he was so unaccustomed to telling, protest his innocence and declare that he was the victim of a put-up job by the Czechs, designed to embarrass the British Ambassador?

The latter course seemed to offer a better chance of securing his uncle's protection; but would he believe him? And, in any case, that could not save him from his uncle's anger, because he could not have been made use of in that way had he not, against Sir Finsterhorn's strenuous opposition, taken a job with the Czechs. He wished most desperately that he had someone to whom he could turn for advice. It was then that his slow mind clicked, and he thought of Luke Beecham.

He could not have rung up Luke from the agency, but had meant to do so after it closed that evening. His hectic experiences since had put the matter right out of his mind, but there was no reason why he should not do so now. Leaving his cassata unfinished, he hurried across the hall to the secretary's deserted office, and called Luke's number.

As he feared might prove the case, Luke was not in, but his man answered. Mr. Beecham was out at a dinner party and, unless he went on anywhere, should be home before midnight. Robbie said that he wished to see Mr. Beecham on a matter of the utmost urgency. When he did get home, would he please come to the Embassy by way of the garage entrance, where Mr. Grenn would be waiting for him till any hour. Realizing that the man would go to bed if his master did not arrive home within the next hour or so, Robbie asked him to write out the message and pin it to Mr. Beecham's pillow.

Returning to the little writing room at the back of the house, Robbie finished his cassata and drank up what remained of the carafe of Attika Demestika wine that Mrs. Gonis had sent up with his supper. By then, it was a little after eleven so, in case Luke might get home early, he went cut into the garden.

It was a warm, cloudless night, with a myriad of stars shining brightly overhead. The sight of them made him think of the Immortals, after whom so many of the stars were named. Fervently, he prayed to his patroness, Athene, that Luke might not go on from his dinner party to the Coronet, the Flamingo, the Mocambo or one of the other Athenian night-clubs, as that would mean waiting for him until two or three in the morning.

Normally Robbie was not a heavy smoker, but as he paced up and down the parched lawn, keeping a watchful eye on the gate beside the garage, he lit cigarette after cigarette. At a quarter to twelve, he noticed the lights of the garage go on, and soon afterward heard the purr of the Rolls as Tompkins drove it off to bring home his master. Another ten minutes went by then, to his heartfelt relief, he saw beyond the iron grille of the side gate a dark figure, that caught the eye more readily owing to the starlight glinting on its white shirt front.

As he let in his visitor, Luke said: 'So you've returned to the fold, Robbie. Your having taken a job with the Czechs is the talk of Athens. I must say I give you full marks for having pulled it off; but a little bird told me that your uncle was so angry that he threw you out.'

'He didn't quite do that,' Robbie replied, leading the way over to the summer house. 'To get the job, I had to pretend I was pro-Communist, and my staying on here wouldn't have fitted in. I meant to move out for a while, anyway, but when I told H.E. what was on, he got terribly shirty and told me that he wouldn't have me back.'

'One can hardly wonder. You have caused him a shocking loss of face. But, as you are back, I assume you've managed to patch things up with him.'

'No.' Robbie gave a heavy sigh as they sat down. 'I'm only here now because this evening I was chased by the police.'

'Good Lord! D'you mean you took sanctuary here, and your uncle doesn't know about it?'

'That's it. If I hadn't, I'd be spending the night in a prison cell.'

'My hat, Robbie! You have got yourself into a mess.'

'I know. I desperately need your advice. That's why I asked you to come over.'

Luke took out a cigar and said: 'All right. Tell me all:' Then he lit the cigar and sat back to listen.

It took Robbie a good ten minutes to give an account of all that had happened to him since last they had met, and he ended up: 'So you see, I've either got to come clean with my uncle and risk his handing me over to stand my trial, or swear I'm innocent ^and risk the Czechs and the police proving me to be a liar.'

For a moment Luke pulled thoughtfully on his cigar, then said: 'While you were being chased the first time, when you had the brief-case, do you think you were seen by anyone who knows you, and would talk about having seen you chased?'

'Not as far as I know. It's hardly likely. The chase could not nave lasted more than a couple of minutes while I ran less than half the length of Stadium Street. But why do you ask?' i;fl?^e°^ause' ^ *^{s so}' Czechs are going to find it devilish difficult to prove that you ever stole the brief-case.'

The first policeman whose attention they attracted may have seen me holding it.'

'This happened after dark. In the uncertain light, he might have been mistaken. The fact that you had not got it when you emerged from the building site would throw doubt on his evidence.'

Robbie was hanging on Luke's words. 'Do you ... do you really think, then, there's a chance that the Czechs may not bring a charge? There is the one they meant to trump up about my stealing money, too.'

'About that they haven't got a shred of evidence, so you can count it out. And I think the odds are against their bringing one about the brief-case unless they feel confident they can prove it. You see, it is already assumed in diplomatic circles that you've been ass enough to let them make propaganda out of you. If they do bring a case, it is certain to be thought that, having got you into their toils, this is a plot they have hatched to bring discredit on the British.'

'Then you think my fears about a police chief turning up here in the morning are groundless?'

'One can't say for certain; but there are times when one may save one's bacon by adopting a masterly policy of inactivity, and I'm inclined to think that this is one of them.'

Closing his eyes, Robbie gave a sigh of relief. 'What a marvellous chap you are, Luke. It would never have occurred to me that if I didn't tell my uncle, he might never know anything about it.'

'Of course, there's no guaranteeing that it won't somehow come out later,' Luke felt compelled to warn him.

Robbie nodded. 'That's true; and it makes it all the more rotten luck that I had to abandon the brief-case. If I still had it, I could have afforded to come clean and put myself in the clear once and for all. Being able to hand to my uncle that wad of secret papers would have justified what I've done.' Suddenly struck by an idea, he added: 'I say, though! If you think the police are not likely to grab me, I could go round to that building site tomorrow and collect the brief-case from the place where I hid it.'

Luke shook his head. 'No, Robbie, you mustn't do that. You would be crazy to leave the precincts of the Embassy during the next forty-eight hours. By then, if the Czechs have laid a charge, the police will have had to take some action, and you'll know about it in no uncertain manner from your uncle. But you must give them a chance to come and ask him to hand you over. If they have not shown up by Tuesday, I think you will be able to count yourself in the clear. But if you go out before that, you might land right in the soup.'

'I see. In that case, I'll have to wait till later to collect the briefcase.'

Luke did not speak for a moment, then he said gently: 'If you do manage to retrieve it, Robbie, I don't think it would be a good idea to hand it over to H.E.'

'Why ever not? It would show that, for once, I've done something really worthwhile, and make him take quite a different view of me.'

'I know how you must feel about it, old chap. But I'm afraid you don't understand how careful people in your uncle's position have to be. It is an accepted thing that no diplomat should undertake any form of espionage* while he is en poste abroad. That applies even to Naval, Military and Air Attaches. Of course, there is nothing against their reporting any developments they may be wily enough to worm out of their opposite numbers or obtain by other normal means, but snooping is definitely against the rules. After all, their job is to get on the best possible terms they can with the Government to which they are accredited, and they wouldn't get very far in that if they were constantly under suspicion of spying. Anyhow, that's the way it is, and as you are a member of the Ambassador's household, all that I've said applies, at least technically, to you.'

'But I haven't been spying on the Greeks,' Robbie protested, 'only on the Czechs. And that's quite different.'

'It's not, as far as this matter of principle is concerned. Any diplomat who was caught out using criminal means to secure the secrets of another would be automatically disgraced. So you see how terribly embarrasing it would be for H.E. if you made him privy to the fact that you stole some documents belonging to a foreign Government.'

Robbie's face fell. 'If that's the case, I'm glad you warned me. But if I can get hold of those papers again, it seems an awful waste to do nothing about them.'

After a moment, Luke said: 'As there is nothing to identify the agents that sent them in, I think you may be overestimating their value, although, of course, our "I" people would certainly like to have the names of the crew members that are mentioned as being pro-Communist.' Raising the hand that held the cigar to emphasize his next words, he went on:

'Now this you must keep under your hat. And I mean that. As it happens I know a chap to whom I could pass them on with no questions asked about how I came by them. So if you do escape exposure during these next few days, and later manage to retrieve them, bring them along to me.'

₍ 'Oh, I say! That's wonderful!' Robbie's spirits soared again. Hven if they're only of small value, I'll feel then that I haven't been through all this awful business for nothing.'

'Good. Now what do you intend to say to H.E. tomorrow? I mean, about returning here without his permission.'

'I hadn't thought. Of course, I shall tell him that I've lost my job with the Czechs, and I suppose I could throw myself on his mercy.'

'You can if you've had enough of playing these Gregory Sallust games; but otherwise it wouldn't be fair to him to ask to be allowed to take up your quarters here again permanently.'

Robbie thought hard for a few moments, then he said: Til have to think about that. I may decide to chuck in my hand, but I don't want to. There's a special reason why I feel that I must go on until I've got to the bottom of this tobacco-oil thing. And, although I had to leave behind the list I made of the places where groups of Czechs are going to start prospecting, I can remember most of them; so I've got something to go on.'

'Are you quite certain the accommodation Krajcir was asked to book was not for batches of ordinary tourists?'

'Yes. Each group was divided into engineers and several grades of technicians. I'd bet anything that they are up to some game or other that won't do the Western Powers any good.'

Luke stood up. 'In that case, I'd be the last person to dissuade you from finding out all you can. Anyhow, I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for you these next few days. Should the worst happen, and H.E. does let the police cart you off, give me a ring, and I'll get you a decent lawyer. Now, I think it's time for bed.'

As Robbie escorted his friend back to the side gate and let him out, he said again and again how grateful he was for his advice. Then, after a last good night, he re-crossed the garden and went up to his room. Suddenly, he felt very tired. In spite of the anxiety he still felt about the outcome of the animosity he had aroused in the Czechs, almost as soon as his head touched the pillow he fell sound asleep.

In the morning, knowing that his uncle disliked unpunctuality, he was first down in the breakfast room. Euan Wettering arrived a few minutes later, gave him a surprised stare and said:

'Well, who would have thought of seeing our young fellow-traveller. What's the latest news from Moscow?'

Robbie reddened. 'You know jolly well that I only pretended Communist sympathies to get a job. Uncle must have told you that.'

'He told me that you had suddenly got the bit between your teeth and nothing he could say would prevent your disgracing the family.'

'He has been at me often enough to get a job,' Robbie muttered sullenly. 'And I got about the only sort of job I could be any good at.'

Euan grinned. 'Am I to assume, then, that you have come back to tell us how successful you have been at it?'

At that moment, Sir Finsterhorn entered the room and Euan went on sarcastically: 'Look who's here, sir. The Kremlin's latest and most brilliant protege. He has come back to tell us that he has just been appointed to lead the Glorious, Boneheaded, Thugminded Youth Movement of Czechoslovakia.'

'Shut up, Euan! Shut up!' Robbie burst out in desperation. 'Mind your own damned business.'

The expression on the Ambassador's face had shown no perceptible change. As he sat down at the table, he asked in a calm voice: 'When did you get back, Robbie?'

'Last night, sir,' Robbie told him. 'And please don't take any notice of the things Euan is saying. The truth is that I've got the sack, and I felt I ought to come back and tell you about it.'

'I don't mind betting orfe thing,' Euan chortled. 'You didn't get the sack for pinching the bottom of one of those plump-breasted workers' joys that the Iron Curtain countries send abroad as typists in their Legations. Did you sock your boss, or was it just laziness?'

'Euan!' Sir Finsterhorn intervened sharply. 'Why you should display so much malice toward Robbie, I have no idea. You will kindly refrain from baiting him. It will do us no harm to eat our breakfasts in silence. As for you, Robbie, I should like a few words with you in private afterwards.'

In the belief that the presence of a third party, even if antagonistic, tends to make matters easier during a dreaded interview, Robbie had hoped to get through his ordeal over breakfast. Now, Sir Finsterhorn's ban on speech condemned him to fifteen minutes' agonizing introspection and growing panic. At last the meal was finished, and he followed the Ambassador across the hall into his study.

Sitting down at his desk, Sir Finsterhorn put the tips of his fingers together, looked over them at Robbie and said only: 'Well?'

'I've not much to say, sir,' Robbie announced awkwardly. 'I didn't exactly get the sack. They put me into their Travel Agency, and I spent simply hours sorting folders and stamping envelopes. After a week of it, I was completely fed-up, and last night I had a row with the Manager, a chap named Krajcir. And I . . . well, I just decided to leave.'

'Does this mean that you are not going back; that you have broken with your Czech friends permanently?'

Robbie nodded violently. 'Oh yes, Uncle.' Then he added with unconscious candour: 'I'm sure they wouldn't give me another job, even if I asked for one.'

Sir Finsterhorn allowed his expression of severity to relax a trifle. 'You are, I trust, aware that this escapade of yours caused me grave embarrassment?'

'Yes, Uncle. I'm afraid it must have. I'm terribly sorry about that.'

'And I told you that if you took this job, I would not have you back at the Embassy?'

I know. I realize now that I ought not to have gone against

your wishes. But . . . well, I was terribly keen to prove myself.'

Again Sir Finsterhorn's face became a shade more amiable, and he said: 'I'm not blaming you for that, Robbie. Your upbringing has been so very different from that of a normal young man. It's only natural that you should suffer at times from a feeling of inferiority and wish to show people that they underestimate your capabilities. Even so, it is most unfortunate that you should have chosen to attempt to do so in a manner that has brought such discredit on yourself and embarrassment to all of us here at the Embassy. What have you in mind to do now?'

'Well, Uncle. I ... I was hoping that you would forgive me and let me remain here . . .'

Robbie had been about to say 'for the next few days'. But Sir Finsterhorn cut in with a quick shake of his head. 'Forgive you, yes; but let you remain here, no. Your having proclaimed yourself a pro-Communist makes that impossible.'

Robbie caught his breath. His heart seemed to rise up into his throat and choke him. His dread of arrest and prison surged back, leaving him for the moment tongue-tied. Luke had said so very definitely that if he left the Embassy during the next forty-eight hours, and the Czechs demanded police action against him, his number would be up. If his uncle expelled him here and now, he might find the police waiting round the corner, on the chance that he would be fool enough to come out, and they would be able to pull him in without going to all the trouble involved in making representations through diplomatic channels. At last, he managed to stutter:

'Uncle . . . please! Can't you let me stay here for a day or two? I ... I mean it will take me quite a time to pack. Can't I stay here just till Monday night?'

Sir Finsterhorn suddenly smiled. 'My dear Robbie, there's no need to take what I said like that. I've no wish to hurry you unduly. Of course, you must have time to pack and make your arrangements. In my view, your best plan would be to return to England. At least you have shown us that you are perfectly capable of taking care of yourself; and if you can do that in Athens, you can certainly do so in Cheltenham. No doubt you could arrange matters so that you leave here by the end of the week.'

'Oh, thank you, Uncle; thank you,' Robbie murmured, almost overcome with relief. Then, seeing that the interview was over, he turned and quickly left the room.

He had won his reprieve, but he knew that he was still very far from being out of the wood. At any time that day or the next, the police or a representative of the Greek Foreign Office might come to see his uncle, and blow everything wide open. He could only pray that Luke was right and the Czechs would decide that they had not a strong enough case against him to press for action. But if Luke proved wrong, the line he had taken

of concealing the truth would make his case worse than ever. He had burnt his boats, and with them any hope that his uncle would give him protection.

10

Wh

That Sunday proved the worst day that Robbie had ever spent in his life. It seemed interminable and, as though drawn by a magnet, he could not resist spending the greater part of it hovering in the vicinity of the hall. As his uncle's secretary was off duty, he used his room as a listening post, sitting in it with the door ajar and a book, on which he found it impossible to concentrate, on his lap. Every time the front-door bell rang, he jumped up and peered out, waiting with pounding heart to find out who the caller was.

So absorbed was his mind with the fear that it could be only a matter of time before he would have to face exposure, that it was not until twelve o'clock that it occurred to him that he ought to do something about the belongings he had left at the Grande Bretagne. Glad of the chance to occupy himself with something that would temporarily take his thoughts off his nerve-racking vigil, he went in search of his uncle's valet, Loadham.

This lean, cadaverous individual also pressed Robbie's trousers and looked after his clothes. He took a gloomy pleasure in describing life in the great houses in which, when younger, he had served masters much more blue-blooded than Sir Finsterhorn, and Robbie was a good listener. Moreover, with his habitual generosity, Robbie gave Loadham a handsome tip every week; so their relations were distinctly cordial.

Haying run Loadham to earth, he opened matters by giving him his usual weekly tip, although he had been away for the past week. He then asked him to go to the Grand Bretagne, pay his bill and collect his things. A little nervously, he added: T came back here last night because some thieves broke into my suite at the hotel. The management don't know that, so they may expect me to pay for the damage to the doors. If they do, don't mention the thieves; just pay up without argument. And . . . er, Loadham, I'd be awfully grateful if you didn't say anything about this to anybody.'

As Loadham took the blank cheque that Robbie had made °ut, he gave him a pained look that almost amounted to a

reprimand. 'As though I should ever dream of such a thing, Mr. Robbie. None of my gentlemen has ever had to complain about my discretion.'

Satisfied that Loadham would not give him away, Robbie hastened back to the hall, fearful now that a bringer of explosive tidings might have appeared on the scene in his absence; but an anxious enquiry of the footman on duty reassured him. No one had called during the past half-hour.

Both Sir Finsterhorn and Euan were out for lunch, so he ate the meal in solitary state. Afterwards, knowing that his uncle would not be back for some hours, he determined to be firm with himself and spend the afternoon lying down in his room. Up there, he found that Loadham had accomplished his mission. The valet had put away all his clothes, but his other belongings were in their usual places and, with heartfelt thanks, he saw that his precious manuscript was on his desk.

After an hour of attempting to doze, he gave it up and went downstairs again. It had crossed his mind that, if the police did call while his uncle was out, at least he would know that he must expect the worst and be prepared for a second visit from them. It was not until after six that the awful tension from which he was suffering began to ease, as Greek officials would be certain to consider an Ambassador's convenience. It seemed unlikely, therefore, that they would put off seeking an interview until an hour when he might be entertaining people to drinks.

It happened, too, that Sir Finsterhorn had invited a number of people in for cocktails that evening, and afterwards he was giving a small, bachelor dinner party to introduce a newly arrived Military Attache to his French, Italian and Turkish opposite numbers. So, from seven o'clock onwards, Robbie's apprehensions perforce nagged at him only intermittently; but by the time he got to bed, he was thoroughly worn out.

That nothing untoward had occurred on Sunday should have reduced his fears considerably. Yet soon after he woke, the horrid thought came to him that, the Greek Foreign Office being manned only by a skeleton staff on the Sabbath, the police were unlikely to have made the necessary contacts there on that day. Therefore, his period of maximum danger had yet to be faced.

Again, like an uneasy ghost, he haunted the hall and staircase until several people had asked him what he was waiting for. Driven by this up to the first-floor landing, he hovered there for a while, cold shivers going down his spine at every ring of the front-door bell. A lunch party forced him to endeavour to behave normally from one o'clock until nearly three. Then, so that he might continue to keep his tormented watch on the hall, he adopted the expedient of pretending to go into the matter of his return to England. At intervals, he rang up in turn every travel agency, air line and shipping company he could think of, and made copious notes of flying times, sailings and fares. Somehow, he got through the afternoon and it was drink-time again. Euan was entertaining a party of American archaeologists on Sir Finsterhorn's liquor, and their talk meant little to Robbie; but he helped himself liberally to cocktails and stood about keeping an anxious eye on his uncle, in case one of the staff came in to say that someone was asking for him.

By eight o'clock, Robbie was three parts tight, but the amount he had drunk had made him take a rosier view of things. He was at last beginning to believe that Luke must have been right, and that he need not have feared exposure after all.

Having just seen off two -of his guests, Euan passed within a few paces of him and, noticing that his face was chalk-white, paused to ask: 'What's the matter, Robbie? You look as if you'd just seen a ghost.'

Robbie was feeling distinctly queasy. Gulping down the hot saliva that was running in his mouth, he mumbled: 'Nothing. Well—nothing much. It's only that . . . that I'm not feeling very well.'

Euan shot a quick look at Sir Finsterhorn, then said with a kindness unusual in him: 'Your trouble, my lad, is that you've been knocking it back too hard, and if you make an ass of yourself at dinner, the Old Man will have your head off. Better go up to your room. I'll re-arrange the places at the dinner table and tell him that you've eaten something that has disagreed with you.'

'Thanks, Euan,' Robbie nodded. 'Jolly decent of you.' Then, with an uncertain smile, he straightened his shoulders and left what remained of the party.

Upstairs he was sick, had a bath and felt better. Flopping into bed, he at last relaxed, and the lingering fumes of the alcohol he had imbibed helped to dull his brain into sleep.

On the Tuesday morning, he came downstairs to breakfast with a ravenous appetite, but still not entirely easy in his mind. It had struck him that, instead of calling on his uncle, the Greek authorities might take up the matter of his criminal activities by sending the Ambassador a written memorandum. If they had done that, it would have been drafted only the day before, and so would arrive in that morning's post.

Once more on tenterhooks through breakfast and after it, he hung about in the vicinity of his uncle's study until a quarter past ten, fearing that at any moment the secretary might emerge with a dread summons for him. But when the secretary did appear, he gave Robbie a smiling nod, and by that time the morning's post must have been opened and dealt with. It was only then, after what seemed to him an unending nightmare of uncertainty, that he felt he might dare to think of the future.

During the past two days, he had found it utterly impossible. But now he had to make up his mind whether to return to England, as his uncle wished, or remain on in Greece. Whichever way he decided, he must now begin making arrangements in earnest, for he had to be out of the Embassy before the end of the week.

It was a lovely day, and he badly needed a change of scene; so he rang up a garage from which he sometimes hired cars, and asked them to send one round. When it arrived, he told the man to drive him out to Sounion. There, he felt, on the headland between sea and sky, at the southernmost point of the peninsula of Attica, would be as good a place as any for him to think things out.

Within five minutes, the car had passed Hadrian's Arch and swung into the broad, straight boulevard that leads to the coast; but when they reached the Gulf, instead of turning right towards the Piraeus, it turned left and passed the Athens Airport at Phaleron. The road then followed the shore, twisting in and out along a score of charming bays in which blue seas broke on golden sands. Here and there, for some fifteen miles, there were clusters of villas, small hotels and cafes. These, later in the year, would be crowded with Athenian holiday-makers, but for the last thirty miles modern buildings were comparatively few and the rugged grandeur of the scene hardly differed from what it must have been in the days of the ancient Greeks.

It was a little after twelve o'clock when the car turned inland, ran up a steep, twisting road and deposited Robbie at the Tourist Pavilion below the headland. In front of it was an array of tables under gay umbrellas, but only one coachload of tourists was scattered among them enjoying iced drinks or an early lunch. In the kitchen of the restaurant, he found that a fisherman had just brought in a catch of kalamarakia so he ordered a dish of the baby squids to be put aside for him and fried at a quarter past one. Then he set out to trudge up the last half mile to the temple of Poseidon, which crowns this lofty promontory.

The temple was built in the Great Age, under Pericles; it is made of pure white marble, and twelve of its original nineteen Doric columns are still standing. To either side of it, the coast falls away, so that it dominates the scene for many miles around. In the background, the green slopes of olive groves and vineyards merge into the brown of uncultivable land broken by stony outcrop, then rise to rocky heights, sharply outlined against a bright blue sky. To the east, south and west, the much darker blue of the sea again meets the sky, broken only here and there by a fleecy white cloud. Seen from whichever angle, the Temple presents one of the loveliest sights in all Greece.

But today Robbie had no eyes for its beauty. Walking past it to within a few yards of the edge of the cliff, he sat down there and, pulling a long stem of wild grass, began to nibble at it. Apart from a few tourists strolling round the ruin in his rear, the place was deserted, and the only sound was the ceaseless pounding of the surf on the rocks far below.

Although he had told Luke during their midnight talk that, if he escaped arrest, he wanted to continue with his self-imposed mission, he had been so scared during the past two days by the results of his initial efforts that he had almost decided to return to England. But now that harrowing episode appeared to be behind him, and he was once more greatly tempted to make use of the information he had secured.

The fact that it was a leaf from Athene's sacred tree blowing through the open window that had led to his coming by the list of places at which groups of Czechs were shortly to begin their operations seemed to him positive evidence that the goddess was keeping a watchful eye on him. Perhaps, indeed, it was she who had in some way influenced events so that he might remain free to carry on the quest with which she had charged him. If so, and he now abandoned it, he might well become the victim of her wrath. There was also the personal side of the matter. This was the one chance he had to prove himself as good as other men. If he rejected it, no other might come his way, and that would mean the acceptance for life of a shaming inferiority.

Before he had been sitting there for fifteen minutes, he had decided that he would stay in Greece.

The next question was how should he set about resuming his mission? Having 'cooked his goose' with the Czechs, it was clear that he could not hope to get anything more out of them by remaining in Athens. He must, then, go to some of the places where they were about to commence work, and endeavour to find out what they were up to.

This idea immediately appealed to him because, although he had been in Greece for a year, he had had no opportunity to see anything of the country except in the vicinity of Athens. During the past summer, he had longed to visit some of the shrines such as Delphi and Olympia, made famous by his beloved gods. However, he had then still been too nervous of having to talk to the groups of strangers with whom he would have had to travel in the long-distance buses used for conducted tours. As he could not drive a car, he had been unable to make such trips on his own.

This last objection still held, if he meant to visit a chain of places some of which were several hundred miles apart, and yet remain mobile. The railway system in Greece made transit by it from one coast town to another extremely difficult and tedious. It then occurred to him that he could quite well afford to hire a car and driver. To conceal from the driver the true purpose of his journey, he could say that he was collecting information for his book. Some further thought produced an improvement on this idea. It would be greatly preferable to have an educated companion with him as driver, instead of an ordinary mechanic. Why should he not secure a secretary who would also act as chauffeur? When they broke their journey for a day or two, he could give the man some typing to do, and that would materially strengthen his cover as an author writing a book on the gods and their temples.

By the time he had walked back to the restaurant, he was so pleased with his plan that he treated himself to a half bottle of St. Helena—a white wine from Aechia that resembles a good quality hock and is one of the most expensive wines in Greece— to wash down the squids. Having rounded off his meal with a huge, sun-ripe orange, he sent for pencil and paper and set about drafting an advertisement.

After much sucking of the pencil and several false starts, he produced the following:

Young gentleman requires chauffeur who will also carry out light secretarial duties while driving him on tour of Peloponnesus. Good pay, all found. No interviews given. Write qualifications fully to Robert Grenn, British Embassy.

He had inserted the phrase no interviews given as an afterthought as he feared that, if a number of applicants queued up in the hall of the Embassy to see him, his uncle might be annoyed.

As there was no point in his getting back to Athens until the newspaper offices re-opened, he spent the next hour up on the headland again, thinking about his book; but soon after four, he was back in the capital, handing in his advertisement at the offices of Kathimerini, for insertion next day in the Personal Column.

Before returning to the Embassy, he walked down Korai Street with a view to making a swift reconnaissance of the building site in which he had hidden the brief-case, for he was contemplating a return there after dark that night to retrieve it. As he strolled past, the low barrier of crossed poles over which he had jumped proved no obstruction, now that it was daylight, to his seeing the whole of the ground floor. It seemed much larger than when he had crouched there in the dark. There were at least twenty of the square, concrete pillars, and it might have been near any one of a dozen of them that he had hidden the brief-case. Yet worse, since Saturday, the workmen had completed the boarding over of the floor, so, even had he known near which pillar to look, it would have meant bringing implements to lever up the planks before he could retrieve his prize. To attempt to pull up half the floor was obviously out of the question.

With a sigh, he reconciled himself to the permanent loss of the reports that had been near costing him so dear. As some consolation he recalled Luke's opinion that, since they contained no clues to the identity of the agents who had written them, they would probably not have proved of any great value to N.A.T.O. Intelligence.

Dismissing the matter from his mind, he spent a cheerful hour before dinner sorting out his things into those that could be got into two suitcases to go in the boot of a car, and the rest which he felt sure his uncle would allow him to leave at the Embassy until—as he would say—he could send for them.

While he was so employed, Loadham arrived on the scene and enquired the reason for this disturbance of drawers and cupboards. When Robbie told him, the cadaverous valet shook his head sadly over his young master's impending departure, but insisted that he should not pack for himself. He had only to put aside, for packing, the thftigs he meant to take with him. Loadham would pack them when instructed to do so and, after Robbie's departure, take care of everything else.

This arrangement left Robbie nothing to do after dinner; so, his mind free of worry, he returned to his book, re-reading parts of it with a view to getting in the mood to start a new chapter next day. On looking through the chapter on Jason, he was far from satisfied with it; so on the Wednesday, instead of tackling a fresh subject, he re-wrote the chapter. And this is how it read when he finally laid down his pen that night:

THE HEROES (no. 3 jason)

I'm not sure that I ought not to have headed this chapter the argonauts, or even the golden fleece, because both would be more likely to ring a bell in my kind reader's mind than just the name of Jason.

Anyhow, as 1 have now managed to wedge these romantic words into the first paragraph readers will have a pretty good idea what this chapter is about.

I have not yet told you about Chiron. He was an old, white-headed Centaur who lived in a cave up on Mount Pelion, which is not far from the coast in north-eastern Greece, and he was looked on by everyone as quite the top tutor of his day. He had the misfortune to die very painfully from having scratched himself with one of Hercules's poisoned arrows, but before that lots of Kings used to send their sons to be educated by him. In fact his cave seems to have been a sort of Eton of those days.

Of course they didn't use books, or not much, anyway, but he taught them all the sort of things that really matter, like being kind to old people, reverence for the gods and sticking to one's Pals through thick and thin. Besides this he coached them in hunting, wrestling, dancing, mountain climbing and how to play the harp and sing, so he must have been quite an exceptional sort of Prof.

Jason spent most of his youth as one of Chiron's pupils, with a whole lot of other young Princes; although at the time he had no idea that he too came out of the top drawer. Actually his father, Aeson, should have been a King, but he had come unstuck through letting his kingdom be stolen from him by his wicked half-brother Pelias. This Pelias was a very unpleasant type as given half a chance he would have killed young Jason, so as to make certain he wouldn't be around to claim the kingdom when he grew up. That is why Aeson hurried little Jason off to live with old Chiron on Mount Pelion.

Jason soon grew as big as I am and he was very much quicker at doing things. He was a match for any of the others at throwing a spear or scaling a cliff, and he didn't mind swimming in icy torrents in mid-winter a bit. What is more, he had taken in all old Chiron had told him about never telling people what a fine fellow he was and showing a sort of polite indifference when dishes were put on the table that were his very favourite thing to eat. I hesitate to say so, but he seems to me to have been a bit of a prig.

At length the day came when Chiron decided that he had turned out a star pupil with no further edges to be rounded off, so he gave Jason the lowdown about his birth and how his father had been done down by Pelias.

Our Hero at once became as mad as a hatter. He would not delay a single day, but next morning set off down the mountain towards the coast where the kingdom lay that should have been his. After springing from rock to rock like a billy-goat for an hour or two, he got down to vineyards, orchards and fields of corn, but then he found himself facing a rushing river.

On its bank was sitting an old woman dressed in filthy rags and moaning to herself: 'Who will carry me across?'

You and I, dear reader, would have known the answer to that one, but Jason very nearly missed the boat. He looked at her as though she were something the cat had brought in; but, luckily for him, on second thoughts he remembered what Chiron had told him about acting as a good guy to anyone in trouble. Hiding his annoyance as best he could, he said: 'All right, mother, I'll take you over.'

No sooner had he spoken than she leapt upon his back and flung her skinny arms round his neck. Far from happy, he waded into the river, slipping and stumbling and cutting his feet on hidden rocks. She clung to him like a limpet and seemed to weigh a ton, so he came near to drowning and had one hell of a time before he managed to stagger with her up the opposite bank.

As you will have guessed she then leapt lightly to the ground and dazzled the poor chap by turning into a female sheathed in silk and surrounded by a sort of full-length halo of incandescent light. It transpired that she was Hera, Zeus's official wife, and what follows is one of the few things I shall have to record to that horrid woman's credit. She told him that as he had proved himself to be a charitable type, he could call on her for help whenever he needed it. And in this case she was as good as her word—or at least now and then.

Feeling distinctly pleased with himself, Jason slogged on towards the city, the towers of which he could now see in the distance. However, his progress was slowed up quite a bit because while fording the river one of his sandals had been gripped by the mud which sucked it off his foot. But he was much too tough to let a little thing like that get him down, and in due course he reached the capital.

Now although Jason did not know it, some years before King Pelias had consulted an Oracle. It had told him that he would lose his kingdom to a stranger who came to him with one bare foot. So it will be readily understood that when Jason presented himself at Court and the King saw that he was wearing only one sandal he nearly threw a fit.

Pulling himself together, Pelias asked Jason who he was, whence he came and all that. Jason, who was either lacking in imagination or a V.C. type that does not count the odds, promptly replied: 'I am the son of Aeson, come to claim my rights. Get off that throne or it will be the worse for you.'

Why Pelias did not call out his Guard and have Jason done in there and then, history does not tell us. Perhaps the prophecy had scared him down to his button boots, so that his mind was not ticking over properly, or he may have had a thing against taking human life. Anyhow, instead of having Jason's throat cut, he invited him to dinner.

While they were ail having a wash and brush up, the King seems to have got his wits back. He had several lovely daughters so he sent for them and said: 'Listen, girls. This fellow Jason whom I've asked to dine is a heel. If we're not darned careful he'll have us all out of here on our ears, and you will find yourself earning a living on the streets. Fortunately he seems a brainless lout, and you are his cousins, so you've got to cozen him, understand? Don't spare the petting, and leave the rest to me,' or words to that effect.

After that you can imagine what happened during dinner. The girls clustered round 'Cousin Jason' as though they were bees and he was the honey pot. They flickered their eyelashes and opened their eyes to the widest extent exclaiming 'Oh!' when they in turn felt his biceps. And they took jolly good care that his glass was never empty. When they felt that they had softened him up enough they gave the wink to their papa, and he brought on the star turn from the local cabaret.

This character's act was a monologue accompanied by occasional twangs on a harp. He told the story of how a Prince and Princess named Phrixus and Helle were terribly persecuted oy their cruel stepmother Queen Ino, until the gods took pity on them and sent them a Golden Ram, that was a kind of animal aircraft, in which to get away from her. They mounted on its back and it must have done pretty well a vertical take-off. Anyway the pace was too hot for poor Helle. When they were crossing the Dardanelles she got giddy, fell off and was drowned; hence the ancients' name for the place, the Hellespont.

The story went on to the effect that Phrixus managed to cling on until the beast had carried him right up the coast of the Euxine Sea and made a safe landing in a country called Colchis, which was probably a part of what we now know as Rumania. Far from being grateful to the Ram, Phrixus proceeded to sacrifice it to Zeus then skinned it and hung its Fleece up in a sacred grove near what was probably a mouth of the Danube.

Phrixus settled down quite happily among the Colchians, married Chalciope, the eldest daughter of their King, whose name was Aeetes, and died in the land of his adoption. But the story did not end there. Why the Kings of those days had to be always consulting Oracles, goodness knows, for they never seem to have done them any good. Anyway, King Aeetes consulted one and it told him that as long as he held on to the Golden Fleece he would be all right, but if once he let it be taken off him he would be a deader.

In the circumstances he did some pretty serious thinking. This resulted in his managing to get hold of—but don't ask me how— a huge fire-breathing serpent that never slept, as guardian of the tree to which the Golden Fleece had been nailed.

The harp-strummer then ended on a note of lament. For some reason undisclosed—since Phrixus had been perfectly happy in Colchis and never made any attempt to return with the Fleece to Greece—his ghost would never lie quiet until the Fleece was brought back to the country of his birth.

By this time Jason must have had a cuddlesome cousin on each of his knees and a third breathing hard down the back of his neck. He was, too, as tight as a tick, otherwise he would never have done what he did.

Staggering to his feet he cried: 'Poo' ole Phrixus! Poo' ole Phrixus! Can't let 'is ghost lie restless in t'grave. I go an' get Fleece. Jus' leave everythin' t'me!'

I've never tried W write like a drunk speaks before, so I can only hope the above will give my readers the right impression.

Seeing that this great big softie had fallen into his trap, the King led the cheering and the girls all patted Jason on the back. Then I suppose his newly found relations carried him up to bed.

Next morning he had the whale of a hangover and realized what an ass he had made of himself. He was very tempted to back out, and I can appreciate his feelings because I've recently had a somewhat similar experience, except that I wasn't tiddly when I let myself in for it. But old Chiron had taught him that if a chap pledges himself to do something he is in honour bound to go through with it. So Jason wrapped his head in a wet towel and set about making a plan.

Living in those parts at the time there was a really wizard shipwright named Argus. Jason got hold of him and had him build a ship out of pine trees cut from Mount Pelion. It was a fifty-oared galley, strong enough to resist any storm yet light enough to be carried overland by its crew. That shows you what a clever old buffer Argus must have been, and it's not surprising that they called the ship after him, the Argo.

As a matter of fact not quite all the credit for the light but unsinkable vessel can go to Argus. In the meantime Jason had paid a visit to Hera's Oragle at Dodona. There was a sacred grove there with a great oak tree in it through which she spoke to people. The goddess told him to lop a limb off her oak and have it carved into a figurehead for his ship, then if he got into difficulties he was to consult it and it would tell him what to do. She also asked Athene to inspire Argus with her wisdom while he was building the vessel, so you see he had the benefit of the goddess's know-how.

Next Jason ran a recruiting campaign, to persuade a lot of other hard-boiled types to come with him. The other Heroes didn't need much persuading because by that time getting the Fleece back had become a thing that had to be done for the honour of Greece. Hercules, Theseus, Orpheus, Castor and Pollux, Admetus, Peleus and lots of others rolled up, fifty in all, including old Argus, who insisted on taking an oar. In addition they took Lynceus as their pilot and Tiphys as their steersman. They would have liked to have Hercules for their captain, but as Jason had started all this Hercules insisted that he should have the job.

When all was set, cunning King Pelias and his girls waved them good-bye. How Jason's pretty cousins felt about him by this time we are not informed. If he was keen about petting parties they were probably a bit misty-eyed, but their papa must have been chuckling in his beard at the happy thought that he would never set eyes on his troublesome nephew again.

Putting out from the coast of Thessaly, the Argo crossed the Aegean and anchored off the island of Lemnos. Some little time before, the women of this island had got bored with their husbands and boy friends, so they had killed them all. Thinking it over later, they came to the conclusion that this had been a big mistake. My lady readers will therefore easily imagine how pleased they were when Jason put in with his crew of fifty-odd likely lads. These stalwarts were pretty quick to realize that the gods had given them a lucky break, so from the very first night a good time was had by all. Not having even seen a man for goodness knows how long, the Lemnos girls fairly let themselves np and spared no pains at all to get the Argonauts thinking that Lemnos was just the place to settle down in for good. Even Jason seems to have liked the idea.

But crusty old Hercules had remained in the ship. As my readers will remember, when young he had chosen Duty instead of Pleasure. So after these jollifications had been going on for some time he came ashore and told his companions what he thought of them. It may be that by then the Argonauts were beginning to find life on an island entirely populated by women a bit exhausting. Anyhow, they admitted that they ought to be ashamed of themselves, and agreed to continue their voyage.

Having sailed up the Hellespont they entered the Propontis Sea, which we now call the Sea of Marmara. There they put in to a haven on its south coast and were kindly received by Cyzicus, the King of the Doliones. This young man was just about to get married and invited them to his wedding feast. Hercules, not being keen on that sort of thing, went off on his own, and it was as well he did. He found that while all the inhabitants of the place were celebrating, a race of giants had come down from the hills and were blocking up the mouth of the harbour with huge stones.

He gave the alarm and kept the giants off with his poisoned arrows until the other Argonauts came on the scene and managed to get their vessel to sea. But later that night a storm drove them back on to the coast. The Doliones, thinking they were enemy raiders, set upon them. In the fight that followed several of the Doliones were killed, among them young King Cyzicus. When daylight came, the mistake was discovered. Everyone was upset, but the Argonauts could only express their regrets and stay over to attend the funeral rites.

Farther along the same coast the Mysians welcomed and gave a party for them. But once again Hercules behaved like a boor and wouldn't join in the fun. However, this time he had something special to occupy him. He had recently broken his oar and he went off into the forest to look for a pine tree large enough to make an oar suitable to his immense strength.

I have never done any rowing myself, but I should have thought that having one oar much bigger than all the rest would have made things pretty tricky. Still, that's beside the point. With him he took Polyphemus, a pal of his, and a beautiful youth named Hylas, of whom he was very fond.

Having found a pine tree that he liked the look of, Hercules sent young Hylas to fetch some water for their frugal supper, then took off his coat to cut the tree down. Hylas found a lake and was kneeling down on its bank to fill whatever it was he had brought with him when a lot of pretty heads bobbed up nearby. These belonged to Water Nymphs who owned the place. After one look at Hylas these girls decided that they could have a lot of fun with such a good-looking chap if only they could keep him with them. So they pulled him in and he never came up again.

Polyphemus heard his shout and ran to get Hercules. Thinking their young friend had been carried off by robbers, they searched the woods all night and went on searching them for some days afterwards. Meanwhile the other Argonauts were getting a bit restive, because the wind was fair. At length, believing H. and Co. must all be dead, they sailed without them. However, before they had gone far a sea god called Glaucus surfaced near the vessel and said for them not to worry. Hercules was O.K. and before long he would have plenty of other things on his plate, so he wouldn't really mind very much not having been in on getting the Golden Fleece.

Their next call was on the King of the Bebrycians. He was not a nice person, as he was very strong and his fun was to insist that any stranger should box with him, then knock them out. In Pollux, who took him on, he caught a Tartar, for he got knocked out himself.

King Phineus, whose country they came to soon after, they found in very poor shape. He was blind and three horrid creatures called Harpies never ceased from tormenting him. They were enormous vultures with women's faces and every time the blind King tried to eat anything they either snatched it from him or made a nasty mess on it. Why he had not long since starved to death is a mystery, and I don't see either how he managed to govern his kingdom.

Fortunately several of the Argonauts were the sons of gods by good-looking girls, and two of them had been born with wings. So they flapped up into the air and sent the Harpies packing. Anxious to repay the people who had at last enabled him to eat a decent dinner, Phineus warned them that they were heading for two floating islands of icy rock called the Symplegades. These islands had a nasty habit of parting, then when a ship was sailing between them suddenly closing and crushing it to bits* Phineus tipped Jason off to take a dove aboard and let it fly between the islands first.

Jason took this advice and when they came to the icebergs, as that is what they must have been, he sent the dove through the channel. The two 'bergs came together with a clang and, believe it or not, nipped off the dove's tail feathers. But the shock made them bounce apart, and by rowing all out the Argonauts managed to get through just in time. Personally, instead of risking going between them I should have rowed round one of them, but none of our Heroes seems to have thought of that.

By this time they were well up in the cold Black Sea and there they had many other adventures, including being attacked by a flock of enormous birds called the Stymphalides. Their feathers Were made of brass and they could shoot them off like javelins, so to be pulling at an oar beneath them can have been no fun at all. But half the Argonauts kept rowing while the other half banged their spears on their bronze shields, and the noise scared the birds off.

They were now drawing near to Colchis, but before going in lor their attempt to make off with the Fleece, they anchored under the lee of an island some way off the coast. Here they had a stroke of luck, for they came upon four naked youths who had been shipwrecked there. These turned out to be the sons of Phrixus, so they were able to tell the Argonauts all about the court of King Aeetes and guide them to it .

Naturally these young men's mother, Chalciope, was delighted to see them again, and her much younger sister, Medea, instantly took a very good view of Jason. But King Aeetes felt a bit uneasy at his house being filled with all these forceful-looking Argonauts, and after supper, when Jason told him what they had come for, he looked very glum indeed.

Jason related all the perils they had been through and claimed the Fleece as their reward. I am no lawyer, but it doesn't seem to me that even shooting Niagara Falls, climbing Mount Everest, going to the bottom of the sea in a bathysphere then being first man up in the stratosphere would entitle one to ask for the Crown Jewels. King Aeetes saw it as I do, but he made Jason a sporting offer.

He said: 'I've got a couple of dozen brazen bulls that belch fire from their nostrils. You can have a shot at harnessing them and using them to plough a four-acre field. I'll then provide you with a satchel full of dragons' teeth to sow the field with. From each tooth there will spring up a fully armed warrior and you will have to take them on single-handed. If you can get through that programme between dawn and dusk I'll let you have a crack at my sleepless serpent that guards the Golden Fleece.'

Being a Hero, Jason said: 'Done!' and went back to his ship to get some shut-eye. But the two Princesses had got butterflies in the tummy about him. Chalciope was afraid that if Jason fell down on the job her papa would have all the rest of the Argonauts killed, and with them her sons for having brought them there. So she slipped on a dressing-gown and went along to Medea's room to ask her help.

Her reason for hoping that her younger sister might be able to put a fast one over their papa was because Medea was a very clever witch. As Medea already had ants in her pants about Jason, she needed no urging to play. Getting into whatever were the equivalent in those days of gumboots and a warmly lined macintosh, she sneaked out of the palace and went into the woods. There she gathered all sorts of herbs and, having brought them back to the kitchen, stewed them down, while muttering enchantments various, until their juices had become a paste. Putting a veil round her head, she then took the magic ointment she had made down to the Argo, which was moored in the river, and had Jason roused from his sleep. She told him that if he wished to come through next day's ordeal alive he must smear this stuff all over his body and his weapons, then nothing could harm him or break them.

Having guessed who she was and already having the same sort of yen for her that she had for him, he thought he could trust her. But when morning came, being a leery sort of cove, he smeared on the ointment then asked some of his pals to try their weapons on him.

This test having proved satisfactory, he went off quite cheerfully to face anything that was coming his way. When he reached the field he threw his spear, sword and helmet aside and stripped to the buff. But of course in those days the girls who were looking on were quite used to chaps doing that. When the brazen bulls were released from their underground stable, they came roaring up like a couple of camouflaged tanks equipped with flame throwers. But Jason just stood there letting them charge him and dash their horns against his unbreakable shield. Presumably he played them like a Spanish matador until he had taken some of the stuffing out of them. Then he chucked away his shield and put on a rodeo act, seizing the bulls by the horns and throwing them on their backs. How he managed to tackle both of them at once passes my comprehension, but he got them yoked up and goaded them into ploughing the four-acre field.

By then King Aeetes was beginning to look a bit green in the gills, but he gave Jason the bag of dragons' teeth and continued to hope that our Hero would bite the dust. No sooner had Jason sown the teeth than row upon row of fierce warriors sprang up from the furrows. It was now up to Jason to kill every one of them before the sun set, but in the middle of the night Medea had whispered to him a trick for getting rid of them that would save his breath.

Doing as she had told him, he picked up a great stone boulder and heaved it right into the middle of the host that was about to set upon him. It may be that these warriors had come to life too quickly to be more than half-baked. Anyhow, none of them seemed to have seen him hurl this great stone; they only realized that it had come down in the midst of them. Those nearest where it had landed accused one of the others of having thrown it. Soon a fight started among them and they were all at one another's throats. Jason just stood looking on while the furrows were filled with blood and the field became black with corpses. By the time the sun went down there was not a single one left and the ground had swallowed them all up again. It was just as simple as that.

Jason then said to the King: 'Now, old cock. How about handing over the Fleece?'

^ But Aeetes, having been told years before by the Oracle that ii he ever parted with it his number would be up, was not prepared to commit what would have amounted to hara-kiri just to Please Jason. So he stalled for time and said: 'We'll have a chat about that in the morning.'

Actually he had already decided that the best thing he could do was to collect several hundred of his warriors together during the night and have them wipe the Argonauts off the slate next day. That his plan failed was partly due to Medea's having gone so weak in the knees over Jason, and partly owing to Aeetes's meanness. Having tumbled to what was afoot, Medea hurried off to warn the boy friend; but he and his pals wouldn't have had much chance to act on her warning if Aeetes had had the foresight to put them up in his palace. Had he done that he would have had a good chance of having them all murdered in their beds, or anyhow of preventing them from getting back to their ship. As it was the old skinflint left them to rough it on their own in a camp down by the river.

When Medea arrived they were still at supper. She told Jason that her papa meant to double-cross him and that his only chance of not being turned into cat's meat was to pinch the Fleece there and then and sail off with it before dawn. While the Argonauts jumped to it to get their vessel ready for sea, Jason set off with Medea and her young brother Absyrtus, who had tagged along with her, to the sacred grove.

Young Absyrtus trembled like a jelly when he heard the hissing of the huge poison-breathing snake that guarded the Fleece. But tackling it was just Children's Hour stuff to Medea. She bedevilled it by singing a low witches' chant, then sprinkled some magic powder she had brought with her on its eyes. That sent it to sleep, so all Jason had to do was to step over its body and tear the Fleece down from the tree to which it had been nailed.

When they got back to the ship, Medea said: 'If my pop tumbles to it that it was I who put you up to this, I shall be for the high jump. So how about taking me with you?'

Chivalry apart, by then her hip-wriggling act had got Jason where she wanted him, so he replied: 'Gladly, oh Maiden, and wilt thou honour me by becoming my bride?' or words to that effect.

So they went aboard, taking young Absyrtus with them, and by the first light the Argo was standing out to sea with the Golden Fleece nailed to the mast and all sail set.

I would not like to sully my gentle readers' ears with the sort of language King Aeetes must have used when he heard what had happened, but he was not the chap to take that sort of thing lying down. In no time at all he had manned his fleet and put to sea in pursuit, and some of his ships were so fast that it seemed certain that they would catch up with the Argo.

When the leading vessel got so close that Medea could see the face of her papa as he stood glowering in the prow, she decided on taking drastic action. She made the Argonauts kill her young brother, cut him in pieces and throw the bits overboard. As Aeetes felt bound to give his son proper burial he had to heave to in order to fish the bits out of the water, and while he was kept busy doing that the Argo managed to get away.

Although Medea had saved their bacon, Jason must have been a bit worried on discovering the sort of better-half he had taken to his bosom. The gods, too, thought that her killing her young brother in this way was a most unsporting thing to do, and they made the Argonauts pay for it in no uncertain manner.

Instead of letting the Argo have a nice trip back to Greece they gave her a very unpleasant passage. Time after time she was carried off her course by tempests and driven on to unknown shores. For months on end her wretched crew humped her over land and across mountains until they reached the Med. But there were more storms after they had re-launched her, and she was washed up in North Africa. There, for some reason, they had to carry her again over miles of desert under a blistering sun. This went on for years and years, so when at last they did manage to get home those among them who had set out as hardy youths had become middle-aged men. If I'd been one of them I must say I'd have been pretty fed up with Jason for having caused me to waste the best years of my life. Still, they had got the Fleece.

Old Pelias was still alive, and was pretty shattered at seeing them again after all this time, as he had long counted them dead. But he once again dug his toes in about giving up his kingdom to Jason. However, Medea soon thought of a way to put him on the spot.

She told him she had the secret of restoring youth and laid on a demonstration by boiling a ram in a cauldron into which she had put a lot of herbs. When she pulled the ram out it had turned into a nice little lamb. The King asked to be made young too; so they prepared another cauldron and put him in it. As my readers will have guessed, Medea didn't put the right herbs in with him so the old fool was boiled alive.

Jason thought it such a scurvy trick that he refused to inherit the kingdom through her wicked deed. Instead he took a run-out powder on her and set off on his travels again. While staying in Corinth he fell in love with the King's daughter, a girl called Glauce, and decided to take her as his second wife. When Medea heard about this she pretended not to mind and sent Glauce a present of a beautiful wedding dress, but actually she was hopping mad and had first sprayed the garment with a subtle Poison. When poor Glauce put it on it stuck to her flesh and burnt her to death, just as the shirt of Nessus did Hercules.

Not content with having spoiled Jason's fun, Medea then murdered the three children she had had by him. Feeling that to

the limit, he made up his mind to do her in. But by her magic arts she summoned up a chariot drawn by dragons and got away in it. Having lost Glauce and his children, and then Medea giving him the slip, sent him absolutely berserk and he killed himself.

From the above it will be seen that Jason did not have at all a happy life. But that was largely his own fault for having failed to keep his eye on the ball, and letting Pelias make him tight in the first place. All things considered, too, I don't think he deserves to be looked on as one of the top Heroes. He wouldn't have got anywhere without Medea, would he?

Robbie felt that the ending to this chapter was still a little weak but, during his re-writing, he had improved it considerably; so, pleased with his day's work, he went happily to bed.

First thing on Thursday morning, he ran downstairs to collect his post and hurried back to his room with it. It consisted entirely of replies to his advertisement, and there was a great stack of them; many more than he had expected.

Having opened several, he soon saw the reason. The idea of carrying out light secretarial duties for a young gentleman, and at the same time making a motor tour of the Peloponnesus, clearly held a strong appeal for a lot of young women in Athens. Even a number who already had jobs were prepared to sacrifice them in Robbie's interest, and several enclosed photographs.

This took him by surprise for, when he had drafted his advertisement, the idea of employing a woman had never entered his thoughts. Had he been a more sophisticated young man, he might have decided from the first to have a woman drive him and, when picking the most attractive applicant from a number of pretty girls, all sorts of interesting possibilities might have crossed his mind.

But the prospect of having a young woman as his sole companion, perhaps for several weeks, scared Robbie stiff. All girls held a frightening, if attractive, mystery for him that he still lacked the courage to explore. He had wanted a man to whom he could talk, and experience told him that when left alone with an attractive woman he usually dried up within a quarter of an hour. To have to strive to find things to say to a girl, day after day, would prove positive torture. On looking through the photographs, too, another aspect of the matter struck him. Perhaps, while picnicking in some lonely spot, he might be overcome by one of those urges he sometimes felt and, as he saw it, there being little chance that the lady would be willing to respond to his caresses, a most shaming and miserable situation would ensue.

Reluctantly, he put aside all the letters from women applicants, and went more carefully through those from men. These formed barely a fifth of the pile, and were very disappointing. Nearly all of them admitted either that they could not take shorthand, or were 'a bit out of practice'. A few could not even type, but asserted that they would make quick learners. Most of them were garage hands. The only applicant whose letter was obviously that of a well-educated man, stated that he would greatly enjoy making such a tour but, owing to his arthritis, could not undertake to drive more than fifty miles a day. Not one came anywhere near fulfilling Robbie's requirement of a good driver, not too far removed from his own age, who would prove a pleasant companion. And, as he had to be out of the Embassy by the end of the week, he could not delay, even for twenty-four hours, in making his choice.

Turning back to the letters from women, he went through them again, and found one from a Mrs. Papayannis. She stated that she had been driving for thirty years without one accident, knew the Peloponnesus like the back of her hand from having been hunted all over it during the war while an officer in the Women's Resistance, could type at 80 and took shorthand at 150. She was out of a job at the moment only because her chief, a distinguished scientist for whom she had worked for the past nine years, had recently died.

It was clear that she must be in the neighbourhood of fifty, an educated woman, but a real old battle-axe. Robbie felt he would be able to talk to her without humiliating diffidence and be free of all temptation to attempt the sort of thing that might cause him bitter regret. Pushing aside the other letters, he put hers in his pocket and decided to take her on.

She had given him her telephone number in her letter, adding that she had an engagement for that morning; so, if he were interested, would he phone her in the afternoon?

After breakfast, he went round to the garage he patronized and got a quotation for hiring a medium-sized car by the week. Next he went to his bank, obtained a letter of credit and drew out a considerable sum in cash; then went for a stroll round the old quarter of the city to the west of Constitution Square. Its narrow streets with groups of shops that sold nothing but buttons, or materials, or embroidery always intrigued him, and for the whole way along Eolou Street, at which the section ended, he could look up at his beloved Acropolis dominating the city.

He returned to the Embassy a little before one o'clock. As he entered the hall, the butler was holding the telephone receiver, and called out to him: There's a lady on the phone for you, Mr. Robbie. She has already rung up twice this morning, but you were out.'

|Who is she?' Robbie asked is surprise. . /It's a Miss Stephanopoulos,' the butler replied. 'She says that it's urgent and she must speak to you personally.' Then he turned back to the instrument and said into it in Greek: 'Hold on, Miss. Mr. Grenn has just come in.'

Having no option, Robbie took the instrument from him and said a shade suspiciously: 'This is Robert Grenn. What did you wish to speak to me about?'

About your advertisement in the Kathimerini,' a soft, slightly breathless voice replied. 'It's the very thing I'm looking for, and I'm sure that I could do all you want perfectly.'

'No!' said Robbie hastily. 'No! The post is already filled.'

'But it can't be!' The voice rose in the suggestion of a pathetic wail. 'You can't have had any applications for it until this morning.'

'That's true,' he admitted. 'But I've settled on the person to whom I mean to give the job.'

'Then unsettle it. Oh please, please!' The imploring note sounded to Robbie as if the girl on the other end of the line was actually getting down on her knees. 'You see, I've been counting on this since yesterday, and I've burned my boats. I must have it. I simply must!'

'No, really,' Robbie protested. 'I'm terribly sorry, but the fact that you have been counting on it is nothing to do with me.'

'Oh, but it is! You'll be responsible now if the most terrible things happen to me. You can't really be such a brute. You said in the advert, you were young, and so am I. You ought to be able to see my point of view.'

'Hang it all, I don't even know what trouble you are in,' Robbie cried desperately.

'That's soon remedied.' The voice dropped back again to a breathless coo. 'I'm telephoning from Floca's. I'm much fatter than I'd like to be, but people say I've got a pretty face. I'm wearing an absurd bit of blue veiling as a hat. You see, it matches my eyes. And a bunch of stephanotis. You'll find me at a table just on the right at the bottom of the stairs. Come round so that we can talk this over.'

'No! Really! No!' exclaimed Robbie. 'I couldn't possibly.'

'You must,' came the quick reply. 'I'm starving. And I've already cut a date, counting on you to give me lunch.'

Next moment, the line went dead. In vain Robbie kept shouting into the instrument: 'Hello! Hello! Are you there?' Then, realizing the futility of further efforts, he hung up.

Frowning, he looked about him. That a girl should try to foist herself on him like that was intolerable. The cheek of it. What were her troubles to do with him, anyway? Give her lunch and listen to some mess she had got herself into! Why should he? Certainly not. She had no claim on him. He didn't even know her. Let her stew in her own juice.

At that moment, Euan crossed the hall on his way to the dining room. With a casual glance at Robbie, he said: 'What are you standing there looking so scared about? Come on in and have some lunch.'

'I'm not scared of anything,' Robbie muttered. Then something suddenly clicked in his brain and, picking up his hat, he added with apparent casualness, 'but I'm not lunching in today. I happen to be giving lunch to a very pretty girl at Floca's.' Then, after one glance at Euan, he walked towards the front door.

As he crossed the threshold, he thought: 'Goodness only knows what I'm letting myself in for. But, by God, the sight of Euan's face was worth it.'

11

Enter the Lady

Instead of hailing a taxi, Robbie walked to Floca's. This famous cafe, the smartest in Athens, is at the Constitution Square end of Venizelou Street; so it was not far, and he needed a little time in which to think. The sudden eruption of a strange young woman into his plans had left him temporarily dazed, but within a few minutes he was feeling as angry as it was ever in his mild nature to be: angry with her for assuming that he had only to come to the meeting she had had the cheek to demand for her to make him do as she wished, and angry with himself for having become committed simply to score a cheap victory over Euan.

Then it struck him that he had not promised to meet her and, before Euan had spoken to him, he had not intended to meet her; so he still need not. As he had already reached the corner of Constitution Square, he halted in his tracks and pulled out his case to smoke a cigarette while considering this. His case was empty, but no one need look far in Athens for fresh supplies of cigarettes. A hundred or more kiosks are dotted about the broad pavements of the principal streets, and all appear to do a thriving trade in exactly similar stocks—newspapers, magazines, sweets, tobacco, souvenirs and secondhand paper-back books.

Having replenished his case, he lit up and drew hard on the cigarette. It was certain that, later in the day, Euan would quiz him about having taken a girl out to lunch. If he refused to say anything about it, Euan would jump to the conclusion that he had lied about having a 'date'. On the other hand, never having done such a thing, would his imagination enable him to talk as if he had? He feared it would not. In either case, the odds were that he would be found out and have laid himself open to Euan's scathing ridicule. Then, like it or not, he had to go through with it.

Two minutes later, he arrived outside Floca's. The de-luxe caf£ bad a long frontage with a row of tables outside and two entrances, one into a big sweet shop and another into a lofty room, holding another fifty or so tables. In the rear of the latter, a short flight of stairs led up through a balustrade to the restaurant, considered by Robbie, who was fond of good food, to be the ^best in Athens.

At this hour, nearly every table in the cafe was taken, but he had only to glance in the direction of the stairs to identify the girl. She was not looking his way; so he had a moment, as he approached, to study her without causing her embarrassment. Nine out of ten of the women in the cafe were brunettes, and the blondes were obviously foreigners. He had instinctively assumed that, being a Greek, she, too, would be a brunette, and she might have passed as one; but there were bronze lights in the mass of short curls on which was perched the little arrangement of blue veiling that passed for a hat. Her face was broad, with a strong chin that had a dimple in it. She had a short nose, a wide mouth and well-curved but rather thick eyebrows that were darker than her hair. Her skin was a golden brown, and such make-up as she was wearing was not sufficient to be obvious. Robbie knew little about women's clothes but, mingling as he did with wealthy women who came as guests to the Embassy, he realized instinctively that hers, though neat, were not expensive. It was only the hat and the big bunch of stephanotis pinned to her well-rounded bust that gave her the appearance of smartness.

When he was within a few feet of her table, she suddenly caught sight of him, said 'Mr. Grenn', smiled, stood up and held out her hand. As he smiled back and took her hand, he saw that she was shorter than he had expected. The mop of chestnut hair only just topped his shoulder. He saw too that, though she was sturdily built, all her curves were in the right places. She had turned up to him a pair of clear blue eyes that sparkled with vitality. Temporarily mesmerized by them, he quite forgot to let go her hand, until she gently withdrew it.

Suddenly embarrassed, and wishing to make amends for this gaffe, he blurted out: 'You said you were a fat girl, but I don't think so.'

She gave him a surprised stare, then burst out laughing. 'What a funny way to greet a new acquaintance.'

'I . . . I'm sorry,' he stammered. 'I didn't mean to be rude.'

'No, I'm sure you didn't. And it was nice to hear that you think that. All the same, I wish I could drop a kilo or two. I suppose if I gave up eating sweets I could, but I simply adore them.' After a rather awkward pause, she added: 'Shall we sit down?'

'Yes, let's,' he replied hastily. 'Er . . . what would you like to drink?'

'Nothing more for the moment, thanks. I've just had an orange squash.'

Robbie beckoned a passing waiter and ordered himself an ouzo, then he turned back to her. He had arrived determined to say at once that he had already engaged the 'battle-axe' but, recalling the desperation in her voice when she had telephoned him, he now dreaded to see tears start to those blue eyes, which were regarding him with such friendliness. Yet, strive as he would, he could think of no other way to open the conversation. Their silence lasted long enough for him to get quite hot under the collar before she broke it by saying:

1 don't know if you got my name over the telephone. It is Stephanie Stephanopoulos.'

He would have liked to say: Tt's a pretty as you are,' but didn't dare. Even so, it gave him a lead, and he asked: 'Are you related to the Foreign Minister?'

'Only distantly. He is a cousin of my father.' Her mouth suddenly assumed a hard line, then she went on: 'It is because of my father that I answered your advertisement. He is an absolute brute. He is treating me abominably.'

'Good Lord!' Robbie exclaimed, then, his chivalrous instincts aroused, his mouth tightened too. 'You don't mean . , . you can't mean that he actually beats you?'

She gave a sudden giggle. 'No, not quite that. Even the peasants here have given up using their belts on daughters of my age.'

'How old are you?' he asked impulsively, and next moment could have bitten out his tongue. But she only laughed.

'Really, Mr. Grenn! You are a forthright person. Still, if you want to know, I'm just turned twenty-four.'

'I . . . er, apologize for asking that. But in what way is your father brutal to you?'

As the waiter set down Robbie's ouzo on the table, she replied : 'For the past week, he has kept me locked up in an attic on bread and water.'

'No! Really! The swine! . . . Sorry! I didn't mean to be rude about your father, but . . .'

'Oh! but that's not the worst.' The blue eyes widened and looked straight into his. 'He has threatened that if I won't do what he wants me to, he will put me out on to the street. And I haven't got a room of my own. The only sort of job I could get would be as a hostess in a night-club, and you know what that means.'

Robbie could guess. Swiftly, he detached his glance from the blue eyes and, to hide his embarrassment, swallowed his ouzo in one gulp. He promptly choked.

Showing quick concern, Miss Stephanopoulos picked up the small glass of water that had been brought with his ouzo as a chaser, and pressed it on him.

With a nod of thanks, he took it and, when he had recovered, asked: 'But what is it your father wants you to do?'

'To marry a man I loathe the sight of. He's a cement manufacturer and as rich as Croesus. But he's twice my age, and Positively repulsive—like a great, fat, greasy slug.'

Robbie knew that, although the emancipation of women in the Balkans had made enormous strides since the Second World War, they were still far from having gained the complete freedom that Women enjoyed in the Western world and that, among the upper E 125

classes, many marriages were still arranged between parents, with scant reference to their daughters. With a shake of his head, he said: That's too bad. If he's as awful as you say, I can quite understand your digging in your toes.'

'I knew you would.' Her face lit up with a radiant smile. 'And now, I'm terribly hungry, so please give me some lunch.'

⁴Of course.' He came quickly to his feet. 'If you have been on bread and water for a week, you must be starving.'

Her skirt was fairly short and, as he followed her up the little flight of stairs to the restaurant, he found himself staring at her legs. She would not have stood a hope of being taken on in a dancing chorus. They were much too short and sturdy. But, all the same, they were perfectly proportioned, with neat ankles and medium-small feet.

When the head waiter brought the menu, she chose Scampi Newberg, to be followed by a woodcock. As Robbie liked scampi and knew that in Greece at that season woodcock was excellent eating, he followed suit. But his prolonged glance at Miss Stephanopoulos's nylon-clad lower limbs had acted on him like a red light. He knew that he must not let this go any further; so, as they broke their caraway-seed-sprinkled rolls, he said:

'You say that if your father throws you out, you would have to become a night-club hostess. But, since you are qualified for a secretarial post, why shouldn't you get a job in an office?'

She made a little grimace. 'I trained at a secretarial college, but that is quite a while ago. And I've never had a job, so my shorthand would be too slow now for me to get a decently paid one. But I could soon work it up if you wanted me to, and my typing is quite good. I can see, too, that you are the sort of man who needs a lot of taking care of, and I should be very good at that.'

Robbie responded only with a slightly nervous smile as she went on: 'There's another thing. My father is certain to ask the help of the police to get me back, and it would be fairly easy for them to trace me if I were working in an office here. About the only hope of my keeping my freedom would be to go underground and take a job in a night spot down at the Piraeus. But, of course, for me to disappear into the wilds of the Peloponnesus with you would be the perfect thing. That's why-'

'D'you think your father has already put the police on to you?' Robbie interrupted to ask, a little anxiously.

'Oh no. He will be away on business until Monday, and he can't know yet that I've left home.'

'How did you manage that?'

'Mother gave way to my pleading. She's a darling, and although she hated letting me go off on my own, she realized that it was the only way to save me from terrible unhappiness. Unfortunately, she's too weak to stand up to father, but her parents were English, and she doesn't at all approve of girls being forced into marriage, like this, just because one of their father's beastly old friends has a lot of money or influence.'

From the first, they had been talking in Greek, and Robbie's Greek was nowhere near as perfect as most of his other languages because, instead of learning it from records and tutors, he had picked it up by conversing with people of all classes. It had, however, struck him that the accent of his charming companion was somewhat unusual, and he said:

'You are half English, then. Have you ever been to England?'

'Not since I was a small girl, so I don't remember much about it. But English was my first .language, and I still speak it with mother when we are alone. My father and mother met some years before the war, when he was the representative in London of a Greek shipping line. It wasn't till it looked as though England was about to be invaded that he brought us back here to live; and, of course, he couldn't then foresee that Greece would be over-run a year later.'

At this, it crossed Robbie's mind that, as his Greek was by no means perfect, it would be a decided advantage to have a secretary who could speak English, as he could then explain to her the more unusual words in his manuscript. Battle-axe Papayannis might not, whereas this girl definitely . . . Sternly he put the thought from him, but only for it to be followed by another. He had entirely overlooked the fact that, if he had a secretary who did not understand English, she would find it next to impossible to type his manuscript at all.

Miss Stephanopoulos broke in on this disturbing thought by asking: 'When do you propose that we should leave Athens?'

Startled, he stammered: 'But . . . but I haven't said I'd take you. I can't, you know; really. I . . . I've as good as promised the job to someone else.'

'As good as!' she repeated angrily. 'That doesn't mean a thing. You must take me. You said you would before we came up to lunch. You can't go back on that now.'

T said no such thing. I-'

'You did! You did!' Suddenly her voice changed to a high, pleading note. 'Oh please, please! You are my only hope of getting out of Athens. If you don't, any awful thing that happens to me will be your fault. You will have deliberately thrown me to the wolves. But rather than-'

'Hush!' Robbie implored her in a hoarse whisper. 'For goodness sake, keep your voice down. People at the other tables are staring at us.' But she ignored him and, tears of desperation welling up in her blue eyes, she hurried on:

'Rather than let that happen, I'll go down to the beach and swim out to sea and drown myself. And I thought you were so nice, so understanding. Mother has always told me that English gentlemen are the most chivalrous in the world. But that isn't true. You're just mean and horrid.'

Wittingly or unwittingly, she had hit Robbie on his soft spot. Like a pricked balloon, he caved in and said hastily: 'All right; all right. You've no need to cry. Please don't. People will think I've done something awful to you. Since you're in such a mess, I'll get you out of it.'

Like April sunshine after rain, her face lit up again. That's sweet of you. I knew you would the moment I saw you.'

'I hope your driving is better than your shorthand,' he said, a little glumly.

'Oh, I drive quite well; and I suppose over long distances we'll be taking it turn and turn about. What make of car have you?'

'I haven't a car. I'm hiring one from a garage. As a matter of fact, I don't know the first thing about cars so I can't even tell you what kind it was that I chose when I went there this morning.'

She regarded him in astonishment. 'Does that mean you can't even drive a car?'

He nodded. 'That's it. There will be no turn and turn about. The driving will be entirely up to you, and I'll not be able to give you any help if we have a breakdown, either. It's taking on quite a lot, and a girl like you must have some friends to whom she can turn when in trouble; so perhaps you would like to reconsider it.'

'Certainly not.' Her jaw hardened, and the momentary hope Robbie had had of escaping from this disturber of his peace flickered out. With another of her bewildering changes, she became extremely practical. 'I may not have a willowy figure, but I was given staying power as a compensation. I'll keep on driving you for as long as most men could. As for friends, of course I have friends; but none who could take me in and hide me for any length of time. It is true that I had a lunch date that I put off to meet you. But only with a girl who would have let me share her flat for a few nights, if I became absolutely desperate.'

'I see. How about money? What sort of salary do you want?'

She shrugged. 'Anything that suits you. Your advertisement said "all found", so all I'll need is a few pence to powder my nose. About this car, though, I think I ought to give it a trial run before we set off.'

'That's a good idea. When we've finished lunch, I'll give you a note to the garage telling them to let you take it out this afternoon.'

'Thanks. And when do we start?'

'Tomorrow morning, if that's all right with you.'

'The sooner the better, as far as I am concerned. That is, after I've had a chance to say good-bye to mother and collect my clothes.'

'Perhaps you'll bring the car round to the British Embassy in the morning, at about ten o'clock, then?'

'Yes, sir.' Her teeth flashed in a sudden smile. 'Am 1 to call you that, or Mr. Grenn or . . . my handsome rescuer from an

awful fate?'

No girl had ever before called Robbie handsome. He flushed to the ears, and stammered: 'Most . . . most people just call me Robbie. I ... Fd like you to do that.'

'Robbie it shall be," she cooed. 'And you must call me

Stephanie.'

The rest of their lunch passed very pleasantly, and somehow it seemed quite natural to him .that, before they left Floca's, he bought her a huge box of chocolates.

When she left him a few minutes later, he was, for a time, quite bemused. The absurd bow of blue veiling perched on the crisp chestnut curls had hardly bobbed out of sight among the crowd before he began to wonder whether the whole episode had not been one of his daydreams. It seemed almost impossible to believe that he had spent nearly two hours with a pretty girl and that, after the first ten minutes, his shyness had entirely left him. Of course, she had been looking to him to save her from a terrible situation, so the circumstances were exceptional. Even so, it seemed a miracle that he should have found his tongue to such a degree that he had kept her laughing happily through the greater part of a long meal.

For over half an hour, he wandered the streets aimlessly, savouring again snatches of their conversation and recalling the swiftly changing expressions of the golden-brown face, still so^ vivid in his memory. Then he gradually came down to earth and began to think about preparations for their departure. He was just about to turn back towards the Embassy, when it occurred to him that he had not yet had a chance to thank Luke Beecham for his sound advice, and that he also owed it to Luke to let him know of his new plan; so he made his way to the United Kingdom Petroleum Company's office.

It was just opening for the afternoon session, so he caught Luke coming in, and was taken straight up by him to his comfortable room on the first floor. As Luke closed the door behind them, he smiled and said: 'So all went well. I felt pretty-sure it would; and if it hadn't, I'd very soon have heard about it.^v

Robbie grinned back. 'Yes, your "Masterly Policy of Inactivity" proved a winner. On the whole, too, H.E. behaved very decently. He said he couldn't let me stay on permanently at the Embassy, but gave me till the end of this week to pack up.'

Luke lit a cigar, perched himself on the corner of his desk, and said: T see. And where do you intend to go?'

Sitting down, and stretching out his long legs, Robbie divulged his plan for continuing his investigation, under cover of gather-^lng information for his book, by making a tour of the places m ^which the Czech groups were soon to be stationed.

'But I thought you couldn't drive a car,' Luke remarked. 'Isn't that going to be an awful handicap?'

Robbie gave a happy laugh. 'I'm hiring a car and I advertised for a chauffeur-secretary. As a matter of fact, I've just come from giving lunch to the one I've settled on, and she's a jolly pretty girl'

Luke's brows contracted slightly, and he asked: 'Is that wise, Robbie?'

'Why? What have you got against it?' Robbie countered defensively. 'She's driven several makes of car, and can type my manuscript. What's more, she will make a very pleasant companion.'

'I don't doubt that.' Luke's voice was a shade cynical. 'But have you thought that your going off into the blue like that might lead to quite a nasty scandal?'

'I don't see why it should. In the places to which we're going, it's unlikely that we shall run into anyone we know. Anyhow that didn't seem to bother her, and it certainly doesn't me.'

'I suppose you have taken up her references?'

Robbie did not feel that he ought to divulge Stephanie's private troubles, which would have put the matter of references, even if he had thought of it, out of the question; so he shook his head. 'No. I didn't think it necessary.'

'But, my young friend, it is,' Luke insisted. 'You are a rich and eligible bachelor. Surely you realize that by taking an attractive young woman off with you to stay in a series of hotels, you are laying yourself open to blackmail. This girl will only have to say that you seduced her on a promise of marriage, and you'll find that you have landed yourself in the hell of an expensive mess.'

This argument came home to Robbie with sudden force when he recalled the photographs of enticing-looking ladies he had received in the post that morning. But again he shook his head. 'No, really Luke, I'm sure you've no need to worry about that. This girl is related to the Greek Foreign Secretary, Stephano-poulos, and she's highly respectable. Besides, although she is a good-looker, she's got her feet firmly on the ground. She's not at all a "come-hither" girl, but the practical type. Even if I tried anything on her, which I don't intend to, I wouldn't mind betting that I'd get a box on the ear. We shall be good friends, that's all.'

Luke shrugged. 'I wouldn't like to risk it. Still, it seems that you have made up your mind, and it's your affair.'

After a moment, Robbie said: 'Look, there's an idea which occurred to me while I was on the way here. As I've told you, my cover for this job will be collecting information for my book. Fortunately, there are ancient temples and things scattered all over the Peloponnesus, but it may turn out that one of these groups will start to operate in a place quite a long way from anything of that sort. If so, I'll require another kind of cover, and since they are supposed to be prospecting for oil, I don't see why someone else shouldn't too. I wouldn't want any pay, of course, but I was wondering if I could carry some form of credentials from you that would enable me to make all sorts of enquiries as though I were an oil man.'

Luke was silent for a moment, then he shook his head. 'No, Robbie. I'm afraid I couldn't do that. The snag is that, although you have no official connections, you will be acting as a secret agent. That has already led you into taking illegal action, and may easily do so again. If you were caught and had a document on you accrediting you to my Company, we couldn't laugh that off. It would be said that-United Kingdom Petroleum had abused its position here to cover espionage. If that happened, my chiefs in London might quite well give me the sack.'

Robbie's face showed his disappointment, but he said at once: 'I hadn't thought of that. If I had, I'd never have dreamt of suggesting it.'

'Wait a minute.' Luke gave a wave with his cigar. 'I believe I see a way to handle this. I could give you some of our cards. They are engraved simply with the name of the Company, this address and telephone number, and underneath "represented by . . ." followed by a blank space in which any member of the staff sent out on some odd job can write his name. You could use those for your enquiries. If you were caught with some of them on you, we should still be in the clear. There would be nothing to show that you were employed by us. I should deny all knowledge of your activities, and say that you must have either managed somehow to pinch the cards or had had them printed yourself.'

'That's marvellous!' exclaimed Robbie, jumping to his feet. 'Are you quite sure, though, that it couldn't possibly get you into trouble?'

'Quite certain. I'll give you a packet of cards before you go.'

For another ten minutes, they talked of Robbie's proposed programme; then, with Luke's good wishes for his success, and a packet of fifty cards in his pocket, he left the office.

With buoyant step he walked back to the Embassy, then cheerfully set to in earnest to sort out the things he intended to take with him. Yet, now and again, he felt a twinge of anxiety. He had still to break it to his uncle that, instead of returning to England, he intended to stay on in Greece, and he feared that Sir Finsterhorn might take that rather badly.

^ He had already learned that there were to be people coming both for drinks and a small dinner party at the Embassy that mght, so he expected that he would have to bottle himself up for the whole evening before a chance came for him to get the unwelcome news off his chest. But he was spared that by a piece of luck.

When he came down to the big drawing room he found Euan there, and that, contrary to his custom, the Ambassador was also present, although there were still at least ten minutes to go before the first guests were due to arrive. Moreover Robbie did not even have to open the subject, for Sir Finsterhorn said at once:

'What is this I hear, Robbie, of your having advertised io yesterday's Kathimerini for a chauffeur-secretary?'

Normally, called to book as he felt sure he was about to be, Robbie would have hesitated and floundered; but he was amazed to find that since lunch he had acquired a new confidence in himself. Looking his uncle straight in the eye, he replied:

That's right, sir. I decided that it would be a pity to leave Greece without seeing some of the most famous temples; so I've hired a car and a chauffeur to take me on a tour of the Peloponnesus.'

To his surprise, Sir Finsterhorn nodded quite amicably. That's a good idea. You should be able to pick up some useful local colour for your book; er . . . that is, if you mean to go on with it.'

'Oh yes. More than half of it is written now, and I hope anyway to get the rest of it roughed out while I'm on this trip.'

For some minutes they talked of the most important places for him to visit and Euan, his professional interest as an archaeologist aroused, for once showed no malice. He even offered to get out a list of things at each place that should not be missed and, when he learned that Robbie intended to leave at ten o'clock next morning, promised to have it ready by then.

That evening, Robbie found himself quite exceptionally loquacious. The hours passed quickly for him and, when he went up to bed, he gave his mind over to happy dreams. But he woke early, and was suddenly taken with a fit of the jitters. All that had happened to him in the past eighteen hours seemed too good to be true. Reconsidered in the light of early morning, could Stephanie's story really hold water? Surely, in these days, parents did not still force girls of twenty-four into marriages repugnant to them, and threaten to throw them on the streets if they refused to obey? Perhaps the whole thing was a cruel hoax and she had been laughing at him all the time.

But why should a strange young woman, who could not possibly have anything against him, use her abilities as an actress to make him look a fool? There could be a reason, though. Someone who had seen his advertisement, and knew what a simple-minded chap he was, might have put her up to it. It was possible that they had induced her to do it by offering her a big bet with long odds in her favour if she could afterwards say that she had landed the job.

Suddenly, he thought of Euan. It was strange that the previous evening Euan had not made a single reference to his taking a girl out to lunch. For once, he could not have been nicer, and surely that must have sinister implications? Euan knew so many people in Athens. It might well be that he knew Stephanie, and that it was he who had put her up to this. If so, and she failed to turn up, Euan would be on hand to witness the outcome of his joke, so that he could laugh with his friends afterwards while describing Robbie's bitter disappointment. That would be the final humiliation.

Miserable and worried almost silly, Robbie got up, did his final packing and went down to breakfast. Sir Finsterhorn was in a pleasant mood and Euan gave the impression of being in unusually high spirits; a fact that Robbie registered with a sinking feeling that it confirmed his worst fears. Yet it was now impossible for him not to go through with the drill to which he had committed himself.

After breakfast he took leave of his uncle, and thanked him with the best words he could find for having had him to stay at the Embassy for so long, adding that he would write his gratitude to Lady Grenn for all her kindness to him. He then made the round of the house to say good-bye to the staff, and was deeply touched by the regrets they expressed that he should be leaving.

At a quarter to ten, Loadham brought his suitcases down to the hall. Opening the front door, Robbie stood on the threshold, still desperately hoping, yet hardly daring to accept the possibility that Stephanie might drive up and carry him away. The next ten minutes were an agony. Then, at five to ten, his heart gave a bound. The car that he had selected—which he later learned was a Ford Zephyr—came hurtling into the semi-circular drive. With admirable precision the brakes were applied, bringing it to a halt opposite the door. Stephanie, now bareheaded and dressed in a neat tweed suit, was driving it.

With a glowing face, Robbie ran forward to greet her. Calling to Loadham to stow his bags in the boot, he walked quickly back into the hall to collect his raincoat. At that moment, Euan appeared. Thrusting a big envelope into Robbie's hand, he said:

'Don't go without this. It's the list of things you must not miss.' Then his glance lit on the car outside and in it the finely chiselled profile crowned by chestnut curls of the girl sitting at the wheel.

His mouth dropped open, and he swung round on Robbie. 'I say! So that's your chauffeuse-secretary! Well, I'll be damned! You secretive old devil. I'd never have thought in a thousand years that you would get hold of a peach like her to drive you round Greece.'

Robbie's smile was seraphic. This was unalloyed triumph. Yet he might well have hesitated to get into the Ford, could he have foreseen the end that the gods had decreed for it.

12

Making Hay while the Sun Shines

Robbie was still blissfully savouring the cloud of glory in which he had departed, when he was roused from it by Stephanie's asking: 'Do you want to get to Patras for lunch?'

On the previous day he had told her that the big port on the Ionian Sea was the first place at which he wished to make a stay. However, he had not even hinted at his real reason for this, and the Bratislava, with the groups of Czechs on board, was not due to dock there till Monday. So he replied: 'Oh no! I doubt if we could, anyway. It must be well over two hundred kilometres.'

'We could if I step on it,' she assured him. 'Your garage has done you jolly well with this car. She goes like a bird.'

'Splendid. I felt sure they would. The chaps there are always awfully nice to me. But there's no hurry about getting to Patras. I thought we would take it easy, and lunch at Corinth.'

Her next question was: 'What make of typewriter is yours?'

'Oh dear!' he exclaimed ruefully. 'I hadn't thought of that. I can't type, so I haven't got one.'

She slowed down the car. 'Well; I can't type your manuscript without a machine, can I? If you want me to, we had better get hold of one before we leave Athens. They are expensive things to buy, but I think I know a place where you could hire one.'

He agreed at once, so she turned the car in the direction of Omonias Square—the Oxford Circus of Athens—and, in a street just off it, selected a portable with Roman lettering that seemed to have seen little service. As Robbie could now give no permanent address, he had to buy it outright; but he had plenty of money on him, and could obtain more at Patras. They then had to make a call at a stationer's, to buy typing paper, carbons and ribbons; so it was well past eleven o'clock before, having bypassed the Piraeus, they came out on to the famous coast road which, for over two thousand years, has been known as the 'Sacred Way'.

Soon they reached Daphni with its ancient convent among tall, candle-like cypress trees, and the little church with the gold mosaics that make it one of the great gems of Byzantine architecture. After another few kilometres, they had a splendid view on their left of the island of Salamis and the blue, almost landlocked bay that separated it from the mainland. Many centuries before, at some spot on the road they were now travelling, the mighty Persian King of Kings must have sat for a whole day, his confident hopes gradually turning to fear and despair, as he watched the much smaller Athenian Fleet destroying his mighty Armada—a victory that, by saving Greece from Asiatic domination, changed the whole history of the world.

The road then turned inland, and the seaward skyline was rendered hideous by clusters of tall chimneys, belching smoke from distilleries, cement works and soap factories. Robbie frowned at them in disgust and said: 'One would have thought there were plenty of other peaces on the coast where they could have built those horrors. To have chosen Eleusis for them is the all-time high in modern vandalism.'

'It was at Eleusis that the famous Mysteries used to be held, wasn't it?' Stephanie remarked. 'And this road is called the Sacred Way because it was along it that the great processions used to come. I wonder what really happened at the Mysteries? Someone told me once that it was only a ceremony at which, when they came of age, young people of the upper classes were let into the secret that all they had been taught about there being gods and goddesses was bunkum; but that they must continue to support the priesthood because a little religion was good for the masses.'

Robbie gave her a shocked glance. 'I'm sure you're not right about that. To the ancient Greeks of all classes, the gods were very real, otherwise they wouldn't have gone in such fear of them. For example, the Mysteries here were in honour of Demeter, and if they hadn't done their stuff at her festivals, they would have been frightened that their crops would fail. There was a time when she caused a most terrible famine, and they never forgot it. But being a Greek yourself, you must know all about that.'

'I suppose I ought to, but at the schools I went to they didn't give much time to ancient history. I'll have to mug it up a bit now, though, if I'm to understand the allusions to the characters in this book of yours that you were telling me about yesterday.'

Tf you read all the chapters I've already written, before you start to do any typing, that would be a help,' Robbie suggested. 'But I haven't done the story of Demeter and Persephone yet. If you like, I'll tell it to you now.'

'Oh, please do,' Stephanie smiled. 'As a child I used to adore being read to and told stories.'

'Right-oh.' Robbie paused for a moment to collect his thoughts, then began: 'Well, I'd better start from the beginning. Demeter was one of the six children of Cronos and Rhea, so Poseidon, the King of the Sea; Pluto, the King of the Underworld; and Zeus, King of both Heaven and Earth, were her brothers.

'In those days, apart from the Royal Family the world was mainly inhabited by monsters, so you'll understand how it was that, to begin with, for marrying and, er . . . that sort of thing, these brothers and sisters had no one but one another.

'Demeter was very good-looking, and Poseidon got a crush on her. But she took the same sort of dim view of him that you do of your cement magnate, so one night she slipped out of Olympus and came down here to live in Arcadia. To make even more certain of escaping Poseidon's unwelcome attentions, she changed herself into a mare and joined a big herd. However, he was terribly keen on her, so he hunted for her all over the place and eventually he saw through her disguise. Then he turned himself into a stallion and ... er . . .' Robbie suddenly reddened and came to an abrupt stop.

Then they did what the bees and the birds do,' Stephanie helped him out, adding with a little titter: T am twenty-four, you know; so it's quite a time since I learnt about the facts of life.'

Robbie gave an awkward laugh. Thanks for being so frank. Otherwise, I'd have had an awful time trying to spare your blushes. You see, so much of that sort of thing went on among the gods and goddesses that if one cuts it out, their histories hardly make sense.

To continue, then. As a result of the affaire, Demeter gave birth to a horse that could talk, and had men's feet instead of hooves on its right legs. She felt frightfully sick at the way she had been treated, so-'

T bet she did. What girl wouldn't?'

'Ah! Yes, of course. Well, she made herself look like a Fury, and went to live on her own in a cave. Zeus was the youngest of the family, but had managed to become top-boy, and had given all his brothers and sisters jobs to do; so in fairness to the others, he couldn't let Demeter go on shirking. Down he came to her cave, and made her return with him to Olympus. By then she had become a lovely girl again, and suddenly he felt an urge ... I mean, he, too, began to take a good view of her.'

'More bees and birds stuff?'

'That's it; but she was just as much against letting him as she had been with Poseidon, so he had to deceive her by turning himself into a bull.'

'Was she crazy about bulls, then?'

'I've no idea. But that's the way Zeus did the trick, and as a result Demeter had a daughter named Kore—although she is much better known by the name she took later, Persephone. I don't think I mentioned it, but Demeter had the most marvellous golden hair and her daughter, who took after her, was just as lovely. Although Demeter continued to associate with the Olympians, she was still a bit sulky with Zeus for having taken her against her will, and spent quite a lot of her time in Sicily. Then, just when Persephone had become a really smashing teenager, Eros played one of his mischievous tricks.'

'Eros was another name for Cupid, wasn't it?'

'Yes; and whoever he shot one of his arrows into fell in love with the next person they set eyes on. In this case he shot Pluto, and the King of the Underworld came up in a fiery chariot out of Mount Etna, roaring with rage. In a flash, he was half-way across the island and came down on the shore of a beautiful lake near the mountain stronghold of Enna. There, in a meadow, he saw young Persephone with her companions, making daisy chains. Snatching her up, he drove his pitchfork into the ground. It opened, and he carried Persephone straight down to the dark realm of Hades.'

Stephanie breathed a sigh. 'It seems that all sorts of exciting things happened to girls in those days.'

Robbie turned to stare at her. 'You wouldn't like to be carried off like that, would you?'

'It would depend on whether I liked the chap. There is something to be said for a tempestuous wooing. But I'm interrupting the story.'

'Well, naturally, Demeter was terribly upset at her daughter having disappeared, and fairly rushed about the world looking for her. At length the Sun God, Helios, let on to her that it was Pluto who had ravished Persephone.'

'What a lovely word. It's so descriptive. But go on.'

'He also told her that it was really Zeus's fault, because he had said he had nothing against Pluto's acquiring the young blonde to brighten up his gloomy kingdom. At that, Demeter got more up-stage than ever. She severed all connection with her family and said that mortals were much nicer; in future she would live among them.

'After wandering all over the place, she turned up at Eleusis, in the guise of an old woman dressed in rags. She spun the people there a yarn that she had been carried off by pirates, but, being too old to be much fun for them, they had put her ashore on the coast nearby. The King of Eleusis was a chap named Celeus, and his wife, Metaneira, had just had a baby. Hearing that Demeter had been offering her services round the town as a nurse, they decided to take her on.

'In spite of her rags, they guessed from her bearing that she must be someone rather special, so they offered to treat her as one of the family. But she wouldn't eat or drink with them, and just stood staring at the ground, until one of the slave girls made a bawdy joke. That set her off laughing, and eased the situation a bit. The baby, Demophoon, was given to her to take care of.

'Instead of feeding the infant, she breathed on him, smeared his body with ambrosia, and at night put him in the fire, so that all that was mortal in him should be burnt away. The result was that he grew like a young god, but one night his mother happened to come into the nursery just as Demeter was piling red-hot coals on him. His mum threw a fit, and-'

'Saints preserve us! I don't wonder.'

'Neither do I. But Demeter was extremely peeved at having her project interfered with. In a rage, she told Metaneira that she had ruined everything, and that it would no longer be possible for her to make the boy an Immortal. Then she scared the pants off all those present by suddenly appearing to them in all her glory. While their knees were still knocking, she ordered them to build a big temple, and worship her in it; but, still in a huff, she said that she meant to resume her travels.

'However, before she left, she calmed down a bit and sent for the King's eldest son, Triptoiemus. Out of gratitude for the years that his family had given her a home, she gave him some grains of corn and taught him to plough and sow. Previous to this, the Greeks had lived on milk, honey, vegetables and, when they could get them, meat and fish. She told Triptoiemus that he must share this secret with people in other parts of the world; so he spent years making demonstration tours, even as far away as Sicily, Scythia and Asia Minor. It was owing to his efforts that bread became the main item in everyone's diet.

'As she had said she would, Demeter went off on her wanderings again, but after some years she returned to Eleusis. By then, her bitterness about losing Persephone had become so acute that she decided to stage a sit-down strike. The job Zeus had given her was to look after agriculture, and now she announced that she would take her misery out on mankind by not letting any crops grow at all.

'You can imagine how alarmed everyone became when February, March and April passed without a single blade of anything showing above ground. The gods became pretty worried, too. Zeus sent a messenger to tell her that she must stop this nonsense, or the whole human race would perish; but she ignored him. Then all the gods and goddesses came down one after the other, and pleaded with her to let up. But she said she couldn't care less if everyone starved to death. The only terms on which she would allow things to grow were that she should be given back her daughter.

'Zeus realized that he had no option but to climb down, so he sent Hermes down to Pluto to tell him that he must give up his young mistress. Pluto didn't feel that he could say "To hell with you" to his powerful younger brother; but he had enjoyed having Persephone to stay with him, and he thought up a cunning ruse for ensuring that she should not leave him for good. Before she left for the upper world, he persuaded her to eat a pomegranate with him.

'When Persephone got back to her mother's arms and they had wept over one another for a bit, Demeter said: "While you were with that awful man, you didn't eat anything with him, did you, dearest?"

⁴ "Oh no, I didn't need to, Mummy," replied the ravished maiden. "But he wasn't quite as hateful as you seem to think, and he was very anxious that I shouldn't be hungry on my way home; so we had a glass of wine and a pomegranate together."

⁴ "You bloody young fool!"' Robbie stopped abruptly, and with a contrite glance at Stephanie, muttered: 'Sorry, but I was getting a bit carried away. Anyhow, that is more or less what Demeter must have said. Then she explained to her daughter that the pomegranate was Hera's fruit. To share one with a man was standard practice as a formality by which one publicly accepted him as one's husband.

'Pluto, of course, claimed the girl back as his legally wedded wife, but Demeter threatened to go on strike again; so Zeus had to arbitrate between them. He proposed that Persephone should spend one-third of the year underground with her husband and two-thirds of it above ground with her mother. To everyone's relief, not least the still starving inhabitants of the earth, the compromise was agreed to.

'So, from then onwards, every year at Eleusis a great feast was held in October, when the leaves started to fall off the trees, and Persephone had to return to Hades, with entreaties that she would not get to like the place and stay there for good. And in February another was held with tremendous rejoicings, when the buds sprouted and blades of this and that appeared, showing that she was on her way back and there would be crops and a harvest to keep the human race going for another year.'

Seeing that Robbie had concluded his narrative, Stephanie said: 'As you are so interested in these things, I suppose you have been to see the ruins of Eleusis?'

'Oh yes,' he assured her, 'and those at Corinth and Sounion and the battlefield of Marathon, too. I've been to all the interesting places that I could get to in a day, but this is my first chance to go further afield.'

By this time, they were actually on the isthmus of Corinth and approaching the canal that enables ships to pass from the Ionian to the Aegean Sea, and saves them a two hundred mile journey round the rocky capes of the Peloponnesus. When they came to the bridge, Stephanie stopped the car and they got out to look over the parapet. The cut is nearly four miles long, and in places over two hundred feet deep, so from that height the strip of water below looked no wider than a broad pavement.

'You wouldn't think it's as broad as the Suez Canal, would you?' Robbie remarked. 'Or that the ancients would not have been afraid to take on the colossal task of cutting it?'

They didn't,' replied Stephanie promptly. 'It wasn't open till the 'nineties.'

T know, but the Romans planned it. The Emperor Nero dug out the first spadeful of earth himself, with a golden spade, and

Vespasian sent him six thousand Jewish captives from Judaea to work on it.'

'Shades of Hitler!'

'Yes, the poor Jews have had a pretty raw deal all through history. Anyhow, the Romans were not the boys to give up lightly anything that set their hands to. They shifted thousands of tons of soil. Later, modern engineers adopted their original plan; so I've no doubt the Romans would have completed it if the job hadn't had to be called off, owing to the great insurrection of Vindex.'

Ten minutes later, they pulled up in Corinth at the Ivy restaurant on the quay, and had welcome drinks, then lunched at a table outside from which they could admire the bay. After the meal, Stephanie suggested a walk round the town but Robbie shook his head.

'There's nothing to see here; only straight streets and second-rate shops. It was built barely a hundred years ago, after the old town up on the hill was destroyed by an earthquake. In fact not much of this one is even that old, as it was wrecked by another earthquake in 1928.'

As the great heats had not yet come, they decided to push on with the longer part of their journey, for which the road lay nearly the whole way along the south shore of the Gulf of Corinth. For a while they were almost silent, then Stephanie asked: 'Why have you selected Patras as our first stop? It's a rather dirty, modern port, and as far as I know there is nothing of archaeological interest within miles.'

For a moment Robbie was as completely floored as if someone had tripped him up without warning. It had never occurred to him that he should provide an explanation of his choice, to make his cover stick.

'Oh, well . . . you see . . .' he floundered. 'It's like this, er . . .' Then, suddenly, his visit to Luke's office came back to him, and he hurried on: 'This isn't altogether a pleasure trip. I am associated with a business firm, and they have given me a few odd jobs to do in various places.'

'What sort of business are you in?'

'Er . . . oil,' Robbie admitted a shade reluctantly.

'Do you mean that you sell petrol to garages, and that sort of thing?'

'No, oh no. It's just that I have to show my company's flag here and there, and make a few enquiries. There's another reason for my going to Patras, though,' he added, memory having suddenly come to his aid. 'Just across the head of the gulf lie the ruins of Calydon and Pleuron, and I'd very much like to see them.'

'If we're going to cross the gulf, I take it, then, that our next stop will be Delphi?' she remarked.

He shot her an uneasy glance. Nothing would have delighted him more than to spend a few days at Delphi, but unfortunately it was many miles from any of the sites at which the Czechs were scheduled to operate; so he replied rather lamely: 'No, I hadn't planned to go to Delphi. You see, there are, er . . . lots more interesting places.'

Raising her dark eyebrows, she shot him a surprised glance. 'Really! I thought Delphi was the piece de resistance of all the ancient sanctuaries. That's where the priestesses used to get dopey in a cellar on the fumes of herbs, and prophesy to people who put their ears to the ground. Surely you are going to write about that, and how people came from all over the place to consult the famous Oracle?'

'Yes; oh yes, of course,' he hastened to assure her. 'But as a matter of fact, I don't think the Oracle was quite all that it was cracked up to be. Most of the answers it gave were terribly ambiguous. You were left to interpret them for yourself, so that left the Pythoness who made them sitting pretty on the basis of "heads I win, tails you lose". For example, look what happened to Croesus. Being a greedy type, he thought it might be a good idea to make war on his neighbour, Cyrus the Persian, and sack some of his cities; but, wanting to make certain before he started anything that he would get the best of it, he sent an Ambassador with costly presents to Delphi to consult the Oracle. The reply came back that his war against Persia would overthrow a mighty Empire. And it did—his own great Kingdom of Lydia.'

'I should have asked for my money back,' commented the practical Stephanie. 'Anyhow, it's better to be born lucky than rich.'

'How right you are! Even before Croesus lost his kingdom, he found that out. He had a favourite son named Atys, and one night he dreamed that the beautiful youth would die of a wound from an iron weapon. He got into such a tizzy about this that he wouldn't allow Atys to remain in the Army, found him a lovely wife to keep him busy at home, and even had all the spears and axes in the Palace hidden away, so that Atys shouldn't cut himself on one by accident. But it wasn't any good. A savage boar began to give trouble to the people in the Mysian hills; so they sent to the King for help to kill it. He collected his bravest hunters and Atys begged to be allowed to go along. Croesus said "No", but Atys argued that a boar's tusks were not made of iron, and persuaded his old man to let him go on the hunt. They found the boar, and made a circle round it. Naturally, all these young bloods wanted the kudos of being the first to wound it. They ail rushed in, and Atys was just a fraction quicker than the rest. The boar didn't get him, but the spear of one of his pals did; and that was that. Look at Midas, too.'

'He was even richer than Croesus, wasn't he?'

'Yes, he was the King of Phrygia and the richest man in the World, but even that didn't satisfy his avarice. One morning, he was walking in his garden, and he came across old Silenus. He was a kind of cask on legs, and one of the god Dionysus's boon companions. The previous night, they had had quite a party, and Silenus had got so drunk that he had lost the others; and there he was sleeping it off under a bush.

'Midas gave him an outsize "hair of the dog", crowned him with a wreath of fresh roses, then took the old soak back to his patron. Dionysus was so pleased with the kindness shown his henchman that he offered to grant Midas anything he liked to ask.

'Without a second thought, Midas asked that everything he touched should turn to gold, And, of course, it did—fruit, flowers, stones; anything he picked up on his way home. His clothes had become gold, too; so before he had gone far, he was getting pretty puffed. Seeing a mule in a field he thought he would ride, but the moment he mounted it, the animal became solid gold and couldn't budge. When he did reach home, things went from bad to worse. The water in which he tried to wash turned to golden ice. He kissed one of his children, and the poor mite became a golden bambino; he struck a slave and found he had made a golden statue. By this time, really worried, he was getting hungry; but when he sat down to lunch, every bit of food he put in his mouth turned to gold, so he had to spit it out again. Hoping against hope that the whole thing was a bad dream, he lay down on his luxurious couch, but the great pile of soft cushions turned instantly to golden rocks.

'At crack of dawn, with not a stitch on, he hurried back to Dionysus. The god laughed at him at first, but later took compassion on his pleading and told him that, if he bathed in the spring from which the river Pactolus rose, he could get rid of his golden touch. For days on end, willing to barter all his wealth for even a penny bun and a cup of ersatz coffee, he staggered round, hunting for the source of the river. At last he found it, plunged in, and came out able to eat and drink again.'

'What an awful story. How about his child and the slave? Was he able to turn them back again?' Stephanie suppressed a smile, and went on wickedly: 'You didn't mention his wife, but if they were fond of one another, that must have been very awkward, mustn't it?'

'You mean if . . . Well, there's no record about that.' Hurriedly, Robbie changed the subject. 'That golden touch business wasn't Midas's only bit of bad luck or, if you prefer, stupidity. One day, he was taking a stroll through the woods and he came upon Apollo and Pan. Apollo had always prided himself on being the absolute tops where music was concerned, but Pan said he could get better music out of his reed flute than Apollo could out of his lyre. To settle the matter, they held a contest there and then, and asked Midas to act as judge. Midas said he liked Pan's pipes better and ApoHo was furious. He said Midas had no more sense of harmony than an ass, so for the rest of his life he should go about with asses' ears. Poor Midas went home, hiding his head in a cloak; and after that, he was so ashamed of his great, pointed, hairy ears that he kept them covered up. But he couldn't keep the secret from his barber; so everyone got to know about it, and he became the laughing-stock of his Court.'

'I think that was very unsporting of Apollo, since he had asked Midas to act as judge. I've always been under the impression, too, that Apollo was one of the kindest of the gods.'

'So he was, generally speaking. He bestowed all sorts of benefits on mankind, but he could turn awfully nasty if anyone upset him. Look at what happened to Marsyas. Athene is said to have been the first of the Olympian family to take up music, but the others laughed so much at the way she blew out her cheeks when playing the flute that she flung the instrument aside, with a curse on anyone who picked it up. Marsyas was unlucky enough to find it. He was a very ugly, ignorant Satyr. However, the flute, having touched Athene's lips, made the most lovely music, so he was chump enough to challenge Apollo. Of course he hadn't an earthly, and as a punishment for his impertinence, the god had him flayed alive.'

'All the same,' remarked Stephanie thoughtfully, 'from what I remember about the gods and goddesses, Apollo must have been much the most attractive to women. He represented the warmth of the Sun and is always portrayed as strong-limbed and handsome, and he was both clever and brave. He would certainly have been my choice.'

'Oh, he was brave enough,' Robbie conceded. 'There was the occasion when two monster giants piled Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa, because they had designs on two of the goddesses and hoped to get up into Olympus and abduct them. Apollo caught the raiders at it, and drove them off single-handed. And, of course, he did have a lot of successful love affairs, but the girls weren't so universally smitten with him as one might suppose.

'Coronis, the daughter of the King of Lepiths, was a case in point. She two-timed him with a chap named Ischys, and a crow let on to Apollo about it. He was so angry at her having preferred a mortal to himself that he not only struck her and her boy friend dead, but cursed the crow so that all crows have had black feathers ever since. Then there was a girl at Delphi named Castalia who disliked him so much that, rather than sleep with bim, she drowned herself in a fountain. With the beautiful Oaphne, too, he had no luck. He did his utmost to seduce her with presents and all that, but she flatly refused to play; so he tried to take her by force. He had actually got his arms round ber, but she prayed for help to the Earth-Mother Gaea, who did a quick magic, and before Apollo knew what was happening he found himself clutching a laurel bush. He must have felt awfully sick.'

Stephanie hooted with laughter. 'I bet he was! I would give anything to have seen his face. Have you any more funny stories like that?'

'Well,' Robbie temporized. 'I don't know about funny, unless you have a practical-joke sense of humour. Of course, the ancient Greeks were pretty primitive. Just as schoolboys still get a big laugh out of seeing an old gent slip up on a piece of banana peel, I suppose your remote ancestors fairly split their sides at seeing someone they didn't much care about turned into a lizard or a toad.

'That sort of thing was liable to happen to quite nice people too, because lots of the trees and nearly every stream and lake were the home of some supernatural being, and it was terribly easy to damage their property without meaning to. Then out they popped, and did the most unpleasant things.

'Take Dryope, for example. All she did was to pick a bright flower from a bush for her little girl. Red sap started to run because, as it happened, the bush was really a wood-nymph taking a nap, and the sap was her blood. 'I'll learn you to go about wounding bushes," yelled the nymph in a fury—or words to that effect. And next moment Dryope found herself sprouting twigs and leaves. She had only just time to gasp out a prayer that her child might be allowed to come and play near her, before she became a bush herself. Then there was the awful business of Erysichthon; but, of course, he brought that on himself.'

'What terrible fate befell him?'

'Well, it was a sort of Midas trouble in reverse. In a general way, the oak was sacred to Hera; but there was one giant oak in Thessaly that Demeter had made her special property, and a bunch of Dryads living in the neighbourhood adopted it as an evening rendezvous to play "chase me round the mulberry bush" with a gang of young Satyrs. For some reason—I suppose because he wanted to build a ship or a new barn—Erysichthon, who was King of those parts, decided to have this oak cut down.

'In vain, the locals implored him not to. He put his woodmen on the job and after tremendous efforts the giant oak was felled. The Dryads were fed to the teeth at their jive centre being ruined, so they rushed off and complained to the management. Demeter naturally resented Erysichthon's having wrecked her dance hall, and assured the girls that she would see him off. She sent one of her Oreads up to the far, ice-bound north, having told her messenger to bring back Famine. When this character, with a head like a skull and his ribs sticking out through parchment skin, put in an appearance, Demeter simply said: "Go and do your stuff on Erysichthon."

'After his hard day's work helping to cut down the oak, you can imagine that the King had put away a good-sized steak for his dinner; but while he was asleep, Famine breathed upon him and he woke up as hungry as a hunter.

'I imagine he had a terrific "brekker". Fried eggs, sausages and bacon, kidneys on toast, kedgeree and rounded off with a few slices of York ham and half a cold grouse. You know, the sort of breakfast our great-grandfathers used to have in Victorian times. But it wasn't much good. By lunch time, he was again ravenous.

'From then on, he never suffered a trace of indigestion but, on the other hand, he could never cram himself with enough to satisfy his hunger. His appetite was so enormous that he ate all day, till he had no flocks and herds left to slaughter. In due course, he had to sell his jewels and his palace in order to buy enough to eat.

'At last, driven from his kingdom by his creditors, he had only one asset left—a lovely daughter named Mestra. As he was still tormented by hunger night and day, he decided to sell her as a slave. Luckily for her and for him, it happened that she had played "slap and tickle" with the great god Poseidon. In gratitude for the fun they had had, the Sea King had given her the power to turn herself into anything she liked. So each time her papa sold her for the price of a few cuts off the joint, she promptly became a bee or a beetle or a butterfly and came back to him, so that he could put her up for auction afresh.

'But after a while, the chaps who were in the money and on the look-out for lovelies who would keep them warm at nights tumbled to this. They formed a ring, and when Mestra was put up, refused to bid for her. That left Erysichton completely in the ditch, and as Demeter refused to pardon him he had to eat himself.'

That's quite enough for today, thank you,' said Stephanie.

But by that time they had rounded the great bend in the gulf and were nearing Patras. After the Piraeus and Salonika, it is the largest port in Greece and, as such, mainly a modern, commercial city. Earthquakes in its neighbourhood are frequent, but although the town has escaped recent devastation, it contains few ancient buildings of interest. It had not even occurred to Robbie to book rooms, but Stephanie had looked up the hotels and, finding that the Cecil in St. Andrew Street headed the list, she suggested that they go to it.

After a few enquiries, they found the way there, and Robbie booked two single rooms, each with a private bathroom. Stephanie then said that, after her drive, she would like to rest; so it was agreed that they should meet at eight o'clock down in the dining room. Robbie, who had lately been missing his long sessions of day-dreaming lying on his bed or a chaise-longue in the Embassy garden, decided that he could pass an hour or two very happily doing nothing; so he, too, went up to his room and enjoyed a belated siesta.

For dinner, Stephanie had changed into a cocktail frock, and so alluring did Robbie find her that, several times during the meal, the thought came to him how wonderful it would be if only he were a god and could carry her off into the woods and ravish her. But he sternly put such disturbing ideas from him and instead tried to draw her out about the sort of life she had led.

His efforts met with little success. As far as he could gather, she had not moved in Athenian society or, at all events, not its higher strata that mingled with the Diplomatic Corps. Her mother, she said, had never been really happy living in Greece, and had not many close friends. There were a few families with whom they dined from time to time or joined up with for beach parties in the summer. Her father, of course, was absorbed in his commercial interests and had a separate set of wealthy men friends, with whom he frequently spent the evening. She said that she had never been allowed to go to a night club, but various boy friends took her to the cinema and to subscription dances, and she had had one really desperate love affair of which she preferred not to talk. She added only that for her it had ended unhappily, because her father had not considered the man good enough for her; so he had married someone else. Robbie forbore from pressing her further on the subject.