Decision at Delphi by Helen MacInnes

slowclimb in a high promontory of rock where ruined columns and broken arches were raised into the sky.
    “There’s the Greek theatre!” Strang said, halting in sudden surprise.
    I wish, she thought angrily, that he would listen to me as intently as he looks at that pile of old bricks and marble. “Mr. Strang, I haven’t much time. I am late as it is. And what I have to ask is so important.”
    “Sorry.” And he was. “All right. Go ahead and ask me for Steve’s address so that you can write him.”
    She opened her large eyes wide. “However did you guess?” He must have been listening, after all. She said, “I just want to clear up everything. I want Yannis—or Steve—to know that George has always believed in him. When he was denounced as a deserter and traitor, it was George who defended him.”
    “He was denounced as a traitor?”
    “Yes, at an emergency meeting in the camp just after he had disappeared. They said he had gone over to the Germans, and that enemy patrols were now moving against the camp, so everyone had to scatter and regroup. It must have all been a lie, of course. But George couldn’t prove it, because he wasn’t allowed to go back to the camp site to see if German patrols had moved up. He wasn’t allowed any freedom of movement at all; he was almost a prisoner after he had defended Yannis. His mission became a total failure. So—” she drew a deep breath— “do you think it was fair of Yannis to wound George so deeply when they met in Naples? Why, George was the only one who defended him.”
    “What were his other friends doing?” Strang asked bitterly.
    “But it was his brother who denounced him. Who couldargue with a brother? Besides, who would argue? See what happened to George! And he had the protection of being a British officer.”
    “I see,” was all Strang said. But he was thinking, Steve never told me anything about a brother. He looked at her, wondering if she had got the story wrong. “His brother?”
    She nodded. “George can tell you all about it.”
    Strang said nothing. George, he was fairly sure, would never again even mention the name of Yannis. To a man, a snub was a snub. It was women, poor darlings, who thought that if only they explained enough, then everything would be made all right.
    “One thing puzzles me,” she said slowly.
    Only one thing? he wondered. “Shall we climb up to the theatre,” he asked, “and talk about it there?” They could hardly stand rooted beside a garden wall for another five minutes
    “I—I don’t know if I have time.” She glanced back at the high, corner window of her hotel. Then she looked at the gateway to the Greek theatre. “It will soon be closed for the night,” she said, watching a girl and an elderly woman coming slowly through the gates. She noticed that Mr. Strang had seen them, too. “They always go up there, each evening, and leave just before the gates are closed. I think she’s lonely. Every morning down on the shore, every evening up on that hill. And always with that old woman trailing along. They bicker, constantly. It’s a very peculiar house-hold—George and I are fascinated—just the girl, always exquisitely dressed; the old woman, always complaining; and a rather strange manservant. At least, he wears a uniform when he drives their car, and yet he lounges about the garden as if he owned it. He was sun-bathing yesterday, without a stitch on.”
    Strang looked away from Miss Katherini Roilos and her duenna arguing sharply on the other side of the road, but the girl hadn’t even glanced in his direction.
    “That’s their house, just across from our hotel,” Caroline Ottway told him, “the one with that heavenly almond tree inside its high wall. They only arrived a week ago. If I had a divine house like that, I’d have been here since early spring, wouldn’t you?”
    He pretended to lose interest in the house. “You were puzzled by one thing,” he reminded her, and started to edge her