"Welcome to our mountainous abode. I am very glad to meet you."
He shook hands with us warmly.
"We, too, are very glad to meet you," said my brother; "but I cannot understand why you are taking all this trouble. What we could afford to give you would not keep you in cigarettes a week."
"Are you quite sure, Mr Spiropoulo?"
"Good gracious, my dear sir," Mano cried, "you don't mean to say you take us for the Spiropouli?"
The chief smiled a most attractive smile it appeared to me; though my brother afterwards described it as fatuous.
"I hope you did not find the ascent too difficult," the leader inquired solicitously.
"Two of the pallikaria made a skamnaki for me," I put in. "It was very nice of them."
I have always spoken my mother tongue with considerable foreign accent, not having learned it until after I spoke French, German and Turkish, and this accent at once attracted the attention of our host. Gravely he asked:
"Did you acquire this French accent, mademoiselle, in the short time you have been studying the French language. Let me see, it is three months now since you passed through the forest before. That was the first time you left Anatolia, I believe—and one does not acquire a French accent in Anatolia."
