Wheeling in his tracks, on the impulse of the moment he walked straight back to the great painted wooden charger, sheathed in steel and cloth of gold, bearing on high a slender, mounted figure in full armour--the dainty Milanese mail Of the Countess of Oroposa.
The superb young figure sat its saddle, hollow backed, graceful, both delicate gauntlets resting easily over the war-bridle on the gem-set pommel. Sunbeams turned the long spurs to two golden flames, and splintered into fire across the helmet's splendid crest. He could not pierce the dusk behind the closed vizor; but in every heart-beat, every nerve, he felt her living presence within that hollow shell of inlaid steel and gold.
For a moment he stood staring up at her, then glanced mechanically toward the high clock. Thirty seconds! Time to speak if he would; time for her to move, if in her heart there ever had been the thought which he had never uttered, never meant to voice. Twenty seconds! Through that slitted vizor, also, the clock was in full view. She could read the flight of time as well as he. Now she must move--if ever she meant to challenge in him that to which he never would respond.
He waited now, looking at the clock, now at the still figure above him. Ten seconds! Five!
There was no movement, no answer from the slitted helmet.
Then the lofty gold and azure clock struck. And when the last of the twelve resounding strokes rang echoing through the sunlit armoury, the mailed figure stirred in its saddle, stretched both stirrups, raised its arms and flexed them.
"You nearly caught me," she said calmly. "I was afraid you'd see my eyes through the helmet slits. Was it your lack of enterprise that saved me--or your prudence?"
"I spoke to you before the hour was up. It seems to me that I _have_ won."
"Not at all. You might just as well have stood in the cellar and howled my name. That isn't discovering me, you know."
"I felt in my heart that you were there," he said, in a low voice.
She laughed. "What a man feels in his heart doesn't count. Do you realise that I'm nearly dead sitting for an hour here? This helmet is abominably hot! How in the world could that poor countess have stood it?"
"Shall I climb up beside you and unlace your helmet?" he asked.