But now! If he really cared--her power would grow with the venture, her own safety the pledge of his purity--a dangerous game, indeed, here alone upon this crag in the mountains, but if he were sincere, she was armed with a flaming sword to defend--to destroy! If--? She would not trust him, but she would fight him with the weapons she had. Her lips closed in a thin line, and a glint as of polished metal came into her eyes as the scene in the house of the Beg of Rataj shut out the lovely landscape before her. To destroy--to fan the spark to flame that she might extinguish it; to corrode the spirit with the biting acid of contempt; to envenom the soul--newly born, perhaps--to the sweeter uses of beneficence, and then escape! If he cared!
And if he did not care--if, as she really believed, he lied to gain an end....
This was the thought of him that obsessed her. A liar, always. Why not now? Men of his kind were unusual to women of hers, but even in the midst of his confession--as near self-abasement as a man of his type could come, the note of egotism rang clear above the graceful phrases--too graceful to be anything but manufactured in that clear inventive brain of his.
She paced the floor, thinking deeply, and at last stopped by the window and sought again the counsel of the eternal hills. After a while she turned again into the room and peered into a mirror, seeking in her face the answer to the riddle. It was pale, resolute, but it was not ugly.
She planned her campaign with the calm forethought of a general who picks out his own battlefield, disposing his forces to the best advantage, for attack or for repulse, for victory, or defeat. She must mask her approach, conceal her intentions, and develop slowly the real strength of her position. There was much that she wished to learn as to Schloss Szolnok, and its security from those who sought to intercept them, much in regard to the plans of her captor for the future, but she knew that she must act with caution and skill, if she hoped to escape.
Goritz had previously expressed a wish that when she grew strong enough to leave her bedroom, she would join him at dinner, which she heard was served in one end of the great Hall, but she decided that the first skirmish should take place in a situation of her own choosing. And so after dusk, the moon coming out, she went again upon the terrace where she leaned upon the wall of the bastion and looked down with an air of self-sought seclusion, upon the mists of the valley.