Dimly Nigel divined that she wore the deep blue velvet and sable furs which he had seen aforetime. More clearly he distinguished in the depths of the hood the dancing of those lustrous eyes, the pouting red lips of that royal mouth, the pallor of the cheeks.
He took her hand to kiss, but she bent forward with a look of enticement.
"Nay! tall captain!" she said. "We need not use the fashion of the courts. It was not so you kissed Ottilie, or so she told me."
But nevertheless she tendered but her cheek, in token, as he understood it, that she had but surrendered the furthest outworks. That vain imagining of his, that to be within arm's length of her was to throw the reins upon the neck of passion and let it gallop, had vanished when he put the key in the lock.
Woman the queen, woman the giver and the withholder, leaned graciously towards him by reason of the love that had descended upon her, abasing her to him, exalting him to her, banishing all thrusting rebellious swashbuckling imaginations from the presence. Tumultuous his thoughts sprang towards speech, but little could he find but an almost breathless--
"Stephanie! Of all living men to choose me for your lover?"
"Nay! tall captain!" Craftily she had ranged herself beside him and rested her hand upon his shoulder, looking up into his eyes with her face of roguish wooer. "Nay! tall captain! You had already taken my sister-half, Ottilie, by assault, and it is not seeming that an Archduchess should be bussed by more than one bold fellow, so I even proffer my cheek to the same smiter for honour's sake."
The tone of raillery set him at his ease. He felt that beneath it beat the true womanly heart. And over him stole a great, a measureless content.
He took her left hand in his, and holding so much of her closely to his side, they began to walk here and there about the orchard by first one and then another of its many paths.
"It is amazing that I did not guess your riddle before, my love," he said.
"Count Tilly guessed it at Magdeburg!" she said. "But he feigned not to, thinking doubtless it would be as well my madcap freaks should not come to the Emperor through him."
"But you put on a different seeming! The voice was like, but the language of Ottilie was different, smacked of the country lady. The face of Ottilie was like that of the Archduchess, but the manner and bearing were less haughty and less assured."