"Count Tilly said that same thing!" said Nigel. "Is it a password of the Rosicrucians?"
"Then he warned you against me!" she said in a tone of triumph.
"He gave it as a piece of general advice," he said. "But what is in our compact?"
"Merely this!" she replied. "You were to conduct us to Erfurt. You were to put us into the company of trustworthy people so that we might pursue our way to Eisenach."
"That is true!" said Nigel. "Yet it is not to be wondered at if I cast about to know more of a noble lady who first tries to stab me with a dagger, then takes a passing interest in my parentage, whom next I find by an extraordinary chance sobbing in a dark corner of a cathedral, whom, finally, I have the honour of conducting to her lodging at an hour when most noble ladies are glad to be within doors." There was a vein of humour in his tone rather than in what he said.
"Does woman ever owe anything to man that she does not pay a thousand-fold? I count no woman my debtor!" He said it in a tone of tenderness she had not heard before from this soldier of fortune.
"Trust me then in turn! I tell you nothing! Believe me, there are things I dare not tell my confessor that I _could_ tell you; only it is better not."
"Let it be so, madame! 'Trust me all in all or not at all' is a proverb of my country."
They had reached the further end of the street called Fischersand and turned on to the Long Bridge, from which it was but the length of a small side street to the Prediger Strasse.
They halted on the bridge and looked over the balustrade, up the waterway. There was candlelight here and there in the back windows of the houses that abutted on the water. Their gaze could only penetrate a little way along the dark space between the houses. A few stars reflected themselves in the water at their feet. The Lady Ottilie of Thüringen was in a restless mood, in that mood when a woman wants everything and nothing, when she is eager to reveal and careful to hide everything but her eagerness. To an older man perhaps there would have been no puzzle, but to Nigel Charteris, who had never known the spell of woman, she was a mysterious child following her own phantasies.
She gazed into the dark vista for a full minute or so of silence--a silence only broken by the tramp of the guard going its rounds. Then she said--