"She found you?" asked Dolores, when she was gone.
"Yes, she found me. You had gone down, she said, to try and save your father. He is safe now!" he laughed.
"She found you alive." Dolores lingered on the words. "I never envied her before, I think; and it is not because if I had stayed I should have suffered less, dear." She put up her hands upon his shoulders again. "It is not for that, but to have thought you dead and to have seen you grow alive again, to have watched your face, to have seen your eyes wake and the colour come back to your cheeks and the warmth to your dear hands! I would have given anything for that, and you would rather that I should have been there, would you not?" She laughed low and kissed away the answer from his lips. "If I had stayed beside you, it would have been sooner, love. You would have felt me there even in your dream of death, and you would have put out your hand to come back to me. Say that you would! You could not have let me lie there many minutes longer breaking my heart over you and wanting to die, too, so that we might be buried together. Surely my kisses would have brought you back!"
"I dreamed they did, as mine would you."
"Sit down beside me," she said presently. "It will be very hard to tell--and it cannot be very long before they come. Oh, they may find me here! It cannot matter now, for I told them all that I had been long in your room to-night."
"Told them all? Told whom? The King? What did you say?" His face was grave again.
"The King, the court, the whole world. But it is harder to tell you." She blushed and looked away. "It was the King that wounded you--I heard you fall."
"Scratched me. I was only stunned for a while."
"He drew his sword, for I heard it. You know the sound a sword makes when it is drawn from a leathern sheath? Of course--you are a soldier! I have often watched my father draw his, and I know the soft, long pull. The King drew quickly, and I knew you were unarmed, and besides--you had promised me that you would not raise your hand against him."
"I remember that my sword was on the table in its scabbard. I got it into my hand, sheathed as it was, to guard myself. Where is it? I had forgotten that. It must be somewhere on the floor."