“Well?” she interrogated, sharply, as the man made no sign. At her word he cast his wrapping from him, and Lycabetta beheld with some irritation the twisted form and writhen features of the fool Diogenes. Lysidice crept round to the other side of her mistress and whispered to her:
“It is the fool.”
Robert moved a little nearer to Lycabetta, with strange fear and strange hope in his heart. Through all the horrors and denials of the night, through all his consciousness of a conspiracy he could neither fathom nor baffle, his distraught mind carried some memory of Perpetua, and that memory had steered him to the gate of Lycabetta’s garden of delight. At those gates he found no obstacle; his word was taken without question; no unbridled hand sought to draw the mantle from his face; unchallenged, untroubled, he had made his way through the sweet-smelling lawns and arbors to Lycabetta’s door. Perhaps she was not in the conspiracy; perhaps she was loyal. These thoughts were racing through his mind as he stood before her and cast the mantle from him; these thoughts forced him towards her, forced him, with lips parted eagerly, pitifully, like the lips of a thirst-goaded man, to speak.
“Do you know me?” he gasped, hoarsely, and his voice sounded strange and unfamiliar in his ears, like the voice of a lost spirit.
Lycabetta smiled a little as she stretched herself carelessly on the couch.
“Surely I know you,” she answered, and at her words the warm blood seemed to well back into Robert’s heart, and he lifted up his hands in a rapture.
“Heaven,” he cried, “I thank you that all the world has not gone mad.”
He mouthed the world’s madness so bitterly that Lycabetta propped herself on an elbow and eyed him curiously. She disliked Diogenes less than the courtier-creatures did, for she had less chance to counter his scathing phrases, and, besides, he was near the King, and it is ever well to be friends with kings’ neighbors.
“You seem angry,” she said.
Robert answered her almost in a yell.