'Egon himself could have done no more,' she said in her own thoughts, and it was the highest praise that she could give to any man, for her Magyar cousin was the embodiment of all martial daring, of all chivalrous ardour, and had led his glittering hussars down on to the French bayonets, as on to the Prussian Krupp guns, with a fury that bore all before it, impetuous and irresistible as a stream of fired naphtha.
On the twelfth morning the river had sunk so much lower that the yacht arriving with medicines and stores of food from Neusatz signalled that she could not enter the creek on which Idrac stood, and waited orders. It had ceased to rain, but the winds were still strong and the skies heavy. She descended to her boat at the water-gate, and told the men to take her out to the yacht. It was early, the sun behind the clouds had barely climbed above the distant Wallachian woods, and the scene had lost nothing of its melancholy. A man was standing on the water-stairs as she descended them, and turned rapidly away, but she had seen him and stretched out her long staff and touched him lightly.
'Why do you avoid me?' she said, as he uncovered his head; 'my men sought you in all directions; I wished to thank you.'
He bowed low over the hand she held out to him. 'I ventured to be near at hand to be of use,' he answered. 'I was afraid the exposure, and, the damp, and all this pestilence would make you ill: you are not ill?'
'No; I am quite well. I have heard of all your courage and endurance. Idrac owes you a great debt.'
'I only pay my debt to Hohenszalras.'
They were both silent; a certain constraint was upon them both.
'How did you know of the inundation? It was unkind of you not to come to me,' she said, and her voice was unsteady as she spoke. 'I want so much to tell you, better than letters can do, all that we felt for you throughout that awful war.'
He turned away slightly with a shudder. 'You are too good. Thousands of men much better than I suffered much more.'
The tears rose to her eyes as she glanced at him. He was looking pale and worn. He had lost the graceful insouciance of his earlier manner. He looked grave, weary, melancholy, like a man who had passed through dire disaster, unspeakable pain, and had seen his career snapped in two like a broken wand. But there was about him instead something soldierlike, proven, war-worn, which became him in her eyes, daughter of a race of warriors as she was.