'Come,' she said, and beckoned him forward. 'I will hide you.' And then on a note of deeper anxiety, for which he blessed her tender, charitable heart, she added: 'If you are found here, all is lost. Crouch low and follow me.'
Obediently he followed, almost on all fours, creeping beside a balustrade of mellow brick that stood breast high to make a parapet for the edge of that very spacious terrace.
Ahead of him the lady moved sedately and unhurried, thereby discovering to Bellarion virtues of mental calm and calculating wit. A fool, he told himself, would have gone in haste, and thus provoked attention and inquiry.
They came in safety to the foot of the arched marble bridge, which Bellarion now perceived to be crossed by broad steps, ascending to a platform at the summit, and descending thence again to the level of the temple on the water.
'Wait. Here we must go with care.' She turned to survey the gardens below, and as she looked he saw her blench, saw the golden-brown eyes dilate as if in fear. He could not see what she saw—the glint of arms upon hurrying men emerging from the palace. But the guess he made went near enough to the fact before she cried out: 'Too late! If you ascend now you will be seen.' And she told him of the soldiers. Again she gave evidence of her shrewd sense. 'Do you go first,' she bade him, 'and on hands and knees. If I follow I may serve as a screen for you, and we must hope they will not see you.'
'The hope,' said Bellarion, 'is slender as the screen your slenderness would afford me, lady.' He was lying now flat on the ground at her feet. 'If only it had pleased Heaven to make you as fat as you are charitable, I'd not hesitate. As it is, I think I see a better way.'
She stared down at him, a little frown puckering her white brow. But for the third time in that brief space she proved herself a woman whose mind seized upon essentials and disregarded lesser things.
'A better way? What way, then?'
He had been using his eyes. Beyond the domed pavilion a tongue of land thrust out into the lake, from which three cypresses rose in black silhouette against the afterglow of sunset, whilst a little alder-bush its branches trailing in the water blunted the island's point.
'This way,' said Bellarion, and went writhing like an eel in the direction of the water.