He started for the court-yard. His plan was to accost the first servant that he encountered and mention Chitta’s name, but this trouble was saved him. In the shadowy gateway, he found Chitta crouching.
She glanced to right and left, saw that they were unobserved, passed beyond a narrow door that opened into the gate, and led Cartaret up a spiral stone staircase to the entrance of a circular room in one of the twin gate-towers. There she turned and left him alone with Vitoria.
In the center of that bare room, standing beside one of the bowmen’s windows that commanded the approach to the castle, the Lady of the Rose awaited him. For an instant, he scarcely recognized her. She was gowned in a single-piece Basque dress of embroidered silk, closely fitted about her full lithe figure to below the hips, the skirt widening and hanging loosely about her slim ankles. A black silk scarf, in sharp contrast to the embroidery, was sewn to the dress and drawn tightly over the right shoulder, across the bust, and then draped beneath the left hip. But the glory of her blue-black hair was as he had first seen it in the twilight of his far-off studio; the creamy whiteness of her cheeks was just touched with pink, and her blue eyes, under curling lashes, seemed at first the frank eyes that he loved.
“Vitoria!” he cried.
She drew back. She raised one hand, its pink palm toward him.
“You should not have done this,” she said in a rapid whisper. “How did you find me? How did you come here?” Her voice was kind, but steady.
Cartaret stood still. This he had not looked for. His cheeks were flushed, and the lines about his mouth deepened, as they always did at moments of crisis, and made his face very firm.
“Does it matter how?” he asked. “Not all the width of the world could have kept me away. There’s something I’ve got to know and know instantly.”
“But you should not have come, and you must go immediately! Listen—no, listen to me now! I am not Vitoria Urola in these mountains; whether I want it or not, I have to be the Doña Dolorez Ethenard-Eskurola. That would perhaps sound amusing in the rue du Val de Grâce; here it is a serious matter: the most serious matter in this little mountain-world. You will have to listen to me.”