"No, thank you. Mrs. Quant will get me out of it." She rose in the stirrups, swung one steel-shod leg over, and leaped to the floor beside him, clashing from crest to spur.
"What a silly game it was, anyway!" she commented, lifting her vizor and lowering the beaver. Her face was deliciously flushed, and the gold hair straggled across her cheeks.
"It's quite wonderful how the armour of the countess fits me," she said. "I wonder what she looked like. I'll wager, anyway, that she never played as risky a game in her armour as I have played this morning."
"You didn't really mean to abide by the decision, did you?" he asked.
"Do you think I did?"
"No, of course not."
She smiled. "Perhaps you are correct. But I've always been afraid I'd do something radical and irrevocable, and live out life in misery to pay for it. Probably I wouldn't. I must take off these gauntlets, anyway. Thank you"—as he relieved her of them and tossed them under the feet of the wooden horse.
"Last Thursday," he said, "you fascinated everybody with your lute and your Chinese robes. Heaven help the men when they see you in armour! I'll perform my act of fealty now." And he lifted her hands and kissed them lightly where the gauntlets had left pink imprints on the smooth white skin.
As always when he touched her, she became silent; and, as always, he seemed to divine the instant change in her to unresponsiveness under physical contact. It was not resistance, it was a sort of inertia—an endurance which seemed to stir in him a subtle brutality, awaking depths which must not be troubled—unless he meant to cut his cables once for all and drift headlong toward the rocks of chance.