The girl stood smiling upon the young man, a spray of the great scarlet blossom of the pomegranate freshly plucked and held easily in her hand. She had broken it from the tree in the courtyard as she came in. The flowers showed like handfuls of blood splashed upon the bosom and neck of her white clinging robe.
"You are very beautiful," said the Abbé John, his voice no more than a hoarse gasp; "what are you doing here in this place? Tell me your name. I seem to have seen you long ago, in dreams. But I have forgotten—I forget everything!"
Then, without taking her eyes, mystically amber and gold, softly caressing as the sea and as changeful, from the young man's face, she beckoned him forward.
"We shall speak more at ease in another place," she said. And held out her hand to him, carelessly, palm downwards, as if he had been her brother, and they were playing some lightheart game, or taking positions for an old-time dance of woven hands and measured paces.
Valentine la Niña led John d'Albret into a summer parlour, equally secure from escape, being surrounded by the high fortress walls of the Hotel of the Inquisition, but full of rich twilight, of flowers, of broidery, and of faint wafted perfumes from forgotten shawl or dropped kerchief, which told of a woman's abiding there.
"Now," said Valentine la Niña, throwing herself back luxuriously on a wide divan of Seville, her hands clasped behind her head, "tell me all there is to tell—keep back nothing. Then we will take counsel what is best to be done! I have not forgotten, if you have!"
And John d'Albret, exhausted by the ceaseless searching of the Eyes into his soul, and the need of the dark which would not come, told her all. To which Valentine la Niña listened, and saw the fear fade out and the reasonable man return. But as John d'Albret spoke, something moved strangely in the depths of her own heart. Her face flushed; her temples throbbed; her hands grew chill.
"And you have done this for the sake of a woman—of a girl?" she said.
"For Claire Agnew's sake," the Abbé John answered, still uncertainly; "so would any one—any one who loved her!"
Valentine la Niña smiled, stirring uneasily on her divan, and as she smiled she sighed also, leaning forward, her great eyes on the youth.