The lock yielded. The door opened. But the walk was bare as far as the fitful moonlight showed. He strode forward almost as if he feared an ambush, though at this part of the garden the short bare trees and standards made but the cover of a spider's-web tracery, through which one sees what is beyond. Only towards the middle of the orchard was there a spot where several walks met, and this was nearly surrounded by evergreen bushes and laurel and holly. This alone loomed blackly in front of him. Towards this he strode. And even as he gained the entrance a tall figure of a woman, cloaked and hooded, emerged from the encompassing dusk, and coming nearer, revealed itself as that of the Archduchess.
Dimly Nigel divined that she wore the deep blue velvet and sable furs which he had seen aforetime. More clearly he distinguished in the depths of the hood the dancing of those lustrous eyes, the pouting red lips of that royal mouth, the pallor of the cheeks.
He took her hand to kiss, but she bent forward with a look of enticement.
"Nay! tall captain!" she said. "We need not use the fashion of the courts. It was not so you kissed Ottilie, or so she told me."
But nevertheless she tendered but her cheek, in token, as he understood it, that she had but surrendered the furthest outworks. That vain imagining of his, that to be within arm's length of her was to throw the reins upon the neck of passion and let it gallop, had vanished when he put the key in the lock.
Woman the queen, woman the giver and the withholder, leaned graciously towards him by reason of the love that had descended upon her, abasing her to him, exalting him to her, banishing all thrusting rebellious swashbuckling imaginations from the presence. Tumultuous his thoughts sprang towards speech, but little could he find but an almost breathless—
"Stephanie! Of all living men to choose me for your lover?"
"Nay! tall captain!" Craftily she had ranged herself beside him and rested her hand upon his shoulder, looking up into his eyes with her face of roguish wooer. "Nay! tall captain! You had already taken my sister-half, Ottilie, by assault, and it is not seeming that an Archduchess should be bussed by more than one bold fellow, so I even proffer my cheek to the same smiter for honour's sake."
The tone of raillery set him at his ease. He felt that beneath it beat the true womanly heart. And over him stole a great, a measureless content.