“You seem zealous for me.”
“I serve my lady. Why, it will be all plain for you. Is it so strange a thing to serve a woman?”
They had left the gardens and come to a high stone wall that skirted the precincts of Lilias’s palace. Cypresses and bays showed above the stone, while a great cedar cast a broad shadow there. In the wall there was a little door studded over with iron nails. The girl took a key that hung at her girdle, unlocked the door, and pointed Tristan in.
“Enter, sir,” she said, with a glib smile and a slight bending of her body.
Tristan stood and looked through under the lintel. He could see a garden spread within, the grass sleek under the noonday sun, beds of flowers, purple and red. At the end of a lawn stood an orange thicket, and under the trees a woman walked, clad in crimson, with her white arms bare. She wore sandals of gold stuff on her naked feet and her hair hung loose about her neck.
But Tristan turned back from the door and looked full into the girl’s dark eyes. She coloured a little under his gaze, as though half guessing what was in his heart, and that he knew the part she played. Nor was he slow to read the truth that shone for him on her thin, pale face.
“You will speak to my lady for me,” he said to her, casting a swift glance into the garden.
The girl looked at him, but did not stir.
“What, sir, shall I say?” she asked.
“That I will not enter yonder place.”