“Madame, I take your gratitude and ask no more.”
“No more?”
“As there is honour in me, I will serve you, and ask no return.”
“Tristan,” she said, with an uprushing of faith, “I can trust at last.”
“God guard us both, madame,” he said very simply. “For your sake, I have been tempted, yet my heart is clean.”
She stood back from him, and covered her eyes for a moment with her arm. At the very gesture a silver circlet upon her wrist caught Tristan’s eye, a coiled snake of tarnished silver, curiously wrought, with emeralds for eyes. Tristan thrust out a hand towards Rosamunde with a strange cry.
“That bracelet!”
She stared in his face, and twisted the thing from off her wrist. Tristan snatched at the circlet of silver, handled it almost with the greed of a miser gloating over some splendid gem.
“Whence had you this?”
His words came sharp and savage as the blows of an armourer’s hammer upon steel.