He had, however, thrown caution to the winds, being, as he believed, at the very threshold of a double goal. Nevertheless, as they entered the long apartment, he assumed his old, pitiable air. “It is cruel,” he said, “to mention captivity to one who, having but just escaped so fell a slavery, is again in direst bondage.”
“It was thoughtless,” she allowed, with subtle truth, “and reprehensible to talk of victory when as yet we have neither of us won.”
He strove to encircle her waist with his arm, but once more, as if with natural coquetry, she eluded him. “Not yet won?” he whispered, passionately. “It is won; it shall be won—and by me.”
“Nay, sir, not so fast. You forget the wine; it is there.” She pointed to a heavy sideboard of black oak near the wall, at the same time taking a silver flagon from the table.
“Ah, the golden wine!”
He went to the sideboard, and, kneeling with his back toward her, thrust a hand across the shelf of a lower cupboard. Finding a dusty bottle in the corner, he withdrew it. “’Tis as old,” he said, closing the doors and surveying the film of cobwebs, “as old as our love is new. Come, dearest—” but, on turning, he broke off suddenly.
The flash of a white ruff, the soft whisper of slippers across a rug, and he was alone—a prisoner.
But then—even then, as the key grated in the lock—he laughed like a boy who has been caught in a game of blind-man’s-buff or hide-and-seek. Even in the first moment of his plight, amusement and an uncontrollable sense of the ludicrous sparkled in his blue eyes. Impulsively knocking off the bottle’s neck against the sideboard, he picked up a silver cup which had rolled to his feet from the cabin door and filled it to the brim.
“You remembered me,” he reflected, sipping the wine with a too-apparent relish as though acting to himself. “You remembered me. That is one point gained.”
In the meanwhile, Eleanor Dare, on the deck, was graciously explaining to Dyonis her apparent unreasonableness and breach of discipline. “You will guard the door until relieved.” And so saying, she returned in her barge to the shore.