"I was journeying to Athens, travelling by night for my whim and pleasure, and by happy chance passed by here at the time when you were bested. The coming of my people frightened the knaves from you, and they fled, with some of mine in pursuit. We were alone together"--she lowered her eyelids for a moment, craftily modest--"and I tended your wounds." The prince made to free himself bodily from those embracing arms, mentally from the net-work of those bewildering words. It was easy to free himself from her clasp, though he did so with all courtesy and rather as one unwilling and unworthy to be so greatly honored, but it was harder to free his spirit from the meshes of her lying tale. "You speak strangely," he said, vaguely, wondering if this were parcel of a dream. "Surely you did not tend me? Where is she?" His haggard eyes wandered over the moonlit space towards the darkling wood and marvelled at the solemn presence of the men-at-arms. Again Esclaramonde wound her arms around him, reluctant, and there was an agony of solicitude in the duchess's voice, an ecstasy of tenderness in her eyes, as she cried to him, clasping him tighter to her warm body: "My lord, my dear lord, what trouble has come to you? It was but a few poor moments ago that you told me how you loved me." The prince looked despairingly into that beautiful, sensual face, and he remembered how it had shone in its splendor over the festivals at Paris. It was very lovely to behold, alluring, commanding, yielding, insisting, but it was not the loveliness his white spirit had longed for then or the worshipped loveliness his memory longed for now. "I told you that I loved you?" The sound of his voice was full of doubt, and yet it went hard with his knightly heart to doubt the word of a woman. Esclaramonde's pale cheeks filled with flame. "With words too flattering sweet for me to echo," she whispered, and she stooped, and her eager face was close to his and her dark hair brushed his forehead, and she kissed him on the mouth at once sharply and suavely, and the fire from her lips ran through his veins. "You gave me a ring which I shall wear forever." She withdrew one clinging arm from about his neck and held a smooth hand before him, and he saw on her finger the ring that had been his own for so long, the ring that had been his mother's, that she had made him promise when she gave it to him never to part with save to the loveliest and the worthiest. "You took a ring from me." She lifted his hand a little and he stared stupidly at the great ruby. "Have you forgotten?" Esclaramonde cried. "Can men forget so soon?" Her eyes swam in obedient tears. The maze of the man's mind showed tragically in his eyes, and then he spoke, but rather to himself than to the woman by his side. "Which is the dream?" he asked. "I thought when I fell that a white girl came from the woods and succored me, a divine child, the loveliest--"