Esclaramonde waited a little while, watching him depart and thinking Thessalian thoughts. He was under her spell; he had forgotten what she willed him to forget; he should never remember while she was by his side. That he was only her lover through the make-believe of her philtres and her will troubled her nothing. He was her lover, comely and young, and she saw herself Duchess of Athens, and her heart leaped and she laughed at times. When Rainouart was out of sight and she was tired of her thoughts, she turned to the far end of the gallery, where her immediate women waited, and summoned them with a gesture to follow her to her appointed pavilion by the lists. XV THE CHALLENGE OF RAINOUART Rainouart walked slowly down the sacred mound through the long lines of soldiers that made a lane for the gentry all along the winding road and at the foot of the hill. He went as he always went after parting with Esclaramonde in these few fantastic hours--like one in a feverish day-dream who found himself unfamiliar amid familiar surroundings. The realities of life distorted themselves into unrealities; your simple soldier standing on guard in his rank loomed monstrous as a giant; your habitual building chose to enlarge and radiate door upon door and gallery upon gallery into infinite, meaningless space. Rainouart walked airily, for his physical condition seemed strangely light; he walked warily, because his mental condition seemed strangely heavy. He was troubled at he knew not what; he wondered, he knew not why; he thought ceaselessly of Esclaramonde, and yet the thought of her seemed always to tease his drugged memory with a desire for some face, some voice, that were not the face and voice of the Duchess of Thebes. So, like a man that walks in sleep, he came from the Acropolis to the meadow at its foot, heedless of the mass of folk, heedless of the clamor and the flapping banners, the eager mien of knights and the radiant faces of ladies, only conscious that his duty in life was that day to sustain in arms the fame of the Lady Esclaramonde.