hink that--we may be friends," she murmured.

"Will you give me your hand, Countess Strahni?"

She extended it slowly and he bowed over it, pressing it to his lips.

She found her excuse in a cough, a vestige of her illness which she
summoned to her rescue.

"It--it is getting late, Herr Hauptmann," she said. "I must be going in.
The night air----"

"By all means." He accompanied her to the portal of the hall and then
she left him.

That night Marishka did not sleep, and the next day, pleading fatigue,
remained in her bedroom, trying to muster up the courage to go forth and
meet Goritz at this tragic game of his own choosing. That she had
stirred some sort of an emotion in the man was not to be doubted. She
read it in his eyes, in the touch of his fingers, and in the resonant
tones of his voice, but she read too, the sense of his power, the
confidence of his egotism to which all things were possible. And much as
she wished to believe the testimony of his flashes of tenderness, the
hazard of her position stared her in the face. But she knew that with
such a man she must play a game of subtlety and courage. And so she
resolved to meet him frequently, testing every feminine device to win
him to her service which would obliterate all things but her own wishes,
and present at last an opportunity for her escape.

In the week that followed she walked out with him across the causeway
into the mountain road, visiting Szolnok farm and climbing the hills
adjacent to the castle, but she saw no one except the German farmers,
and it seemed indeed as though the gorge was taboo to all human beings.
Goritz made love to her, of course, but she laughed him off, gaining a
new confidence as the days of their companionship increased. Slowly,
with infinite patience, with infinite self-control, she established a
relationship which baffled him, a foil for each of his moods, a parry
for each attack. With a smile on her lips which masked the lie, she told
him that Hugh Renwick had been nothing to her.

And Goritz told her of the women he had met in the performance of his
duty from London to Constantinople, women of the secret service of
England, France, Russia, who had set their wits to match his. Some of
them were ugly and clever, some were stupid and beautiful, but they had
all been dangerous. He had passed them by. No woman in the world that he
had ever known had had the nobility of spirit, the courage, the
self-abnegation of the Coun