For after all he was a man, and young; while the waist of Inez was as pretty as all the rest of her.

"But," he added, "it might be misunderstood." "Quite so, I wish it to be misunderstood: not by me, who know that you care nothing for me and would as soon place your arm round that marble column." Peter opened his lips to speak, but she stopped him at once.
"Oh! do not waste falsehoods on me, in which of a truth you have no art," she said with evident irritation.

"Why, if you had the money, you would offer to pay me for my nursing, and who knows, I might take it! Understand, you must either do this, seeming to play the lover to me, or we cannot walk together in that garden." Peter hesitated a little, guessing a plot, while she bent forward till her lips almost touched his ear and said in a still lower voice: "And I cannot tell you how, perhaps--I say perhaps--you may come to see the remains of the Dona Margaret, and certain other matters.

Ah!" she added after a pause, with a little bitter laugh, "now you will kiss me from one end of the garden to the other, will you not?
Foolish man! Doubt no more; take your chance, it may be the last." "Of what?
Kissing you?
Or the other things ?" "That you will find out," she said, with a shrug of her shoulders.
"Come!" Then, while he followed dubiously, she led him down the length of the great room to a door with a spy-hole in the top of it, that was set in a Moorish archway at the corner.
This door she opened, and there beyond it, a drawn scimitar in his hand, stood a tall Moor on guard.

Inez spoke a word to him, whereon he saluted with his scimitar and let them pass across the landing to a turret stair that lay beyond, which they descended.