When he woke free of delirium it was night. A person was sitting near the head of his bed. Between him and the chair a candle burned; beyond the yellow globe of light about the candle-flame he could see a man's hand and sleeve. "Who's there?" he asked uneasily. The man rose and showed him in the full light of the candle a face destroyed. Nothing was left of the features but mouth and chin. These were delicate, the mouth and chin of a boy of about nineteen. The rest was newly healed scar.

"I'm George Mogeskar. Can you understand me?"

"Yes," Andre replied from a constricted throat.

"Can you sit up to write? I can hold the paper for you."

"What should I write?"

They both spoke very low.

"I wish to surrender my castle," Mogeskar said. "But I wish my sister to be gone, out of here, to go free. After that I shall give up the fort to you. Do you agree?"

"I – wait – "

"Write your lieutenant. Tell him that I will surrender on this one condition. I know Sovenskar wants this fort. Tell him that if she is detained, I shall blow the fort, and you, and myself, and her, into dust. You see, I have nothing much to lose, myself." The boy's voice was level, but a little husky. He spoke slowly and with absolute definiteness.

"The . . . the condition is just," Andre said.

Mogeskar brought an inkwell into the light, felt for its top, dipped the pen, gave pen and paper to Andre, who had managed to get himself half sitting up. When the pen had been scratching on the paper for a minute, Mogeskar said, "I remember you, Kalinskar. We went hunting in the long marsh. You were a good shot."

Andre glanced at him. He kept expecting the boy to lift off that unspeakable mask and show his face. "When will the princess leave? Shall my lieutenant give her escort across the river?"

"Tomorrow night at eleven. Four men of ours will go with her. One will come back to warrant her escape. It seems the grace of God that you led this siege, Kalinskar. I remember you, I trust you." His voice was like hers, light and arrogant, with that same husky note. "You can trust your lieutenant, I hope, to keep this secret."

Andre rubbed his head, which ached; the words he had written jiggled and writhed on the paper. "Secret? You wish this – these terms to be kept – you want her escape to be made secretly?"

"Do you think I wish it said that I sold her courage to buy my safety? Do you think she'd go if she knew what I am giving for her freedom? She thinks she's going to beg aid from King Gulhelm, while I hold out here!"

"Prince, she will never forgive – "

"It's not her forgiveness I want, but her life. She's the last of us. If she stays here, she'll see to it that when you finally take the castle she is killed. I am trading Moge Castle, and her trust in me, against her life."

"I'm sorry, prince," Andre said; his voice quavered with tears. "I didn't understand. My head's not very clear." He dipped the pen in the inkwell the blind man held, wrote another sentence, then blew on the paper, folded it, put it in the prince's hand.

"May I see her before she goes?"

"I don't think she'll come to you, Kalinskar. She is afraid of you. She doesn't know that it's I who will betray her." Mogeskar put out his hand into his unbroken darkness; Andre took it. He watched the tall, lean, boyish figure go hesitatingly off into the dark. The candle burned on at the bedside, the only light in the high, long room. Andre lay staring at the golden, pulsing sphere of light around the flame.

Two days later Moge Castle was surrendered to its besiegers, while its lady, unknowing and hopeful, rode on across the neutral lands westward to Aisnar.

And they met the third and last time, only by chance. Andre had not availed himself of Prince George Moges-kar's invitation to stop at the castle on his way to the border war in "47. To avoid the site of his first notable victory, to refuse a proud and grateful ex-enemy, was unlike him, suggesting either fear or a bad conscience, in neither of which did he much indulge himself. Nonetheless, he did not go to Moge. It was thirty-seven years later, at a winter ball in Count Alexis Helleskar's house in Krasnoy, that somebody took his arm and said, "Princess, let me present Marshall Kalinskar. The Princess Isabella Proyedskar."

He made his usual deep bow, straightened up, and straightened up still more, for the woman was taller than he by an inch at least. Her grey hair was piled into the complex rings and puffs of the current fashion. The panels of her gown were embroidered with arabesques of seedpearls. Out of a broad, pale face her blue-grey eyes looked straight at him, an inexplicable, comradely gaze. She was smiling. "I know Dom Andre," she said.

"Princess," he muttered, appalled.

She had got heavy; she was a big woman now, imposing, firmly planted. As for him, he was skin and bone, and lame in the right leg.

"My youngest daughter, Oriana." The girl of seventeen or eighteen curtsied, looking curiously at the hero, the man who in three wars, in thirty years of fighting, had forced a broken country back into one piece, and earned himself a simple and unquestionable fame. What a skinny little old man, said the girl's eyes.

"Your brother, princess – "

"George died many years ago, Dom Andre. My cousin Enrike is lord of Moge now. But tell me, are you married? I know of you only what all the world knows. It's been so long, Dom Andre, twice this child's age. . . ." Her voice was maternal, plaintive. The arrogance, the lightness were gone, even the huskiness of passion and of fear. She did not fear him now. She did not fear anything. Married, a mother, a grandmother, her day over, a sheath with the sword drawn, a castle taken, no man's enemy.

"I married, princess. My wife died in childbirth, while I was in the field. Many years ago." He spoke harshly.

She replied, banal, plaintive, "Ah, but how sad life is, Dom Andre!"

"You wouldn't have said that on the walls of Moge," he said, still more harshly, for it galled his heart to see her like this. She looked at him with her blue-grey eyes, impassive, simply seeing him.

"No," she said, "that's true. And if I had been allowed to die on the walls of Moge, I should have died believing that life held great terror and great joy."

"It does, princess!" said Andre Kalinskar, lifting his dark face to her, a man unabated and unfulfilled. She only smiled and said in her level, maternal voice, "For you, perhaps."

Other guests came up and she spoke to them, smiling. Andre stood aside, looking ill and glum, thinking how right he had been never to go back to Moge. He had been able to believe himself an honest man. He had remembered, faithfully, joyfully, for forty years, the red vines of October, the hot blue evenings of midsummer in the siege. And now he knew that he had betrayed all that, and lost the thing worth having, after all. Passive, heroic, he had given himself wholly to his life; but the gift he had owed her, the soldier's one gift, was death; and he had withheld it. He had refused her. And now, at sixty, after all the days, wars, years, countrysides of his life, now he had to turn back and see that he had lost it all, had fought for nothing, that there was no princess in the castle.

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