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 Countess Strahni.
It was in these moods of adulation and self-revelation that Marishka found him most difficult. But she managed to keep him at arm's length by the mere insistence of her spirituality which accepted his friendship upon its face value, telling him that she forgave the past, and vaguely suggesting hope for the future. With that he had to be content, though at times he was dangerously near rebellion. She promised him many things but denied him her lips, hoping day by day for the rescue which came not, and praying night after night that the God who watched over her would forgive her for her duplicity and for the hatred of him that was in her heart.
But there came a day when the walks beyond the causeway ceased, and from the window of her bedroom she learned the reason. Far, far below her in the valley along the road which wound through the Pass, she saw the figures of marching men. Austrian soldiers! What did their presence mean? They were going toward the other end of the pass--thousands of them. Had the Russians crossed Galicia? That night there were no lights in the side of the castle toward the gorge save the candle in her room, which was screened by heavy hangings. And when at dinner she questioned Goritz he gave her the briefest of replies. The Cossacks were coming? Perhaps, but they would not take Dukla Pass. He warned her not to show her figure at the castle windows or above the wall of the rampart, and she obeyed.