days when he would have naught to do with fishing or with
books; dark days when I forbore and left him to mope by the dunes, or in
the great garden which had been his mother's, but was now a wilderness
untended. And it was then that he first met with the lady Mette.

For as he walked there one morning, a little before noon, a swift shadow
passed overhead between him and the sun, and almost before he could
glance upward a body came dropping out of the sky and fell with a thud
among the rose-bushes by the eastern wall. It was a heron, and after it
swooped the bird which had murdered it; a white ger-falcon of the kind
which breeds in Greenland, but a trained bird, as he knew by the sound
of the bells on her legs as she plunged through the bushes. Ebbe ran at
once to the corner where the birds struggled; but as he picked up the
pelt he happened to glance towards the western wall, and in the gateway
there stood a maiden with her hand on the bridle of a white palfrey.
Her dog came running towards Ebbe as he stood. He beat it off, and
carrying the pelt across to its mistress, waited a moment silently, cap
in hand, while she called the great falcon back to its lure and leashed
it to her wrist, which seemed all too slight for the weight.

Then, as Ebbe held out the dead heron, she shook her head and laughed.
"I am not sure, sir, that I have any right to it. We flushed it yonder
between the wood and the sandhills, and, though I did not stay to
consider, I think it must belong to the owner of the shore-land."

"It is true," said Ebbe, "that I own the shore-land, and the forest,
too, if law could enforce right. But for the bird you are welcome to
it, and to as many more as you care to kill."

Upon this she knit her brows. "The forest? But I thought that the
forest was my father's? My name," said she, "is Mette, and my father is
the Knight Borre, of Egeskov."

"I am Ebbe of Nebbegaard, and," said he, perceiving the mirth in her
eyes, "you have heard the rhyme upon me--

"'Ebbe from Nebbe, with all his men good,
Has neither food nor firing-wood.'"

"I had not meant to be discourteous," said she contritely; "but tell me
more of these forest-lands."

"Nay," answered Ebbe, "hither comes riding your father with his men.
Ask him for the story, and when he has told it you may know why I cannot
make him or his daughter welcome at Nebbegaard."

To this she made no reply, but with her hand on the palfrey's bridle
w