R XII

EYES OF EMERALD

It was a strange little room into which the Lady Ysolinde brought me,
full of quaint, changeful scents, and all ablaze with colors the like of
which I had never seen. For not only were rugs and mats of outlandish
Eastern design scattered over the floor, but there was vividly colored
glass in the small, deeply set windows. Yet that which affected me most
powerfully was a curious, clinging, evanescent odor, which came and went
like a breeze through an open window. I liked it at first, but after a
little it went to my head like a perfumed wine of Greece, such as the men
of Venice sometimes send to our northern lands with their embassies of
merchandise.

Altogether, it was a strange enough apartment for the daughter of a
lawyer in the city of Thorn, within a mile of the bare feudal strengths
of the Red Tower and the Wolfsberg.

All this while Ysolinde had kept my hand, a thing which at once thrilled
and shamed me. For though I had never been what is called "in love" with
the Little Playmate, nor till that day had spoken a word to her my father
might not have heard, yet hitherto she had always been first and sole in
my heart whenever I thought on the things which were to be.

The Lady Ysolinde having brought me to her chamber, bade me sit upon
an oaken folding-stool beside a table on which lay weapons of curious
design--crooked knives and poisoned arrows. Then she went to an
ivory cupboard of the Orient (or, as they are called in Holy Writ,
"an ivory palace"), and opening the beautifully fitting door, she
took from it a small square bottle of red glass which she held
between her and the light.

"It is well," she said, looking long and carefully at it; "it will flow."

And coming to the table and pouring some of a shining black liquid into
the palm of her left hand, she sat down beside me on the stool and gazed
steadily into the little pool of ink.

It was strange to me to sit thus motionless beside a beautiful woman
(for such I then thought her)--so near that I could feel the warmth of
her body strike like sunshine through the silken fineness of her
sea-green gown. I glanced up at her eyes. They were fixed, and, as it
seemed, glazed also. But the emerald in them, usually dark as the
sea-depths, had opal lights in it, and her lips moved like those of a
devotee kneeling in church.

Presently she began to speak.

"Hugo--Hugo Gottfried, son of the Red Axe," she said, in the same hushed
voic