t done for the sake of any advancement in Plassenburg."

I felt again the great disadvantage I was under in speaking to the Lady
Ysolinde. I never had a word to say but she could put three to it. My
best speeches sounded empty, selfish, vain beside hers. And so was it
ever. By deeds alone could I vanquish her, and perhaps by a certain
dogged masculine persistence.

"Princess," I said to her, "you have asked me to meet you here. It is not
of the past, nor yet of likings, imaginings, recriminations that I must
speak. My love, my sister, my playmate, bound to me by a thousand ancient
tendernesses, lies in prison in this city of Thorn, under sentence of a
cruel death. Will you help me to release her? I think that with your
father, and therefore with you, is the power to open her prison doors!"

"And what is there then for me?" cried the Lady Ysolinde, instantly,
bending her head forward, her emerald eyes so great and clear that their
shining seemed to cover all her face as a wave covers a rock at
flood-tide.

"What for me?" she repeated, in the silence which followed.

"For you," said I, "the gladness to have saved an innocent life."

"Tush!" she cried, with a gesture of extravagant contempt. "You mistake;
I am no good-deeds monger, to give my bread and butter to the next
beggar-lass. I tell you I am the woman who came first out of the womb of
Mother-earth. I will yield only that which is snatched from me. What is
mine is more mine than another's, because I would suffer, dare, sin, defy
a world of men and women in order to keep it, to possess it, to have it
all alone to myself!"

"But," I answered, "who am I, that so great a lady should love me? What
am I to you, Princess, more than another?"

"_That_ I know not!" she answered, swiftly. "Only God knows that. Perhaps
my curse, my punishment. My husband is a far better, truer, nobler man
than you, Hugo. I know it; but what of that, when I love him not? Love
goes not by the rungs in a ladder, stands not with the most noble on the
highest step, is not bestowed, like the rewards in a child's school, to
the most deserving. I love you, Hugo Gottfried, it is true. But I wish a
thousand times that I did not. Nevertheless--I do! Therefore make your
reckoning with that, and put aside puling shams and whimpering
subterfuges."

This set me all on edge, and I asked a question.

"What, then, do you propose? Where, shall this comedy end?"

"End!" she said--"end! Aye, of course,