I laughed aloud.  So certain was I of the utter impossibility of the thing, that I laughed a laugh of scorn.  And I saw the sound of my voice jar the Lady Ysolinde like a blow on the face.

“You do not believe!” she said, standing straight before me.

“I do not believe—­I know!” answered I, curtly enough.

“Nevertheless the thing is true,” she said, with a curious, pleading expression, as if she had been charged with wrong-doing and were clearing herself, though none had accused her by word or look.

“It is most true,” the Princess went on.  “She fled from the palace an hour before sundown.  She was seen mounting a horse belonging to Von Reuss at the Wolfmark gate, with two of his men in attendance upon her.  She is known to have received a note by the hand of an unknown messenger an hour before.”

I did not wait for the permission of the Princess, but tore up the women’s staircase to Helene’s room, where I found nothing out of place—­not so much as a fold of lace.  After a hurried look round I was about to leave the room when a crumpled scrap of paper, half hidden by a curtain, caught my eye.

I stooped and picked it up.  It was written in an unknown and probably disguised hand—­a hand cumbersome and unclerkly: 

“Come to me.  Meet me at the Red Tower.  I need you.”

There was no more; the signature was torn away, and if the letter were genuine it was more than enough.  But no thought of its truth nor of the falseness of Helene so much as crossed my mind.

To tell the truth, it struck me from the first that the Lady Ysolinde might have placed the letter there herself.  So I said nothing about it when I descended.

The Prince met me half-way up the stairs.

“Well?” he questioned, bending his thick brows upon me.

“She is gone, certainly,” said I; “where or how I do not yet know.  But with your permission I will pursue and find out.”

“Or, I presume, without my permission?” said the Prince.

I nodded, for it was vain to pretend otherwise—­foolish, too, with such a master.

“Go, then, and God be with you!” he said.  “It is a fine thing to believe in love.”

And in ten minutes I was riding towards the Wolfsberg.

As I went past the great four-square gibbet which had made an end of Ritterdom in Plassenburg, I noted that there was a gathering of the hooded folk—­the carrion crows.  And lo! there before me, already comfortably a-swing, were our late foes, the two bravoes, and in the middle the dead Cannstadt tucked up beside them, for all his five hundred years of ancestry—­stamped traitor and coward by the Miller’s Son, who minded none of these things, but understood a true man when he met him.

I pounded along my way, and for the first ten miles did well, but there my horse stumbled and broke a leg in a wretched mole-run widened by the winter rains.  In mercy I had to kill the poor beast, and there I was left without other means of conveyance than my own feet.