“Then there came a night, lightning peeping and blazing, alternate blue and ghastly white—­God’s face and the devil’s time about staring in at the lattice.  I lay alone in my chamber.  But I was not asleep.  As you know, I do not often sleep.  But I lay awake and thought and thought.  The lightning showed me faces I had not seen for thirty years, and forms I remembered, black against eternity.  But all at once, in a certain after-clap of silence that followed the roaring thunder, I heard a voice call to me.

“’My father—­my father” it cried.

“It was like a soul in danger calling on God.

“I rose and went, clad as I was in the red of mine office (for that day I had done the final grace more than once); even so, I ran down the stairs to the room of my little Helene.

“The lightning showed me my lamb crouched in the corner, her lips open, white, squared with horror, her arms extended, as though to push some monstrous thing away.  A black shape, whose, I could not tell, I saw bending over her.  Then came blackness of darkness again.  And again my Helene’s voice.  Ah, God, I can hear it now, calling pitifully, like a woman hanging over hell and losing hold:  ‘Father—­my father!’

“‘I am here!’ I cried, loudly, even as on the scaffold I cry the doom for which the malefactors die.

“And the room lit up with a flame, white as the face of God as He passed by on Mount Sinai, flash on continuous flash.  And there before me, with a countenance like a demon’s, stood Otho von Reuss.”

I uttered a hoarse cry, but Dessauer again checked me.  My father went on: 

“Otho von Reuss it was—­he saw me in my red apparel, and cried aloud with mighty fear.  If God had given me mine axe in my hand—­well, Duke or no Duke, he had cried no more.  But even as he turned and fled from the room I seized him about the waist, and, opening the window with my other hand, I cast him forth.  And as he went down backward, clutching at nothing, God looked again out of the skylights of heaven, and showed me the face of the devil, even as Michael saw it when he hurled him shrieking into the nether pit.

“Then I went back and took in my arms my one ewe lamb.

“Many days (so they brought me word) Otho lay at the point of death, and Duke Casimir came not near me nor yet sent for me.  But by that very circumstance I knew Otho had not revealed how his accident had befallen.  Yet he but bided his time.  And as he grew well, Duke Casimir grew ill.  He waxed more and more like an armored ghost, and one day he came here and sat on the bed as in old times.

“‘I know my friends now,’ he said, ’good Red Axe of mine, friend of many years.  I have had mine eyes blinded, but this morning there has come a mighty clearness, and from this day forth you and I shall stand face to face and see eye to eye again, as in the days of old!’

“Then being athirst, he asked for something to drink.  Which, when our sweet Helene had brought, he patted her cheek.  ’A maid too good for a court—­one among a thousand, a fair one !’ he said; and passed away down the stairs, walking with his old steady tread.