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, men must ever look to an end.  Women are content with a continuance.  That you should love me and keep on loving me, that is all I want!”

“But,” I began, “I love—­”

“Ah, do not say it!” she cried, pitifully, clasping her hands with a certain swift appeal in her voice—­“do not say it!  For God’s sake, for the sake of innocent blood, do not say that you love me not!”

She paused a moment, and grew more pensive as she looked stilly and solemnly at me.

“I will tell you the end that I see; only be patient and answer not before I have done.  I have seen a vision—­thrice have I seen it.  Karl of Plassenburg, my husband, shall die.  I have seen the Black Cloak thrice envelop him.  It is the sign.  No man hath ever escaped that omen—­aye, and if I choose, it shall wrap him about speedily.  More, I have seen you sit on the throne of Plassenburg and of the Mark, with a Princess by your side.  It is not only my fancy.  Even as in the old time I read your present fortune, so, for good or ill, this thing also is coming to you.”

She never took her eyes from my face.

“Now listen well and be slow to speak.  The Princedom and the power shall both fall to me when my husband dies.  There are none other hands capable.  So also is it arranged in his will.  Here”—­she broke off suddenly, as with a gesture of infinite surrender she thrust out her white hands towards me—­“here is my kingdom and me.  Take us both, for we are yours—­yours—­yours!”

I took her hands gently in mine and kissed them.

“Lady, Lady Ysolinde,” I said, “you honor me, you overwhelm me, I know not what to say.  But think!  The Prince is well, full of health and the hope of years.  This thought of yours is but a vision, a delusion—­how can we speak of the thing that is not?”

“I wait your answer,” she said, leaving her hands still in mine, but now, as it were, on sufferance.  Then, indeed, I was torn between the love that I had in my heart for my dear and the need of pleasing the Lady Ysolinde—­between the truth and my desire to save Helene.  Almost it was in my heart to declare that I loved the Lady Ysolinde, and to promise that I should do all she asked.  But though, when need hath been, I have lied back and forth in my time, and thought no shame, something stuck in my throat now; and I felt that if I denied my love, who lay prison-bound that night, I should never come within the mercy of God, but be forever alien and outcast from any commonwealth of honorable men.

“I cannot, Lady Ysolinde,” I answered, at last.  “The love of the maid hath so grown into my heart that I cannot root it out at a word.  It is here, and it fills all my life!”

Again she interrupted me.