We went in among the dogs—­great, lank, cowering, tooth-slavering brutes.  I followed my father till we came to the feeding-troughs.  Then he bade me to stand where I was till he should set their meat in order.  So he vanished behind, the barriers.  Then, when he had prepared the beasts’ horrid victual, though I saw not what, he opened the narrow gate, and the howling, clambering throng broke helter-skelter for the troughs, cracking and crunching the thigh-bones, tearing at the flesh, and growling at one another till the air rang with the ear-piercing din.

And outside the little Helene flung herself frantically at the split pines of the enclosure, crying, bitterly, “Take off that hateful mantle, Hugo Gottfried!  I hate it—­I hate it!  Take it off!”

My father stood behind the dogs, whose arched and bristling backs I could just manage to see over the fence of wooden spars, and dealt the whip judicially among them—­at once as a warning to encroachers and a punishment for greed.

Then all unharmed we went out, and as soon as my father had gone up to his garret-room in the tower, I tore the red cloak off and trampled it in the dirt of the yard.  Then I went and hid it in a little blind window of the tower opposite the foot of the ladder which led to my father’s room.  For, because of my father’s anger, I dared not destroy the badge of shame altogether, as both Helene and I wished to do.

Day by day the Little Playmate (for so I was now allowed to call her—­the Princesshood being mostly forgotten) grew great and tall, her fair, almost lint-white hair darkening swiftly to coppery gold with the glint of ripe wheat upon it.

Old Hanne followed her about with eyes at once wistful and doubtful.  Sometimes she shook her head sadly.  And I wondered if ever the poor old stumbling crone, wizened like a two-year-old winter apple, had been as light and gay a thing as our dainty rose-leaf girl.

One day I was laboring at the art of learning to write, along with Friar Laurence—­a scrawny, ill-favored monk, who, for good deeds or misdeeds, I know not which, was warded in a cell opening out of the lower or garden court of the Wolfsberg, when I heard Helene dance down the stairs to the kitchen of the Red Tower.

“Hannchen!” she cried, merrily, “come and teach me that trick of the broidering needle.  I never can do it but I prick myself.  Nevertheless, I can fashion the Red Axe almost as clearly as the pattern, and far finer to see.”

Friar Laurence raised his great, softly solid face, blue about the jowls and padded beneath the eyes with craft.

“That little maid is over much with old Hanne,” he said, as if he meditated to himself; “she will teach her other prickings than the needle-play.  The witch-pricking at the images of wax was what brought her here.  Aye, and had it not been for your father wanting a house-keeper, the Holy Office would have burned the hag, and sent her to hell, flaming like a torch of pine knots.”