Now this was so perilously near the truth that I was mightily incensed, and I felt that I did well to be angry.

“Girl,” I said, grandly, “you do not know what you say.  I have been abroad all night on the service of the State, and I have discovered a most dangerous conspiracy at the peril of my life!”

For I thought it was as well to put the best face on the matter; and, besides, I have never been able, all the days of me, to hide my light under a bushel, as the clerks prate about.

But I was not yet done with my adventuring of this eventful day.  And in spite of my father setting me, like a misbehaving bairn, to the drudgery of the water-carrying, there was more in life for me that day than merely hauling upon a handle.  For that is a thing which galls an aspiring youth worse than any other labor, being so terribly monotonous.

As for me, I did not take kindly to it at all—­not even though I could see mine own image deep in the pails of water as they came up brimming and cool out of the fern-grown dripping darkness of the well.  Aye, and though the image given back to me was (I say it only of that time) a likely enough picture of a lad with short, crisped locks that curled whenever they were wet, cheeks like apples, and skin that hath always been a trouble to me.  For I thought it unmanly and like a girl’s.  And that same skin of mine is, perhaps, the reason why all my days I never could abide your buttermilk-and-roses girls, having a supply about me enough to serve a dozen, and therefore thinking but little of their stock-in-trade.

Now in the Wolfmark this is the common kind of beauty—­not that beauty of any kind is over-common.  For our maids—­especially those of the country—­look too much as if they had been made out of wooden pillows such as laborers use to lay their heads on of nights—­one large bolster set on the top of two other little ones, and all three well wadded with ticking and feathers.  But I hope no one will go back to the Wolfmark and tell the maids that Hugo Gottfried said this of them, or of a surety my left ear will tingle with the running of their tongues if there be any truth in the old saw.

It was three of the clock and the sun was very fierce on the dusty, unslaked yard of the Wolfsberg, glaring down upon us like the mouth of a wide smelter’s oven.  Fat Fritz, the porter, in his arm-chair of a cell, had well-nigh dissolved into lard and running out at his own door.  The Playmate’s window was open, and I caught the waft of a fan to and fro.  I judged therefore that my lady knew well that I was working out there in the heat, and was glad of it—­being a spiteful pretty minx.

Then I began to wonder who had given her that fan, for it was not like my father to do it, and she knew no other.  “Ah!” I said to myself, as a thought struck me, “could it possibly be Michael Texel?  He is rich, and Helene may have known him before.  The cunning, dark-eyed little vagabond—­to take my introduction yester-even as if she had never set eyes on the fellow before, while here it is as clear as daylight that he had all the time been giving her presents—­fans and such like.”