As I made my way humbly enough across to Master Gerard’s room his daughter did not speak to me, only followed me boldly, and yet, as it seemed to me, somewhat wistfully too, with her sea-green eyes.  And as the door was closing upon me I saw her beckon the serving-man.

But I, on the inner side of the door, and with Master Gerard von Sturm before me, had enough to do to tell my tale and answer his questions without troubling my head about green-eyed girls.

Master Gerard was as remarkable looking to the full as his daughter, with the same luminously green eyes.  But the orbs which in the maid shone as steadily clear as the depths of the sea, in the father glittered opalescent where he sat in the dusk, like the eyes of Grimalkin cornered by dogs in some gloomy angle of the Wolfsberg wall.

As soon as I had set eyes on him I knew that I had to do with a man—­not with a walking show like my Lord Duke Casimir.  It struck me that for good or evil Master Gerard could carry through his intent to the bitter end, and that in council he would smile when he saw my father change his black vesture of trial for the red of beheading.

The Doctor Gerard was little seen in the streets of Thorn.  Many citizens had never so much as set eyes on him.  Nevertheless his hand was in everything.  Some said he was a Jew, chiefly because none knew rightly what he was or whence he had come.  Thirty years had gone by since he had suddenly appeared one day in the noble old house by the Weiss Thor, from which Graetz the wizard and his wife had been burned out by the fury of the populace.  Twenty years of artistic labor had made this place what it now was.  And the little impish maid who used to break unexpectedly upon the workmen of Thorn from behind doors, or who clapped hands upon their shoulders in dusky recesses, scaring them out of their wits with suggestions of witch-masters long dead and damned, had grown into this maid of the sea-green eyes and silken draperies.

“A good-day to you, Hugo Gottfried!” said Master Gerard, quietly, looking at me keenly across the table.  He wore a skull-cap on his closely cropped head.  One or two betraying locks of gray appeared under it in front, but did not conceal a flat forehead, which ran back at such an angle that, with the luminous eyes beneath it, it gave him the look of a serpent rearing his yellow head a little back in act to strike.  This was a look his daughter had also.  But in her the gesture was tempered by the free-playing curves of a beautiful throat and the forward thrust of a rounded chin—­advantages not possessed by the angular anatomy and bony jaw of the famous doctor of law.

Master Gerard, clad in a long robe of black velvet from head to heel, sat bending his fingers gracefully together and looking at me.  His head was thrown back, I have said, and the lights of the colored windows striking on his gray hair and black skull-cap, caused him to look much more like some lean ascetic ecclesiastic and prince of the church than the chief lawyer of the ancient capital of the Wolfmark.