Altogether, it was a strange enough apartment for the daughter of a lawyer in the city of Thorn, within a mile of the bare feudal strengths of the Red Tower and the Wolfsberg.

All this while Ysolinde had kept my hand, a thing which at once thrilled and shamed me.  For though I had never been what is called “in love” with the Little Playmate, nor till that day had spoken a word to her my father might not have heard, yet hitherto she had always been first and sole in my heart whenever I thought on the things which were to be.

The Lady Ysolinde having brought me to her chamber, bade me sit upon an oaken folding-stool beside a table on which lay weapons of curious design—­crooked knives and poisoned arrows.  Then she went to an ivory cupboard of the Orient (or, as they are called in Holy Writ, “an ivory palace"), and opening the beautifully fitting door, she took from it a small square bottle of red glass which she held between her and the light.

“It is well,” she said, looking long and carefully at it; “it will flow.”

And coming to the table and pouring some of a shining black liquid into the palm of her left hand, she sat down beside me on the stool and gazed steadily into the little pool of ink.

It was strange to me to sit thus motionless beside a beautiful woman (for such I then thought her)—­so near that I could feel the warmth of her body strike like sunshine through the silken fineness of her sea-green gown.  I glanced up at her eyes.  They were fixed, and, as it seemed, glazed also.  But the emerald in them, usually dark as the sea-depths, had opal lights in it, and her lips moved like those of a devotee kneeling in church.

Presently she began to speak.

“Hugo—­Hugo Gottfried, son of the Red Axe,” she said, in the same hushed voice as before, most like running water heard murmuring in a deep runnel underground, “you will live to be a man fortunate, well-beloved.  You will know love—­yes, more than one shall love you.  But you will love one only.  I see the woman on whom your fate depends, yet not clearly—­it may be, because my desire is so great to see her face.  But she is tall and moves like a queen.  She goes clad in white like a bride and her arms are held out to you.

“But another shall love you, and between them two there is darkness and hate, from which come bursting clouds of fire, bringing forth lightnings and angers and deadly jealousies!

“Again I see you, great, honored, and sitting on a high seat.  The woman whose face I cannot distinguish is beside you, clothed in a robe of purple.  And, yes, she wears a crown on her head like the coronet of a queen.”

Ysolinde withdrew her eyes gradually from the ink-pool, as if it were a pain to look yet a greater to look away.  Then with a quick jerk she threw up her head, and tears were standing in her eyes ready to overflow.  But the wetness made them beautiful, like a pebble of bright colors with the dew upon it and shone on by the sunshine of the morning.