“You hurt me,” she murmured reproachfully, looking at me more like a child than ever I had seen her.  She was very near to me.

“I make you suffer!” cried I, greatly astonished.  “How can Hugo Gottfried have done this thing?”

For it seemed impossible that a poor lad, and one alien by his birth from the hearts of ordinary folk, should yet have the power to make a great lady suffer.  For a great lady I knew Ysolinde to be even then, when her father seemed to be no more in the city of Thorn than Master Gerard, the fount and treasure-house of law and composer-general of quarrels.

But I might have known that he was no true lawyer to be so eager about that last.  For upon the continuance and fostering of differences the law-men of all nations thrive and eat their bread with honey thereto.

As my father often said, “Better the stroke of the Red Axe than that of the scrivener’s goose-quill.  My solution is kindlier, sooner over, hurts less, and is all the same in the end!”

Ysolinde thought a little before she answered me.

“No man ever made me suffer thus before,” she said, “though I have seen and known many men.  I am older than you, Hugo, and have travelled in many countries, the lands from which these things came.  But true love, the pain and the pleasure of it, have I never known.”

She leaned her head on her hand and her elbow on the table, turning thus to look long and intently at me.  I felt oafish and awkward, as Jan Lubber Fiend might have done before the King.  Many things I might have wished to say and do with that slender figure and lissome waist so near me.  But I knew not how to begin.  Yet I think the desire came not so much from love or passion, but rather from a natural longing to explore those mysteries concerning which I had read so much after Friar Laurence had done me the service of teaching me French.  But it was well that stupidity was my friend.  For rebounding like a vain, upstart young monkey from my mood of self-depreciation, I must needs hold it for certain that all was within my grasp, and that the Lady Ysolinde expected as much of me, which thing would have wrought my downfall.

“Yon ride soon to Plassenburg, I hear,” she said, after she had looked at me a long time steadily with the emerald eyes shining upon me.  Then it was that I saw clearly that they were not the right emerald in hue so much as of the shade of the stone aqua-marine, which is one not so rare, but a better color when it comes to the matter of maiden’s eyes.

“It is indeed true, my lady,” I replied, disappointed at her words, and yet somehow infinitely relieved, “that I ride soon to Plassenburg by the favoring of your father, who has been gracious enough to promise me his interest with the Prince.”

I saw her lip curl a little with scorn—­the least tilt of a rose leaf to which the sun has been unkind.

She seemed about to speak, but presently thinking better of it, smiled instead.