And now on horseback Helene looked all charming, and what with the exercise, the unknown adventure, and my reassurance, she had a glow of rose color in her cheeks.  She had never before been so far away from the precincts of the Wolfsberg.  I had even taught her to ride in the court-yard of a summer evening, on a horse borrowed from one of the Duke’s squires.

We found the Lady Ysolinde waiting for us at her house, Master Gerard talking to her in the doorway, earnestly and apart.  Both of them had a look of much solemnity, as though the matter of their discourse were some very weighty one.

Presently her father kissed her and she came down the steps.  I leaped from my horse to help her to the saddle, but the respectable serving-man was before me.  So that instead I went about and looked to the buckles and girths, which were all in order, and patted the arching neck of the beautiful milk-white palfrey whereon she rode.  Then Master Gerard waved a hand and went within.

And as we fared forth out of the Weiss Thor into the keener air of the country, I thought what a charge I had—­to squire two ladies so surpassingly fair, each in her own several graces, as our Helene and the Lady Ysolinde.

No sooner, however, were we past the outer barriers, at which the soldiers of the Duke Casimir kept guard, than a vast, ungainly wight started up from the road-side.

“Jan Lubber Fiend!” cried the Lady Ysolinde; “what do you here?”

The oaf grinned his awful, writhed smile and wriggled his great body after the manner of a puppy desirous of the milk-platter.

“Think you, my lady,” said he, cunningly, “that your poor Jan would abide within the precincts of the city house with that funeral ape bidding me do this and do that, sit here and sit there, come in and go out at his pleasure?  A thing of dough that I could twist into knots as easily as I can crack my joints.”

And of this latter accomplishment he proceeded to give us certain examples which sounded like cannon-shots delivered at close quarters.

“Get home with you!” cried Ysolinde; “I cannot have thee following us.  There are two men presently to meet us, to guard us to Plassenburg, and we do not need you, Jan Lubber Fiend.  Get back and take care of my father.”

“Oh, as for him,” said the monster, sitting down squat upon the plain road in the dust, “he is a tough old cock, and will come to no harm.  We can e’en leave him with a good cook, a prime cellar, and an easy mind.  But this young man is not to trust to with so many pretty maids.  Jan will come and look after him.”

And with that he nodded his hay-stack of a head three times at me, and going to the hedge-root he laid hold of the top of a young poplar and turned him about, keeping the stem of it over his shoulder.  Then he set himself to pull like a horse that starts a load, and presently, without apparently distressing himself in the least, he walked away with the young tree, roots and all.