You never saw so quick a change in any men.  The heartiest reveller forthwith became silent and slunk behind his neighbor.  Knees shook beneath stalwart frames, and there seemed a very general tendency to get down upon marrow-bones.

The Lady Ysolinde stood before them, strangely different from the slim, willowy maiden I had seen her.  She looked almost imperial in her demeanor.

“You shall be rewarded for your ready obedience,” she said; “the Prince will not forget your service.  Take away that offal!”

She pointed to the dead rascals on the floor.

And the men, muttering something that sounded to me like “Yes, your Highness !” hastened to obey.

“Did you say ‘Yes, your Highness’ ?” I asked one of them, who seemed, by his air of command, to be the superior among the archers.

“Aye,” answered he, dryly, “it is a term usually applied to the Lady Ysolinde, Princess of Plassenburg.”

I was never more smitten dazed and dumb in my life.  Ysolinde, the daughter of Master Gerard, the maid who had read my fate in the ink-pool, whom I had “made suffer,” according to her own telling—­she the Princess of Plassenburg ’.

Ah, I had it now.  Here at last was the explanation of the threadbare and inexplicable jest of Jorian and Boris, “The Prince hath a Princess, and she is oft upon her travels !”

But, after all, what a Wendish barking about so small an egg.  I have heard an emperor proclaimed with less cackle.

Ysolinde, Princess of Plassenburg—­yes, that made a difference.  And I had taken her hand—­I, the son of the Red Axe—­I, the Hereditary Justicer of the Wolfmark.  Well, after all, she had sought me, not I her.  And then, the little Helene—­what would she make of it?  I longed greatly to find an opportunity to tell her.  It might teach her in what manner to cut her cloth.

The archers of the Prince camped with us the rest of the night in the place of the outcast crew.  They behaved well (though their forbearance was perhaps as much owing to the near presence of the Princess as to any inherent virtue in the good men of the bow) to the women and children who remained huddled in the corners.

Then came the dawn, swift-foot from the east.  A fair dawn it was, the sun rising, not through barred clouds, with the lightest at the horizon (which is the foul-weather dawn), but through streamers and bannerets that fluttered upward and fired to ever fleecier crimson and gold as he rose.

We rode among a subdued people, and ere we went the Princess called for the Burgomeister and bade him send to Plassenburg the landlord, so soon as he should be found, and also the heads of the half-dozen houses on either side of the inn.

Then, indeed, there was a turmoil and a wailing to speak about.  Women folk crowded out of the huts and kissed the white feet of the palfrey that bore the Lady Ysolinde.

“Have mercy!” they wailed; “show kindness, great Princess!  Here are our men, unwounded and unhurt, that have lain by our sides all the night.  They are innocent of all intent of evil—­of every dark deed.  Ah, lady, send them not to your prisons.  We shall never see them more, and they are all we have or our children.  ’Tis they bring in the bread to this drear spot!”