About the same hour, or a little earlier, the Lord of Hers, with a small retinue, had set out in an opposite direction, but on the same mission.  Rodolph had long seen that King Henry’s unprincipled ambition threatened the liberties of religion and of Austria, and he only paused for the Papal excommunication to throw off all allegiance to a monarch who could not be safely trusted.  That excommunication was impending, and, as may be easily conjectured, the duke was making a rapid circuit of his dominions, to unite his barons more closely to his interests; to warn them to prepare for the approaching struggle; to confirm the weak and wavering in their fidelity; inspire the resolves of those who were true and firm, and make all the pulses of the circle of Suabia throb in concert to the action of one grand moving power.  To gain time, the Lord of Hers had been despatched to the provinces bordering upon the Rhine with letters from Rodolph to the principal barons there, while the duke himself, with Henry of Stramen, followed the Danube.

For many months there had been no active warfare between the hostile houses, though the feud had lost none of its venom.  But age was stiffening the impetuosity of the old barons; and their sons, no longer urged on by the battle-cry of their sires, listened with more attention to the advice and representations of their spiritual instructors.  Gilbert of Hers was not inclined to take an injury to his breast, and hug it there; but the bold and frequent incursions of Henry of Stramen had induced him to retaliate rather in a spirit of rivalry than of revenge.  Henry of Stramen inherited all his father’s implacability, but he had often yielded to his sister’s solicitation to dedicate to the chase the day he had devoted to a descent upon the lordship of Hers.  The troubled condition of Germany had also diverted the chiefs from the disputes of their firesides to the civil wars of the empire; and neither the Lord of Hers nor the Baron of Stramen gave much attention to aught else than the league that Rodolph was forming against Henry IV of the house of Franconia.

Gilbert, left almost without a companion—­for the good priest Herman, whose time was divided between his pastoral duties, his prayers, and his studies, saw him but at intervals—­found time to hang very heavily upon his hands.  He thought the old reaper weary and sluggish, for the scythe flies fast only when we employ or enjoy the moments.  The autumn blast was beginning to lend a thousand bright colors to the trees, and the giddy leaves, like giddy mortals, threw off their simple green for the gaudy livery that was but a prelude to their fall—­for the beauty that, like the dying note of the swan, was but the beauty of death.  It was the season of all others for the chase, that health-giving but dangerous pastime, which our ancestors pursued with almost incredible eagerness, hunting the stag or the boar, over hill and dale, bog and jungle, through every twist and turn, as their Anglo-Saxon descendants now pursue the flying dollar.