The prisoner had followed the combat first with anxiety, then with joy.  While the falcon held the rat in his claws and struck him with his beak again and again, she called the squire to her, and bade him free her from her chains.  This was no distasteful task for George, indeed it gave him so much pleasure that he was in no hurry to finish.

When at last all her bonds were loosened, she stood very erect, and lifted her arms, and each moment seemed to make her more lovely and more beautiful.  Then she grasped the circle of emeralds, about which the enchanter had wound her golden hair, and waving it high in the air, cried:  “Falcon, return to the shape you were before.  Misdral, hear thy sentence!”

Wendelin assumed immediately his knightly guise, which seemed very clumsy to him after having been a falcon.  The rat lengthened itself and expanded until it was once more the giant covered with pumicestone; it walked no longer erect, however, but crawled along the ground at the feet of the beautiful woman, whimpering and howling like a whipped cur.  She then said to it:  “At last I possess the emerald circlet, in which resides your power over me.  I can destroy you, but my name is Clementine and so I will grant you mercy.  I will only banish you to your rocks.  There you shall remain until the last hour of the last day.  Papaluka, Papaluka,—­Emerald, perform thy duty!”

The giant of pumice-stone immediately glowed like molten iron.  Once he raised his clenched fist towards Wendelin, and then plunged into the lake where the hissing and foaming waters closed over him.  The lady and the knight were left alone together.  When she asked him what reward he desired, he could only answer that he wished to have her for his wife, and to take her to his home in Germany; but she blushed and answered sadly:  “I may not leave this country, and it is not permitted to me to become the wife of any mortal man.  But I know how heroes should be rewarded, and I offer you my lips to kiss.”

He knelt down before her and she took his head between her slim hands and pressed her mouth against his.

George, the squire, saw this, sighed deeply, and wondered:  “Why was my father only a miller?  What favours are granted to a knight like that!  But I hope the kiss won’t be the end of it all; for, unless she is a miserly fairy, there ought to be much more substantial pay for his services in store for him.”

But Clementine bestowed even a richer reward than he had expected upon her rescuer.  When she discovered that a lock of the brown hair on Wendelin’s left temple had turned grey during the conflict with the evil monster, she said to him:  ’All this land shall belong to you henceforth, and because you have grown grey in your courageous fight with evil, you shall be known from this time forward as Duke Greylock.  Every prince, yea, even the Emperor himself, will recognize the title which I confer upon you as my saviour, and when the race, of which you