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Then the Lady Ysolinde withdrew to her own apartments, and that day I got no more words with her nor yet with Helene. The Prince also went to his room, and I remained where I was, deeming that for the present my duty was done. The servant of the man whose coat I wore stood with another servitor close at hand indeed, many of all ranks stood about.
Ysolinde sat silent a while, and when I would have spoken further she moved her hand a little impatiently aside, in sign that I was not to interrupt. Yet even this was not done in her old imperious manner, but rather sadly and with a certain wistful gentleness which went to my heart. When she spoke again it was in the same even voice with which she had formerly told my fortune in that very room.
"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.
It might be, also, that they desired to teach a lesson for the benefit of the wild robber border folk and the yet more ruffianly kempers who foregathered in this strange inn of Erdberg on the borders of the Mark. I summoned the maids that they might look on. For I wot the scene was a curious and pleasing one, and I could see that the eyes of the Lady Ysolinde glittered.
Nevertheless, I talked pleasantly enough with both of them, and I might have been an acquaintance of the day for all the notice that the Little Playmate took of me, oven when the Lady Ysolinde told her, evidently not for the first time, of my standing sentry by the door and blowing upon the match at my girdle.
But though, when need hath been, I have lied back and forth in my time, and thought no shame, something stuck in my throat now; and I felt that if I denied my love, who lay prison-bound that night, I should never come within the mercy of God, but be forever alien and outcast from any commonwealth of honorable men. "I cannot, Lady Ysolinde," I answered, at last.
"I have promised him a regiment," said the Princess, speaking quickly. "What of leaden soldiers?" answered the Prince, looking at her mighty soberly. "Your Highness is pleased to be brutal," answered the Lady Ysolinde, coldly. "It is your ordinary idea of humor!" A kind of quaint humility sat on the face of the Prince.
Having had no mercy on the innocent, how shall you ask God to have mercy on you?" "I will not ask Him!" she cried. "Instead of puling for mercy I will have had my revenge. And after that, come earth, heaven, or hell I shall not care. All will then be the same to Ysolinde!" I thought I would try her yet once more.
"Pray remember, Lady Ysolinde," said I, with much eagerness, "that I have as yet said nothing of the matter to Helene, and that my father only knows that I am to ride to Plassenburg in order to exercise myself in the practice of arms, before becoming his assistant here in the Red Tower and in the Hall of Judgment across the way." My visitor nodded a little impatiently.
The Lady Ysolinde reached a hand for her husband to kiss, which he did with singular gentleness. But, so far as I could see, she neither looked at him even once nor yet so much as spoke a word to him. Presently he questioned her directly: "And who may this fair young damsel be, who has done me the honor to journey to my country?"
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