three deeply-recessed windows and hung with old tapestry worked by her great-grandmother in the dark days of the Emperor Charles, when the Count of Heritzburg shared the imprisonment of the good Landgrave of Hesse. A screen stood a little way within the door, and behind this it was my business to wait, until I was called.

On this morning, however, I had no patience to wait, and I made myself so objectionable by my constant coughing that at last she cried, with a cheerful laugh, 'What is it, Martin? Come and tell me. Has there been a fire in the forest? But it is not the right time of year for that.'

'No, my lady,' I said, going forward. Then out of shyness or sheer contradictoriness I found myself giving her the usual report of this and that and the other, but never a word of what was in my mind. She sat, according to her custom in summer, in the recess of the farthest window, while Fraulein Anna occupied a stool placed before a reading-desk. Behind the two the great window gave upon the valley. By merely turning the head either of them could look over the red roofs of Heritzburg to the green plain, which here was tolerably wide, and beyond that again to the dark line of forest, which in spring and autumn showed as blue to the eye as thick wood smoke.

While I spoke my lady toyed with a book she had been reading, and Fraulein Anna turned over the pages on the desk with an impatient hand, sometimes looking at my lady and sometimes tapping with her foot on the floor. She was plump and fair and short, dressing plainly, and always looking into the distance; whether because she thought much and on deep matters, or because, as the Countess's woman once told me, she could see nothing beyond the length of her arm, I cannot say. When I had finished my report, and paused, she looked up at my lady and said, 'Now, Rotha, are you ready?'

'Not quite, Anna,' my lady answered, smiling. 'Martin has not done yet.'

'He tells in ten minutes what another would in five,' Fraulein said crossly. 'But to finish?'

'Yes, Martin, what is it?' my lady assented. 'We have eaten all the pastry. The meat I am sure is yet to come.'

I saw that there was nothing else for it, and after all it was what I had come to do. 'Your excellency knows the Bavarian soldier and his daughter, who have been lodging these six months past at the Red Hart?' I said.

'To be sure.'

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