She smiled bitterly, and, because the thing she spoke was partly true, I had still nothing to answer her.

“Hugo Gottfried,” she said, “try to remember if, when we rode to Plassenburg in the pleasant weather of that old spring, you loved this girl whom now you love?”

“Aye,” said I, “loved her then, even as I love her now.”

“You lie,” she answered, calmly, not like one in anger, but as one who makes a necessary correction, “you loved her not.  You were ready to love me—­glad, too, that I should love you.  And since you knew not then of my rank, it was not done for the sake of any advancement in Plassenburg.”

I felt again the great disadvantage I was under in speaking to the Lady Ysolinde.  I never had a word to say but she could put three to it.  My best speeches sounded empty, selfish, vain beside hers.  And so was it ever.  By deeds alone could I vanquish her, and perhaps by a certain dogged masculine persistence.

“Princess,” I said to her, “you have asked me to meet you here.  It is not of the past, nor yet of likings, imaginings, recriminations that I must speak.  My love, my sister, my playmate, bound to me by a thousand ancient tendernesses, lies in prison in this city of Thorn, under sentence of a cruel death.  Will you help me to release her?  I think that with your father, and therefore with you, is the power to open her prison doors!”

“And what is there then for me?” cried the Lady Ysolinde, instantly, bending her head forward, her emerald eyes so great and clear that their shining seemed to cover all her face as a wave covers a rock at flood-tide.

“What for me?” she repeated, in the silence which followed.

“For you,” said I, “the gladness to have saved an innocent life.”

“Tush!” she cried, with a gesture of extravagant contempt.  “You mistake; I am no good-deeds monger, to give my bread and butter to the next beggar-lass.  I tell you I am the woman who came first out of the womb of Mother-earth.  I will yield only that which is snatched from me.  What is mine is more mine than another’s, because I would suffer, dare, sin, defy a world of men and women in order to keep it, to possess it, to have it all alone to myself!”

“But,” I answered, “who am I, that so great a lady should love me?  What am I to you, Princess, more than another?”

“That I know not!” she answered, swiftly.  “Only God knows that.  Perhaps my curse, my punishment.  My husband is a far better, truer, nobler man than you, Hugo.  I know it; but what of that, when I love him not?  Love goes not by the rungs in a ladder, stands not with the most noble on the highest step, is not bestowed, like the rewards in a child’s school, to the most deserving.  I love you, Hugo Gottfried, it is true.  But I wish a thousand times that I did not.  Nevertheless—­I do!  Therefore make your reckoning with that, and put aside puling shams and whimpering subterfuges.”