"Sweet thanks and compliments! And doubtless you gave as much and more to little Elspeth at Magdeburg. She has poured such a tale of Colonel Nigel Charteris into my ears to-night I am wellnigh tired of him. Who is your prisoner at the camp?"
"He caused some of my troopers to desert, and then pursued me hotly on my road to the Wartburg."
"It was a scurvy trick!" There was genuine indignation in her tone. "You must beware! Promise me, you will beware!" she pleaded; and Nigel, looking at the dimming of her eyes and her lips on the brink of quivering, felt a wave of tenderness flow over him. He leaned towards her and took her hands.
"You care for me, Ottilie?" There was a world of eagerness in his tones, such eagerness as made his voice sound hoarsely in his own ears.
She smiled a pitiful smile as she drew her hands from his as not trusting her silly tell-tales. Then she said--
"Do you so soon forget my words at Erfurt, my tall captain?"
"You said I should be a fool to dream of it!"
"I shall play the fool, Star Ottilie! So help me, Holy Mother of Heaven!"
"Not here then! I have stayed too long. What of your valise? Give me an order. They shall bring your baggage."
There was an inkhorn and paper at a little table and he wrote a line and signed it.
"This is to my soldier servant!" He handed it to her in a dream of happiness.
She went swiftly, and before many minutes had passed the man brought his baggage and holsters and laid them on the floor. The trooper was half asleep and bemused with the beer or the mead he had drunk.
"And the Count von Teschen's?" Nigel asked.
The man waved an arm vaguely and explained something in an inarticulate way, and then stared and blinked at his colonel in a manner that made it clear at least that there would be no sense in his head till the morrow, and Nigel sympathised with the man, for he was scarcely rested enough himself to take off his own boots. So he dismissed the man, and a few more minutes saw his devotions, addressed mainly to a mythical Saint Ottilie, and his ablutions, alike concluded, and the Landgrave's four-poster shut him into dreamless oblivion.
At five the sun streaming in, even finding its way between the curtains of the four-poster, awoke him. A moment to regain the sense of his position in the universe, during which the geometrical figure of the great Pietro Bramante sprang to his mind again, and made him wonder where he was on the line of his own orbit, and he leaped from the bed and gazed out and down upon that wonderful rolling sea of tree-tops and hills behind hills, all clad in pines, and little villages in green spaces here and there.