ght of fear and Baron Conrad's thought of fear were
two very different matters.

The afternoon had passed by the time they had reached the end of their
journey. Up the steep, stony path they rode to the drawbridge and
the great gaping gateway of Drachenhausen, where wall and tower and
battlement looked darker and more forbidding than ever in the gray
twilight of the coming night. Little Otto looked up with great,
wondering, awe-struck eyes at this grim new home of his.

The next moment they clattered over the drawbridge that spanned the
narrow black gulph between the roadway and the wall, and the next were
past the echoing arch of the great gateway and in the gray gloaming of
the paved court-yard within.

Otto looked around upon the many faces gathered there to catch the
first sight of the little baron; hard, rugged faces, seamed and
weather-beaten; very different from those of the gentle brethren among
whom he had lived, and it seemed strange to him that there was none
there whom he should know.

As he climbed the steep, stony steps to the door of the Baron's house,
old Ursela came running down to meet him. She flung her withered arms
around him and hugged him close to her. "My little child," she cried,
and then fell to sobbing as though her heart would break.

"Here is someone knoweth me," thought the little boy.

His new home was all very strange and wonderful to Otto; the armors, the
trophies, the flags, the long galleries with their ranges of rooms,
the great hall below with its vaulted roof and its great fireplace of
grotesquely carved stone, and all the strange people with their lives
and thoughts so different from what he had been used to know.

And it was a wonderful thing to explore all the strange places in the
dark old castle; places where it seemed to Otto no one could have ever
been before.

Once he wandered down a long, dark passageway below the hall, pushed
open a narrow, iron-bound oaken door, and found himself all at once in
a strange new land; the gray light, coming in through a range of tall,
narrow windows, fell upon a row of silent, motionless figures carven in
stone, knights and ladies in strange armor and dress; each lying upon
his or her stony couch with clasped hands, and gazing with fixed,
motionless, stony eyeballs up into the gloomy, vaulted arch above them.
There lay, in a cold, silent row, all of the Vuelphs who had died since
the ancient castle had been built.

It was the chape