es did not waver as she looked frankly back at him.

"Nay; I am no princess, and I have no enchantments -- would that I had,
if they could be used in offices of pity and mercy! I am but a
portionless maiden, an orphan, an alien. Ofttimes I weep to think that I
too did not die when my parents did, in that terrible scourge which has
devastated the world, which I hear that you of England call the Black
Death."

"Who art thou then, fair maid?" questioned Gaston, who was all this time
cautiously approaching the Tower of Saut by a winding and unfrequented
path well known to his companion. Roger had been told to wait till the
other riders came up, and conduct them with great secrecy and caution
along the same path.

Their worst fears for Raymond partially set at rest, and the hope of a
speedy rescue acting upon their minds like a charm, Gaston was able to
think of other things, and was eager to know more of the lovely girl who
had twice shown herself to him in such unexpected fashion.

It was a simple little story that she told, but it sounded strangely
entrancing from her lips. Her name, she said, was Constanza, and her
father had been one of a noble Spanish house, weakened and finally
ruined by the ceaseless internal strife carried on between the proud
nobles of the fiery south. Her mother was the sister of the Sieur do
Navailles, and he had from time to time given aid to her father in his
troubles with his enemies. The pestilence which had of late devastated
almost the whole of Europe, had visited the southern countries some time
before it had invaded more northerly latitudes; and about a year before
Gaston's first encounter with the nymph of the wood, it had laid waste
the districts round and about her home, and had carried off both her
parents and her two brothers in the space of a few short days.

Left alone in that terrible time of trouble, surrounded by enemies eager
to pounce upon the little that remained of the wide domain which had
once owned her father's sway, Constanza, in her desperation, naturally
turned to her uncle as the one protector that she knew. He had always
showed himself friendly towards her father. He had from time to time
lent him substantial assistance in his difficulties; and when he had
visited at her home, he had shown himself kindly disposed in a rough
fashion to the little maiden who flitted like a fairy about the wide
marble halls. Annette, her nurse, who had come with her mother from
Fra