accompany his daughter
home. From your little castle I was directed to the hospital, where I
found her amongst the horrible women. She had struggled faithfully
against her loathing and disgust, but when I arrived her power of
resistance was already beginning to fail. Fortunately the sedan-chair was
there, for she felt that her feet would scarcely carry her back. I
ordered one to be prepared for Jungfrau Ortlieb, though I remembered the
dying woman who kept her. As if the matter were some easy task, she
begged the countess to excuse her, and remained beside the wretched straw
pallet."

The deeply agitated girl had just released herself from the matron's
embrace, and begged the knight to have her Roland saddled; but Frau
Christine stopped him, and entreated Cordula, for her sake, to use her
sedan-chair instead of the horse.

"If it will gratify you," replied the countess smiling; "but I should
reach home safely on the piebald."

"Who doubts it?" asked the matron. "Give her your arm, husband. The
bearers are ready, and you will soon overtake them on your horse,
Boemund."

"The walk through the warm June night will do me good," the latter
protested.

Soon after the sedan-chair which conveyed Cordula, lighted by several
torch-bearers on foot and on horseback, began to move towards the city.

At St. Linhard, Boemund Altrosen, who walked beside it, asked the
question, "Then I may hope, Countess? I really may?"

She nodded affectionately, and answered under her breath: "You may; but
we must first try whether the flower of love which blossomed for you out
of my weakness is the real one. I believe it will be."

He joyously raised her hand to his lips, but a torch-bearer's shout--"
Count von Montfort and his train!"--urged him back from the sedan chair.
A few seconds after Cordula welcomed her father, who had anxiously ridden
forth to meet his jewel.

CHAPTER XIV.

"I can hardly do more, and yet I must," groaned Frau Christine, as she
gazed after the torch-bearers who preceded Cordula. Her husband, however,
tried to detain her, offering to go to their young guest in her place.

But the effort was vain. The motherless child, whom the captive father
probably believed to be in safety with her sensible sister, was at a post
of danger, and only a woman's eye could judge whether it would do to
yield to Eva's wish, which the housekeeper had just told her mistress,
and allow her--it was already past midnight-to remain