lls, scattering their kindly greetings like flowers among the crowds
of men and women.

All this time little or nothing was heard of poor Sintram. The last wild
outbreak of his father had increased the terror with which Gabrielle
remembered the self-accusations of the youth; and the more resolutely
Folko kept silence, the more did she bode some dreadful mystery. Indeed,
a secret shudder came over the knight when he thought on the pale,
dark-haired youth. Sintram's repentance had bordered on settled despair;
no one knew even what he was doing in the fortress of evil report on the
Rocks of the Moon. Strange rumours were brought by the retainers who
had fled from it, that the evil spirit had obtained complete power over
Sintram, that no man could stay with him, and that the fidelity of the
dark mysterious castellan had cost him his life.

Folko could hardly drive away the fearful suspicion that the lonely
young knight was become a wicked magician.

And perhaps, indeed, evil spirits did flit about the banished Sintram,
but it was without his calling them up. In his dreams he often saw the
wicked enchantress Venus, in her golden chariot drawn by winged cats,
pass over the battlements of the stone fortress, and heard her say,
mocking him, "Foolish Sintram, foolish Sintram! hadst thou but obeyed
the little Master! Thou wouldst now be in Helen's arms, and the Rocks of
the Moon would be called the Rocks of Love, and the stone fortress would
be the garden of roses. Thou wouldst have lost thy pale face and dark
hair,--for thou art only enchanted, dear youth,--and thine eyes would
have beamed more softly, and thy cheeks bloomed more freshly, and thy
hair would have been more golden than was that of Prince Paris when men
wondered at his beauty. Oh, how Helen would have loved thee!" Then she
showed him in a mirror, how, as a marvellously beautiful knight, he
knelt before Gabrielle, who sank into his arms blushing as the morning.
When he awoke from such dreams, he would seize eagerly the sword and
scarf given him by his lady,--as a shipwrecked man seizes the plank
which is to save him; and while the hot tears fell on them, he would
murmur to himself, "There was, indeed, one hour in my sad life when I
was worthy and happy."

Once he sprang up at midnight after one of these dreams, but this time
with more thrilling horror; for it had seemed to him that the features
of the enchantress Venus had changed towards the end of her speech, a