"I don't know what to think," stammered Herr Goebel at last, gazing
across the table with bewildered face.

"Think of your good fortune. A moment ago you imagined a thousand
thalers were lost. Now it is but five hundred thalers invested, and you
are a partner with the Royal House of the Empire."

III

DISSENSION IN THE IRONWORKERS' GUILD

Up to the time of his midnight awakening, Prince Roland had led a
care-free, uneventful life. Although he received the general education
supposed to be suitable for a youth of his station, he interested
himself keenly in only two studies, but as one of these challenged the
other, as it were, the result was entirely to the good. He was a very
quiet boy, much under the influence of his mother, seeing little or
nothing of his easy-going, inebriated father. It was his mother who
turned her son's attention towards the literature of his country, and he
became an omnivorous reader of the old monkish manuscripts with which
the Palace was well supplied. Especially had his mind been attracted by
the stories and legends of the Rhine. The mixture of history, fiction,
and superstition which he found in these vellum pages, so daintily
limned, and so artistically embellished with initial letters in gold and
crimson and blue, fascinated him, and filled him with that desire to see
those grim strongholds on the mountain-sides by the river, which later
on resulted in his journey from Ehrenfels to Bonn, when his ingenuity,
and the cupidity of his custodian, freed him from the very slight
thraldom in which he was held by the Archbishop of Mayence.

If his attention had been entirely absorbed by the reading of these
tomes, he might have become a mere dreamy bookworm, his intellect
saturated with the sentimental and romantic mysticism permeating Germany
even unto this day, and, as he cared nothing for the sports of boyhood,
body might have suffered as brain developed.

But, luckily, he had been placed under the instruction of Rinaldo, the
greatest master of the sword that the world had up to that period
produced. Rinaldo was an Italian from Milan, whom gold tempted across
the Alps for the purpose of instructing the Emperor's son in Frankfort.
He was a man of grace and politeness, and young Roland took to him from
the first, exhibiting such aptitude in the art of fencing that the
Italian was not only proud of one who did such credit to his tuition,
but came to love the youth as if he were his