knew that I had to do with a man--not
with a walking show like my Lord Duke Casimir. It struck me that for good
or evil Master Gerard could carry through his intent to the bitter end,
and that in council he would smile when he saw my father change his black
vesture of trial for the red of beheading.

The Doctor Gerard was little seen in the streets of Thorn. Many citizens
had never so much as set eyes on him. Nevertheless his hand was in
everything. Some said he was a Jew, chiefly because none knew rightly
what he was or whence he had come. Thirty years had gone by since he had
suddenly appeared one day in the noble old house by the Weiss Thor, from
which Graetz the wizard and his wife had been burned out by the fury of
the populace. Twenty years of artistic labor had made this place what it
now was. And the little impish maid who used to break unexpectedly upon
the workmen of Thorn from behind doors, or who clapped hands upon their
shoulders in dusky recesses, scaring them out of their wits with
suggestions of witch-masters long dead and damned, had grown into this
maid of the sea-green eyes and silken draperies.

"A good-day to you, Hugo Gottfried!" said Master Gerard, quietly, looking
at me keenly across the table. He wore a skull-cap on his closely cropped
head. One or two betraying locks of gray appeared under it in front, but
did not conceal a flat forehead, which ran back at such an angle that,
with the luminous eyes beneath it, it gave him the look of a serpent
rearing his yellow head a little back in act to strike. This was a look
his daughter had also. But in her the gesture was tempered by the
free-playing curves of a beautiful throat and the forward thrust of a
rounded chin--advantages not possessed by the angular anatomy and bony
jaw of the famous doctor of law.

Master Gerard, clad in a long robe of black velvet from head to heel, sat
bending his fingers gracefully together and looking at me. His head was
thrown back, I have said, and the lights of the colored windows striking
on his gray hair and black skull-cap, caused him to look much more like
some lean ascetic ecclesiastic and prince of the church than the chief
lawyer of the ancient capital of the Wolfmark.

"You were present at this child's play yester-eve in the hostel of the
White Swan?" he asked, boring into me with his uncomfortable,
triangular eyes.

"Aye, truly," said I, "and much they made of me!"

For since my father said that I was ac