d on the maiden's head where it lay on the pillow by me.

"She is my little wife!" I said. "The Duke gave her to me out in the
court-yard there!"

And this is the whole tale of how the Little Playmate came to dwell with
us in the Red Tower.

CHAPTER III

THE RED AXE OF THE WOLFMARK

Just as clearly do I remember the next morning. The Little Playmate lay
by me on my bed, wrapped in one of my childish night-gowns--which old
Hanne had sought out for her the night before. It was a brisk, chill,
nippy daybreak, and I had piled most of the bedclothes upon her. I lay at
the nether side clipped tight in my single brown blanket. It was
perishing cold. Out of the heaped coverings I saw presently a pair of
eyes, great and dark, regarding me.

Then a little voice spoke, sweetly and clearly, but yet strangely
sounding to me who had never before heard a babe speak.

"I want my father--tell him to send Grete, my maid, to attend on me, and
then to come himself to sit by the bed and amuse me!"

Alas! her father--well I knew what had come to him--that which in the
mercy of the Duke Casimir and in the crowning mercy of the Red Axe, I had
seen come to so many. The dogs did not howl at all that morning. They,
too, were tired with the hunting and sated with the quarry.

All the same, I tried to answer my companion.

"Little Maid!" said I, "let me be your maid and your father. I will
gladly get you all you want. But your good father has gone on a weary
journey, and it will be long ere he can hope to return."

"Well," she said, "send lazy Grete, then. I will scold her soundly for
not bringing the sop of hot milk-and-bread, which, indeed, is not food
for a lady of my age. But my father insists upon it. He is dreadfully
obstinate."

Now there was no one but our old deaf Hanne in the kitchen of the Red
Tower. She stayed only for cooking and keeping the house clean. My father
never paid her wages, and she never asked any. She did her work and took
that which she needed out of the household purse without check or
question. It was long before I guessed that Hanne also owed her life to
my father's care. I had noticed, indeed, when he had upon him the red
headman's dress, which fitted him like a flame climbing up a tall back
log on the winter's fire, that old Hanne trembled from head to foot and
shrank away into her den under the stairs. Many a time have I seen her
peeping round the corner of the kitchen-door and tottering back w