ke a
woman hanging over hell and losing hold: 'Father--my father!'

"'I am here!' I cried, loudly, even as on the scaffold I cry the doom for
which the malefactors die.

"And the room lit up with a flame, white as the face of God as He passed
by on Mount Sinai, flash on continuous flash. And there before me, with a
countenance like a demon's, stood Otho von Reuss."

I uttered a hoarse cry, but Dessauer again checked me. My father went on:

"Otho von Reuss it was--he saw me in my red apparel, and cried aloud with
mighty fear. If God had given me mine axe in my hand--well, Duke or no
Duke, he had cried no more. But even as he turned and fled from the room
I seized him about the waist, and, opening the window with my other hand,
I cast him forth. And as he went down backward, clutching at nothing, God
looked again out of the skylights of heaven, and showed me the face of
the devil, even as Michael saw it when he hurled him shrieking into the
nether pit.

"Then I went back and took in my arms my one ewe lamb.

"Many days (so they brought me word) Otho lay at the point of death, and
Duke Casimir came not near me nor yet sent for me. But by that very
circumstance I knew Otho had not revealed how his accident had befallen.
Yet he but bided his time. And as he grew well, Duke Casimir grew ill. He
waxed more and more like an armored ghost, and one day he came here and
sat on the bed as in old times.

"'I know my friends now,' he said, 'good Red Axe of mine, friend of many
years. I have had mine eyes blinded, but this morning there has come a
mighty clearness, and from this day forth you and I shall stand face to
face and see eye to eye again, as in the days of old!'

"Then being athirst, he asked for something to drink. Which, when our
sweet Helene had brought, he patted her cheek. 'A maid too good for a
court--one among a thousand, a fair one !' he said; and passed away down
the stairs, walking with his old steady tread.

"But even at the steps of the Hall of Justice he stumbled and fell. They
carried him in, and there in the robing chamber he lay unconscious for a
week, and then died without speech.

"When he was dead, and ere he had been embalmed, there arose a clamor,
first among the followers of Otho von Reuss, and after that among those
of the Wolfsberg who expected that they would be favored by the new Duke.
It was first whispered, and then cried aloud, that the death of Duke
Casimir had been compassed by witch