in
the Weiss Thor I do not know. Whether the servitor, Sir Respectable,
showed me out or not has quite passed from me. I only remember that I
came upon myself waiting outside the gate of Bishop Peter's palace
ringing at a bell which sounded ghostly enough, tinkling like a cracked
kettle behind the door.

The lattice clicked and a face peeped out.

"Get hence, night-raker!" cried a voice. "Wherefore do you come here so
untimeously, profaning the holy quiet of our minster-close?"

"There was no very holy calm in the kitchen t'other night, Peter
Swinehead!" said I, my wits coming mechanically back to me at the
familiar sound.

"Ha, Sir Blackamoor, 'tis you; surely your chafts have grown strangely
white, or else are my eyes serving me foully in the torchlight."

Instinctively I covered as much of my face as I could with my
cloak's cape, for indeed I had washed it ere I went forth to see the
Lady Ysolinde.

"'Tis that you have slipped too much of the Rhenish down thy gullet, old
comrade," said I, slapping Peter on the back and getting before him so
that he might remark nothing more.

At that, being well pleased with my calling him comrade, he lighted me
cordially to my chamber, and there left me to the sleepless meditation of
the night.

The next day was one of great quietness in the city of Thorn. An uneasy,
sultry pause of silence brooded over the lower town. Men's heads showed a
moment at door and window, looked furtively up and down the street, and
then vanished again within. Plots were being hatched and plans laid in
Thorn; yet, while there was the lowering silence in the city, up aloft
the Wolfsberg hummed gayly like a hive. Once I went up that way to see if
I could win any news of my father. But this day the door into the Red
Tower stood closed, nor would any within open for all my knocking. So
perforce I had to return unsatisfied. Several times I went to the Weiss
Thor to spy the horizon round for the troops of Plassenburg. But only the
gray plain of the Mark stretched itself out so far as the eye could
penetrate--hardly a reeking chimney to be seen, or any token of the
pleasant rustic life of man, such as in my youth I remembered to have
looked down upon from the Red Tower. Beneath me the city of Thorn lay
grimly quiescent, like a beast of prey which has eaten all its neighbors,
and must now die of starvation because there are no more to devour.

The day passed on feet that crept like those of a tortoise