present to reserve it.

"My friend," he said, suavely, "I will reply to you presently. I have a
word to speak to your betters."

He turned him about to Dessauer.

"And what, Lord High Chancellor of Plassenburg, think you of this
masquerading? Dignified, is it not? And your wondrous speech in court
that was to have done such great things. Will you be pleased to abide
with us here in the Wolfsberg? Or must you forsake us to pleasure the
Emperor, who, poor man, cannot sleep of nights in his bed at Ratisbon
till the eloquent Doctor is come to cheer him with the full-flowing river
of speech?"

"Duke Otho," said Dessauer, "my life is indeed in your hands. I hold it
forfeit. A few years less or more are but little to Leopold von Dessauer
now. But there is one who will most bloodily avenge us if a hair of our
heads falls to the ground."

"Who?" said Otho, sneeringly. "Karl Miller's Son, I suppose. Ah, fool
that you are, I hold your poor Karl in the palm of my hand!"

"It is like enough," said Dessauer, with a quick look, the look of a keen
fencer when he sees an advantage. "I have often enough seen the palm of
your hand approach Karl Miller's Son's treasury when I kept the moneys."

I saw the face of Otho twitch angrily. But he had evidently made up his
mind to command his temper, sure of having that up his sleeve which would
sufficiently answer all taunts.

"You mistake me," he said, with more subtlety than I had expected from
the brute. "I had not meant to prove ungrateful. I am but newly come to
my own here in the Wolfmark. I have learned from your host, Bishop
Peter, how precious a thing forgiveness is. And now I am resolved to
practise it. There is a time to love and a time to hate; a time to war
and a time to be at peace. This is the last news I had from the holy
clerk whose revenues I pay. So lay it to heart, as I have done."

"Glad am I," said Dessauer, courteously, as if he had been turning a
phrase on the terrace at Plassenburg--"glad am I that in your hour you
are to be mindful of old friends, for they are like old wine, which grows
better and mellower with the years."

"It is indeed well," said Otho von Reuss, ironically. "I have known the
Chancellor Dessauer many years, and he grows more honorable and more wise
with each decade.

"But now 'tis with this young man that I would speak," he said, changing
his tone. "He at least is mine own servant, and so I have other words for
him. Hugo Gottfried, you re