e badge of shame
altogether, as both Helene and I wished to do.

Day by day the Little Playmate (for so I was now allowed to call her--the
Princesshood being mostly forgotten) grew great and tall, her fair,
almost lint-white hair darkening swiftly to coppery gold with the glint
of ripe wheat upon it.

Old Hanne followed her about with eyes at once wistful and doubtful.
Sometimes she shook her head sadly. And I wondered if ever the poor old
stumbling crone, wizened like a two-year-old winter apple, had been as
light and gay a thing as our dainty rose-leaf girl.

One day I was laboring at the art of learning to write, along with Friar
Laurence--a scrawny, ill-favored monk, who, for good deeds or misdeeds, I
know not which, was warded in a cell opening out of the lower or garden
court of the Wolfsberg, when I heard Helene dance down the stairs to the
kitchen of the Red Tower.

"Hannchen!" she cried, merrily, "come and teach me that trick of the
broidering needle. I never can do it but I prick myself. Nevertheless,
I can fashion the Red Axe almost as clearly as the pattern, and far
finer to see."

Friar Laurence raised his great, softly solid face, blue about the jowls
and padded beneath the eyes with craft.

"That little maid is over much with old Hanne," he said, as if he
meditated to himself; "she will teach her other prickings than the
needle-play. The witch-pricking at the images of wax was what brought her
here. Aye, and had it not been for your father wanting a house-keeper,
the Holy Office would have burned the hag, and sent her to hell, flaming
like a torch of pine knots."

Now this was the first I had heard with exactness of the matter of old
Hanne's having been a witch. And now that I knew it for certain I began
to imagine all sorts of unholy things about the poor wretch, and grew
greatly jealous of Helene being so often in the kitchen. Whereas before I
had thought nothing at all about the matter, save that Hannchen was a
dull, pleasant, muttering, shuffling-footed old woman, who could make
rare good cream-cakes when you got her in the humor.

And that was not often.

CHAPTER VI

DUKE CASIMIR'S FAMILIAR

I mind it was some tale of years later that I got my first glimpse below
the surface of things in the town of Thorn, and especially in the castle
of the Wolfsberg.

Duke Casimir continued to move, as of yore, in cavalcade through
his subject city. The burghers bowed as obsequiously as ever