east.

"You have seen her?" he inquired, stopping in front of me,
wide-nostrilled, like a dog that points the game.

"I _have_ seen her," I replied, as simply.

"Well?" he queried again, with a keen, eager note of anxiety in
his voice.

"I am ready to do that which you have asked."

He seemed to be on the point of saying something else. But, changing his
mind, he touched a little silver bell.

The usher appeared.

"Show the Hereditary Justicer of the Mark to the Red Tower. Give him all
that is necessary to eat and drink. Bid a man-at-arms attend him, and set
a sufficient guard at the door!"

So I went out from the presence, and the Duke and the Duke's new Justicer
bowed to each other gravely as I stood a moment on the threshold.

"Till we meet again, Red Axe of the Wolfmark!" said Duke Otho.

"Till we meet again!" said I, countering him like blade meeting blade.

In little more than ten minutes after I had entered them, I stood outside
the Duke's apartments, and with my escort I strode across to the empty
Red Tower, the home of so many memories. My head was reeling, and with
the overpress of excitement I could not sleep. So, bribing the soldier,
my companion--who had been charged by the Duke not to lose sight of
me--to accompany me, I went up to my father's garret.

There I found all things as they had been when my father died.

I set the windows wide, cast the tumbled bedclothes out upon the
dust-heap beneath, and bared the whole to the clean, large, wholesome
breezes of the night. I saw the fateful Red Axe lean as usual against the
block, and, taking it up, I found it keen as a razor. It was spotless,
and the edge gave back the long low room and our one glimmering candle
like a mirror. It must have been my father's last work in this world to
polish it.

Then I went down to my own room and cast myself down upon the bed in
which, on that night of the first home-coming of the Playmate, I had laid
my little wife.

The soldier couched across the door, rolled in his cloak and some chance
wrapping he found about the house.

God keep me from ever spending such a night again! I thought it would
never come to an end. Out in the square in front of the Wolfsberg I could
hear a knocking--dull, continuous, reverberant. At first I thought it
must be within my own head. So I asked the soldier, after a little, if he
heard it also. I had some faint idea that it might be Prince Karl of
Plassenburg with his army thund