lay, just keeping the groans of pain
and weariness from crossing his lips.

"Could you reach this flask if I threw it over to you?" asked Ulrich
suddenly; "there is good wine in it, and one may as well be as
comfortable as one can. Let us drink, even if to-night one of us dies."

"No, I can scarcely see anything; there is so much blood caked round my
eyes," said Georg, "and in any case I don't drink wine with an enemy."

Ulrich was silent for a few minutes, and lay listening to the weary
screeching of the wind. An idea was slowly forming and growing in his
brain, an idea that gained strength every time that he looked across at
the man who was fighting so grimly against pain and exhaustion. In the
pain and languor that Ulrich himself was feeling the old fierce hatred
seemed to be dying down.

"Neighbour," he said presently, "do as you please if your men come first.
It was a fair compact. But as for me, I've changed my mind. If my men
are the first to come you shall be the first to be helped, as though you
were my guest. We have quarrelled like devils all our lives over this
stupid strip of forest, where the trees can't even stand upright in a
breath of wind. Lying here to-night thinking I've come to think we've
been rather fools; there are better things in life than getting the
better of a boundary dispute. Neighbour, if you will help me to bury the
old quarrel I--I will ask you to be my friend."

Georg Znaeym was silent for so long that Ulrich thought, perhaps, he had
fainted with the pain of his injuries. Then he spoke slowly and in
jerks.

"How the whole region would stare and gabble if we rode into the market-
square together. No one living can remember seeing a Znaeym and a von
Gradwitz talking to one another in friendship. And what peace there
would be among the forester folk if we ended our feud to-night. And if
we choose to make peace among our people there is none other to
interfere, no interlopers from outside . . . You would come and keep the
Sylvester night beneath my roof, and I would come and feast on some high
day at your castle . . . I would never fire a shot on your land, save
when you invited me as a guest; and you should come and shoot with me
down in the marshes where the wildfowl are. In all the countryside there
are none that could hinder if we willed to make peace. I never thought
to have wanted to do other than hate you all my life, but I think I have
changed my mind about thin