, she was terribly annoyed
with him for having dented her precious avenue with hoof-marks.
She temporized, therefore, professing herself unable to decide, and
dismissed them for three years with a promise to marry the one who in
that time should prove himself the noblest knight.

"Thereupon Prince Melchior and Prince Otto rode away in anger, for
they coveted the golden road as well as the lady. Prince Melchior,
who loved fighting, went home to collect an army and avenge the
insult, as he called it. Prince Otto, whose mind worked more subtly,
set himself by secret means to stir up disaffection among the
Carinthians, telling them that their labour and suffering had gone to
make the splendid useless avenue of gold; and he persuaded them the
more easily because it was perfectly true. (He forbore to add that
ho coveted it for his own.) But Prince Caspar, having seen his
lady-love, could find no room in his heart either for anger or even
for schemes to prove his valour. He could think of her and of her
only, day and night. And finding that his thoughts brought her
nearer to him the nearer he rode to the stars, he turned his horse
towards the Alps, and there, on the summit, among the snows, lived
solitary in a little hut.

"His mountain overlooked the plain of Carinthia, but from such a
height that no news ever came to him of the Grand Duchess or her
people. From his hut, to which never a woodman climbed, nor even a
stray hunter, he saw only a few villages shining when they took the
sun, a lake or two, and a belt of forest through which--for it hid
the palace--sometimes at daybreak a light glinted from the golden
avenue. But one night the whole plain broke out far and wide with
bonfires, and from the grand-ducal park--over which the sky shone
reddest--he caught the sound of a bell ringing. Then he bethought
him that the three years were past, and that these illuminations were
for the wedding; and he crept to bed, ashamed and sorrowful that he
had failed and another deserved.

"Towards daybreak, as he tossed on his straw, he seemed to hear the
bells drawing nearer and nearer, until they sounded close at hand.
He sprang up, and from the door of his hut he saw a rider on muleback
coming up the mountain track through the snow. The rider was a
woman, and as she alighted and tottered towards him, he recognized
the Grand Duchess. He carried her in and set her before his fire;
and there, while he spread food before her,