ughter on
her face.

"Return to thy chamber," he thundered. "I will give thee until tomorrow
to decide whether thou wilt accept Peter of Colfax as thy husband, or
take another position in his household which will bar thee for all time
from the society of thy kind."

The girl turned toward him, the laugh still playing on her lips.

"I will be wife to no buffoon; to no clumsy old clown; to no debauched,
degraded parody of a man. And as for thy other rash threat, thou hast
not the guts to put thy wishes into deeds, thou craven coward, for well
ye know that Simon de Montfort would cut out thy foul heart with his own
hand if he ever suspected thou wert guilty of speaking of such to me,
his daughter." And Bertrade de Montfort swept from the great hall, and
mounted to her tower chamber in the ancient Saxon stronghold of Colfax.

The old woman kept watch over her during the night and until late the
following afternoon, when Peter of Colfax summoned his prisoner before
him once more. So terribly had the old hag played upon the girl's fears
that she felt fully certain that the Baron was quite equal to his dire
threat, and so she had again been casting about for some means of escape
or delay.

The room in which she was imprisoned was in the west tower of the
castle, fully a hundred feet above the moat, which the single embrasure
overlooked. There was, therefore, no avenue of escape in this direction.
The solitary door was furnished with huge oaken bars, and itself
composed of mighty planks of the same wood, cross barred with iron.

If she could but get the old woman out, thought Bertrade, she could
barricade herself within and thus delay, at least, her impending fate
in the hope that succor might come from some source. But her most subtle
wiles proved ineffectual in ridding her, even for a moment, of her harpy
jailer; and now that the final summons had come, she was beside herself
for a lack of means to thwart her captor.

Her dagger had been taken from her, but one hung from the girdle of the
old woman and this Bertrade determined to have.

Feigning trouble with the buckle of her own girdle, she called upon the
old woman to aid her, and as the hag bent her head close to the girl's
body to see what was wrong with the girdle clasp, Bertrade reached
quickly to her side and snatched the weapon from its sheath. Quickly
she sprang back from the old woman who, with a cry of anger and alarm,
rushed upon her.

"Back!" cried the