shoulders in dusky recesses, scaring them out of their wits with
suggestions of witch-masters long dead and damned, had grown into this
maid of the sea-green eyes and silken draperies.

"A good-day to you, Hugo Gottfried!" said Master Gerard, quietly, looking
at me keenly across the table. He wore a skull-cap on his closely cropped
head. One or two betraying locks of gray appeared under it in front, but
did not conceal a flat forehead, which ran back at such an angle that,
with the luminous eyes beneath it, it gave him the look of a serpent
rearing his yellow head a little back in act to strike. This was a look
his daughter had also. But in her the gesture was tempered by the
free-playing curves of a beautiful throat and the forward thrust of a
rounded chin--advantages not possessed by the angular anatomy and bony
jaw of the famous doctor of law.

Master Gerard, clad in a long robe of black velvet from head to heel, sat
bending his fingers gracefully together and looking at me. His head was
thrown back, I have said, and the lights of the colored windows striking
on his gray hair and black skull-cap, caused him to look much more like
some lean ascetic ecclesiastic and prince of the church than the chief
lawyer of the ancient capital of the Wolfmark.

"You were present at this child's play yester-eve in the hostel of the
White Swan?" he asked, boring into me with his uncomfortable,
triangular eyes.

"Aye, truly," said I, "and much they made of me!"

For since my father said that I was accounted a hero in this house, I had
determined not to hide away my deeds in my leathern scrip. I had had