whereof no single word ever came true. He promised my brother a Count's
coronet and a wife from a race of princes; and when Ann heard it, and
held up her finger at Herdegen for shame, he whispered in her ear that
she was of the race of the Sovereign Queen of all queens--of Venus, ruler
of the universe. All this she heard gladly; yet could no one persuade
her to let her hand be read.

At last it was the woman's turn to dance; before she began she had
smoothed her hair and tied it with small gold pieces; and indeed she was
a well grown maid and slender, well-favored in face and shape, with a
right devilish flame in her black eyes. It was a strange but truly a
pleasing thing to see her; first she laid a dozen of eggs in a circle on
the grass, and then she beat her tambourine to the piping of the lad and
the drumming of one of the men who had remained with her, and rattled it
over her head with wanton lightness till the bells in the hoop rang out,
while she turned and bent her supple body in a mad, swift whirl, bowing
and rising again. Her falcon eyes never gazed at the ground, but were
ever fixed upwards or on the bystanders, and nevertheless her slender
bare feet never went nigh the eggs in the wildest spinning of her dance.

The gentlemen, and we likewise, clapped our hands; then, while she stayed
to take breath, she snatched Herdegen's hat from his head--and she had
long had her eye on him--and gathered all the eggs into it with much
bowing and bending to the measure of the music. When she had put all the
eggs into the hat she offered it to my brother kneeling on one knee, and
she touched the rim of her tambourine with her lips. The froward fellow
put his fingers to his lips, as the little children do to blow a kiss,
and when his eyes fell on that wench's, meseemed that this was not the
first time they had met.