"Hey, comrade, hey, what haste?" panted the other at his ear. "What is your purpose up there? You've been there once too often." There was a certain anxiety under the speaker's mocking air.
"My purpose——" began Steven, coldly. He was about to add, "concerns you not," but on second thought he wheeled round, and all that had been gathering in his heart this night escaped in words of fire. "Why do you ask?" he cried. "You know! What! are you the man to whom the souls of others lie bare? Are you a man like myself, and do you think I can leave that child now? With her little hand she held me from death. She lay in my arms and slept and trusted me. Do you think I could endure myself if I thought I had left her unprotected here? If I give my whole life to the mere guardianship of her, shall I do more than my duty? Man!" cried Steven, catching the fiddler's sunburnt wrist and shaking him, "I tell you, the child lay in my arms all night."
"She is indeed a child," said the musician, quietly.
"And it is even for that!" exclaimed Steven. "Oh, I thought you would have understood!"
"Let us go up to the heights, then," said the fiddler.
"What, no music?" cried Sidonia, gaily, as she watched them coming, from the doorstep. "I expected to hear your fiddle chanting the song of delivery!"
"I have enough music in my soul this morning," replied the wanderer.
* * * * *
The Burgrave was a sorry spectacle. A man may play the mediæval avenger overnight, but in the morning he belongs to his own age and the sense of proportion reasserts itself. The Burgrave's awakening to sobriety, his realization of his own deed, were depressing to the direst degree. Paradoxically, no less terrible was the discovery that his suspicions had been unfounded; that his wife was both virtuous and still of the living; that it was an innocent niece and an innocent guest whom he had precipitated to an awful doom. He almost betrayed himself on meeting the Burgravine.
"It was Sidonia, then—it was not you, the youth was after, all the time!" he exclaimed, bewildered.