Erna flushed faintly, and her lips parted as if she would speak in impatience or anger; then she controlled herself, and replied with a show of gayety:
"Then it were wise not to forbid me aught, since then there will be no chance for me to follow after forbidden things."
And so she departed out of the chamber, and sought out Count Stephen with the petition that he sing to her; a request which he was not slow to grant.
XX
HOW THEY RODE TO FLY THE FALCON.
The wood was filled with whispers in the autumn afternoon, as if the trees were telling one another things which were to come to them soon, gossip leaning toward gossip with confidential mien. The sense of unseen creatures, presences quick with the keen life of their kind yet not sharing in human being, was diffused through the air like the scent of the fallen leaves. The Countess Erna, who rode here to-day, felt a vague dread, even in the sunlight and with her troop to come to her aid in case harm threatened her. She had a feeling as if she were watched and followed by the wood-folk, and had it not been that she was much engrossed with the consciousness of Count Stephen's presence she might have turned homeward.
As it was she struck her palfrey sharply with her whip, and went galloping through the wood, with her cousin close after. On her wrist was her favorite falcon, his bell tinkling as she rode. The west wind fanned her cheeks, hot with the flush which had sprung in them at the soft words Von Rittenberg had been whispering into her ears as they came through the pine wood below the castle steep. She heard the hoof-beats of his horse behind her like an echo, which repeated the things he had been saying, and although she knew beyond peradventure that she should lose in his esteem by not showing him that she was angry, yet withal so little had she been in sooth displeased, that she could but illy feign displeasure.
As they rode, the mind of the countess was busy with an endeavor to understand her own feelings, as a fly which hath been ensnared by the spider struggles to regain the freedom of his wings. She was herself entangled in a web of circumstance and of passion, and she glowed with a warmth which was at once shame and desire. She was not without some proper indignation against Count Stephen, and yet she desired with a curiosity which was not all unwilling, to learn what more he would dare to whisper in her ear before they came again to the castle from this hunt upon which she had ridden against the wish of her husband. Her blood seemed on fire. She repeated to herself the words in which she had for the first time set at naught the wishes of Albrecht, and with strange inconsistency she was angry that he had not forced her to remain at the castle. She said to herself that when she had declared her defiance of his will that she go not with the count to fly the falcon, her husband should have constrained her to obedience. She could not divine why it was that Albrecht seemed to look upon her as a being higher than himself, and to yield to her will as if it were that of one who had the right to command. He seemed less strong and noble than she had believed him when he failed to bend her pride to his wish.
Erna was a woman, and she did not ask herself what would have been her feelings had she at this moment been a prisoner at home, instead of careering thus across the forest with the soft west wind blowing in her face and a tingling sense of the hoof-beats of Count Stephen's steed just behind her. Though it be not when they are most kindly entreated that women be most just, yet are they not to be constrained into doing justice to those who love them.