A beggar-woman crept round the wall of the churchyard.
"May I beg of you to day?" began a hoarse voice, at Ilse's back. "When it is not the father, it is the son."
Ilse turned round; again she saw the hollow eyes of the gipsy, and cried out, dismayed, "Away from here."
"The lady can no longer drive me away," said the gipsy, cowering down, "for I am very weary, and my strength is at an end."
One could see that she spoke the truth.
"The troopers have hunted me from one boundary to another. If others have no compassion on me, the lady from the rock should not be so hard-hearted, for there is old fellowship between the beggar and her. I also once had intercourse with noble people, I have abandoned them, and yet my dreams ever hover over their golden palaces. Whoever has drunk of the magic cup will not lose the remembrance of it. It has again and again driven me into this country, I have led my people here--and they now lie in prison, the victims of the old memories that pursued me."
"Who is this woman?" asked the Prince.
The beggar raised her hands on high.
"In these arms I have held the Hereditary Prince when he was a child and knew nothing; I have sat with him on velvet in his mother's room. Now I lie in the churchyard on the high road, and the hands that I stretch out to him remain empty."
"It is the gipsy woman," said the Prince in a low tone, and turned away.