It was one brave June day when the Princess Olivera Rinalda Victorine, armed cap-à-pie, went forth to war. She was mounted on a charger of dapple gray; a palfrey she would not have. On her head was a shining steel helmet, through the back of which her tawny hair floated down her back—there was not room to do it high. Through her visor her blue eyes sparkled with a steady light. On her arm she carried a blue shield, for even in her battle mood she could not forget what color was becoming. It bore the device that she had chosen for herself, a virgin rampant, gules. The armor that covered her from head to foot was of wrought rings of finest steel, made with a flowing skirt that fell in protecting folds about her feet. Her right hand held a spear; with her left she guided her steed.
"Good-by, dear!" called the Princess, waving her hand to Auguste Philippe.
"You are a silly thing," he remarked, affectionately, from the battlements. "You won't do anything but tear your clothes."
He did not try to stop her. In the strain of becoming Auguste Philippe the Twenty-fourth he found that there were many things he was not so sure of as he had been before. The flame in his sister's eyes he did not understand, and he wondered why she was not content to stay at home and play at quoits and dance to music, as he was; but he resolved that Victorine should make a fool of herself in her own way, and that it should not cost her too dear. So he stood long watching her as she went shining across the great green plain with the light flashing from a thousand glittering points on her armor.
Now, the Princess rode by night and day, and not once did her courage fail or her arm grow weary. She left behind the green plain and the pleasant trees, and traveled in a grievous waste beyond the songs of birds, and anon she came to a woodland that was dark and old. She was sorely puzzled as to the habitat of the Microbe, for in his raids he came from east and west and north and south, and no one could tell if he had a permanent abiding-place. Often in the dusky shadows of the wood, she stopped to call a challenge: "What, ho! Come out and try thy skill!" But that was not his way of fighting, and he stayed hidden. Sometimes she inquired at a cottage door or at a shepherd's hut on the edge of the wood, but all thought that the lovely lady in armor was surely mad, wearing such strange clothing and asking such strange questions. Once she came upon a witch-wife who was gathering simples by a swamp in the wood.
"Is the pretty lady looking for the pretty knight that passed this way yestere'en?" asked the witch-wife, with a horrible leer of her sunken eyes.
The Princess elevated her eyebrows with a look of scorn.
"No," she answered coldly; "I am looking for the Microbe."
"How?" asked the witch-woman, with her hand behind her ear.