"You have been reading Amadis de Gaul, or Charlemagne and his paladins—fie, I did not think it of your gravity," jested Louis of Nassau.
Rénèe flushed into animation, and it was like the sudden blooming of a tightly closed flower, so did the quick flash of her feeling light her features into beauty.
"There were such men," she said, "and might be again, surely—do you not believe so, Magister? And never were they more needed than now——"
She checked herself sharply and the lovely flush faded. She turned away and picked up one of the slender glass bottles of essences Vanderlinden had placed before her.
Louis of Nassau looked at her curiously. "She is beautiful," he thought.
"Perhaps one day you will find your hero and Vanderlinden his stone," he said, and the sun flickered like a caress over his brilliant person and his pleasant young face.
"Perhaps? Nay, surely," replied the alchemist. "Or if we do not, another will. For both are there as surely as God is in heaven."
"You, too, think the world needs some knight, some paladin?" asked the Count, drawing on his white gloves stitched with gold.
"I have travelled much," replied the alchemist, "and could not avoid seeing, albeit that I was ever engaged in abstruse studies, the great horrid cruelties and wrongs abroad, especially under the reign of His Majesty King Philip, in whose dominions God grant me never to set foot again. I was in England, princely seigneur, while he was King of that country, and I did see things that made me weary of life. So, too, in Spain from whence I fled hastily. And, lately, it is no better in the Netherlands; indeed there are few places where a man can think as he please and speak freely, save only in these states of Germany."
Louis of Nassau looked thoughtfully at the speaker, and then at Rénèe whose fair head was bent over the rows of alabaster pots and bottles of twisted glass and crystal. He had never lived under a tyrant, his brief joyous life had passed in absolute freedom, and with him his faith was not the result of conviction but of heritage. Still the old man's words and the girl's eloquent face were not without effect on him; some emotion strange and vague echoed in his heart, and he sighed as he took the two little boxes from Duprès.