“How?”
“By coming with me, who will persuade you, as readily as you did with your guardian, who coerced you.”
“I am an ungrateful simpleton,” she murmured. “Of course your way is the right one, and I am quite helpless if you desert me.”
“There,” cried Roland, with enthusiasm, “you have more than repaid whatever you may owe.”
After breakfasting at St. Goarhausen and purchasing the horses, they journeyed down the rough road that extended along the right bank of the Rhine. Roland and Hilda rode side by side, the other two following some distance to the rear. The young man maintained a gloomy silence, and the girl, misapprehending his thoughts, remained silent also, with downcast eyes, seeing nothing of the beautiful scenery they were passing. Every now and then Roland cast a sidelong glance at her, and his melancholy deepened as he remembered how heedlessly he had pledged his word to the three Archbishops regarding his marriage.
“I see,” she said at last, “that I have offended you more seriously than I feared.”
“No, no,” he assured her. “There is a burden that I cannot cast from my mind.”
“May I know what it is?”
“I dare not tell you, Hilda. I have been a fool. I am in the position of a man who must break his oath and live dishonored, or keep it, and remain for ever unhappy. Which would you do were you in my place?”
“Once given, I should keep my oath,” she replied promptly, “unless those who accepted it would release me.”