To tell the truth, it struck me from the first that the Lady Ysolinde might have placed the letter there herself. So I said nothing about it when I descended.
The Prince met me half-way up the stairs.
"Well?" he questioned, bending his thick brows upon me.
"She is gone, certainly," said I; "where or how I do not yet know. But with your permission I will pursue and find out."
"Or, I presume, without my permission?" said the Prince.
I nodded, for it was vain to pretend otherwise—foolish, too, with such a master.
"Go, then, and God be with you!" he said. "It is a fine thing to believe in love."
And in ten minutes I was riding towards the Wolfsberg.
As I went past the great four-square gibbet which had made an end of Ritterdom in Plassenburg, I noted that there was a gathering of the hooded folk—the carrion crows. And lo! there before me, already comfortably a-swing, were our late foes, the two bravoes, and in the middle the dead Cannstadt tucked up beside them, for all his five hundred years of ancestry—stamped traitor and coward by the Miller's Son, who minded none of these things, but understood a true man when he met him.
I pounded along my way, and for the first ten miles did well, but there my horse stumbled and broke a leg in a wretched mole-run widened by the winter rains. In mercy I had to kill the poor beast, and there I was left without other means of conveyance than my own feet.