"You did not love me," said I; "you were but kind to me, the unworthy son of the Executioner of Thorn. Out of your good heart you did it."
I acknowledge that I spoke like a paltering knave, but in truth knew not what to say.
"I loved you—yes, and I love you!" she said, serenely, as though my words had been the twittering of a bird on the roof. "And I am not ashamed. There was indeed no reason for my folly—no beauty, no desirableness in you. But—I loved you. Pass! Let it be. We will begin from there. You loved, or thought you loved, a maid—your Little Playmate. Pshaw, you loved her not! Or not as I count love. I was proud, accustomed to command, and, besides, a Prince's wife. The last, doubtless, should have held me apart. Yet my Princessdom was but as straw bands cast into the fire to bind the flame. As for you, Hugo Gottfried, you were in love with your success, your future, and, most of all, with your confident, insolently dullard self."
She smiled bitterly, and, because the thing she spoke was partly true, I had still nothing to answer her.
"Hugo Gottfried," she said, "try to remember if, when we rode to Plassenburg in the pleasant weather of that old spring, you loved this girl whom now you love?"
"Aye," said I, "loved her then, even as I love her now."
"You lie," she answered, calmly, not like one in anger, but as one who makes a necessary correction, "you loved her not. You were ready to love me—glad, too, that I should love you. And since you knew not then of my rank, it was not done for the sake of any advancement in Plassenburg."
I felt again the great disadvantage I was under in speaking to the Lady Ysolinde. I never had a word to say but she could put three to it. My best speeches sounded empty, selfish, vain beside hers. And so was it ever. By deeds alone could I vanquish her, and perhaps by a certain dogged masculine persistence.
"Princess," I said to her, "you have asked me to meet you here. It is not of the past, nor yet of likings, imaginings, recriminations that I must speak. My love, my sister, my playmate, bound to me by a thousand ancient tendernesses, lies in prison in this city of Thorn, under sentence of a cruel death. Will you help me to release her? I think that with your father, and therefore with you, is the power to open her prison doors!"
"And what is there then for me?" cried the Lady Ysolinde, instantly, bending her head forward, her emerald eyes so great and clear that their shining seemed to cover all her face as a wave covers a rock at flood-tide.