"Let your Playmate come," she said. "There is room, I warrant, for her and you both at Plassenburg. You shall keep each other company when you have the homesickness, and on the journey she can ride with us side by side."
Then going to the curtain she summoned the servitor who had first opened the door for me. He bowed before the girl with infinite respect. She bade him conduct me upon my way. I will not deny that I had hoped for a tenderer leave-taking. But all at once she seemed to have slipped back into the great lady again, and to be desirous of setting me in my own sphere and station ere I went, lest perchance I should presume overmuch upon her favors.
Yet not altogether so. For, relenting a little as I turned to leave her, she stood holding the curtain aside for me to pass, and, as it had been by accident, in dropping it her fingers rested a moment against my cheek. Then the heavy curtain of blue fell into its place, and I found myself following the eminently respectable domestic of Master Gerard down the stairs.
At the outer door, but before he opened it, the man put a sealed packet in my hand.
"From Doctor Gerard von Sturm," he said, bowing respectfully, yet with a certain sense of being a party in a favor conferred.
I thrust the letter into my inner pocket and went out into the street. The sun was still shining, yet somehow I felt that it must be another day, another world. The houses seemed hard and dry, the details of the architecture insufferably mean and insultingly familiar. I longed with all my heart to get away from Thorn into the new world which had opened to me—a world of perfumes and flowers and flower-like scents and Oriental marvels, of low voices, too, and the touching of soft hands upon cheeks.
In all the world of young men there was no greener or more simple Simon
than I, Hugo Gottfried, as, playing a tune on the pipe of my own conceit,
I marched up the High Street of Thorn to the entrance gate of the
Wolfsberg.
The Little Playmate was standing at the door as I approached, sweet as a June rose. When she saw me she went into the sitting-room to show that she had not yet forgiven me. Though I think by this time, as was often the way with Helene, she had forgotten almost what was the original matter of my offending.
But I pretended to be careless and heart-free. And so—God forgive me!—I went whistling up the steps of the Red Tower to my room without so much as looking within the chamber where my Little Playmate had withdrawn herself.
Which thing I suffered grievously for or all was done. And an excellent dispensation of Providence it had been if I had lost my right hand, all for making that little heart sore, or so much as one tear drop from those deep gray eyes.