* The Finnish word ämmä means old woman.
All listened, appalled, to the din of the waters. It seemed to them as if the mighty fall roared more wildly, more terribly than before, in the dreary winter dawn. The sergeant was right, it was like the howl of an angry dog, when they have thrown him his prey.
CHAPTER XV.
BERTEL AND REGINA.
We left our wandering knight of La Mancha asleep in a peasant's house at Ylihärmä. We found him again just now at Kajaneborg castle, vainly trying to secure the feared and hated Jesuit, whom he had seen through the window-pane of the wretched hut. Bertel's circuitous course during the days between can be perhaps imagined. Led on a false scent in his chase after the fugitives, he had scoured all the roads in East Bothnia, and even went as far up as Uleiborg, and only when he had lost every sign of them did he resolve as a last resource to seek the runaways in the far-off Kajana desert. Why the young cavalier pursued them with such unconquerable perseverance will soon be manifest.
Some hours after the scene on the bridge we find Bertel in the apartment which the Governor had assigned to Lady Regina, under the protection of one of his female relatives. More than three years have passed since they last met in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, in the presence of the great king.
Bertel was then an inexperienced youth of twenty, and Regina an equally untrained girl of sixteen. Both had gone through many trials since then; in each case the burning enthusiasm of youth had been cooled by struggles and sufferings.
The distance between the prince's daughter and the lieutenant had been lessened by Bertel's military fame and lately acquired coat of arms; nay, at this moment, she, the abandoned prisoner, might consider herself honoured by a knight's attentions. But the distance between their convictions, their sympathies, their hearts—had it been diminished by these trials, which generally steel a conviction instead of destroying it?
Bertel approached the young girl with all the perfect courtesy which the etiquette of his time had retained as an inheritance from the chivalry of past centuries.
"My lady," he said in a slightly tremulous voice, "since my hope of finding you at Korsholm failed, I have pursued you through forest and wilderness, as one pursues a criminal. Perhaps you divine the cause that prompted me to do so."