transplanting! It is not fair to your young life that my red stain should
lie upon your lot. I have given you a quiet hermitage while you needed
it. But now it is right that my house should again be left unto me
desolate. It is already late summer with Gottfried Gottfried, and high
time that the young brood should fly away."

He turned to me.

"With you, Hugo, it is a thing different; you were born to that to which
you are born. And to that, as I read your horoscope, you must one day
return. But in the mean time care well for the maid. I lend her to you. I
give her into your hand. Cherish her as your chiefest treasure. Let her
enemies be yours, and if harm come to her through your neglect, slay
yourself ere you come again before me. For, by the Lord God of all
Righteous Judgment, I will have no mercy!"

I saw the eyes of the Lady Ysolinde glitter like those of the snake in
her belt as thus my father delivered Helene over to me.

But my father had yet more to say.

"And if any," he went on, in a deep, still voice, keeping his hand upon
the downcast head of the Little Playmate--"if any, great or small,
prince or pauper, harm so much as a hair of this fair head, by the great
God who wields His Axe over the universe and sits in the highest Halls of
Judgment, whose servant I am--I, Gottfried Gottfried, swear that he shall
taste the vengeance of the Red Axe and drink to the dregs the cup of
agony in his own blood!"

So saying, he kissed Helene and stalked out without turning his head or