The state of feverish anxiety into which Aage had been thrown, had called the colour into his cheek, and restored the appearance of health to his countenance. In the spacious apartment appropriated to the female inmates of the castle, where strangers were received, and where the household assembled on holidays before divine service, Aage and Master Petrus were received by the aged mistress of the castle, who herself presented the guests their warm morning drink in cups of polished silver. At a large round table in the middle of the apartment, which was covered with a white fringed woollen table-cloth, sat the two German minstrels, with the smoking cups before them, in pleasant converse with the ladies. Ulrica questioned them, with curiosity, of their visits to foreign princes, in whose praise and exaltation Master Rumelant was as inexhaustible as he was unwearied in reckoning up all the honour he had gained by his lays with these "excellent lords, his august and most gracious patrons." Margaretha also took part in the conversation with the strangers; but she was more modest in her queries. She was much more interested in their art than in the good fortune they had sought and obtained by it from the great. The solemn Master Poppe favoured her with a detailed account of the genius and lays of the famous Minnesingers, whose most flourishing period Master Poppe asserted could only be supposed by the ignorant to have passed away. He affirmed, on the contrary, that the noble art of minstrelsy had only now for the first time fully developed itself on higher themes,--in the praise of moral truth and seraphic beauty. Minstrels no longer repeated the monotonous praises of verdant May, or of the beauty of earthly females and vain loves, but now in the same, or even in a more regular measure, sang moral or religious themes and important theological dogmas. He could not, however, deny that the ancient love songs possessed a degree of pathos and animation which even his good friends Master Henrick Frauenlob and a certain Master Regenbogen, as well as the famous schoolmaster of Esslingen, with all their learning, vainly strove to attain. Meanwhile he deemed it very fortunate that, as princes and emperors no longer, as in former times, devoted themselves to the noble art of minstrelsy, now cultivated chiefly by the honest burgher class, there still were lords and princes, like the King of Denmark, to honour and encourage the art, and that the minstrel's lay yet resounded in knightly halls and in the apartments of noble ladies. He lauded the poetic spirit of the chivalrous poetry of Denmark, but still considered it, as well as the love songs, too vain and worldly; a charge which Margaretha took much to heart, although she readily admitted to the learned minstrel, that all the Danish ballads she knew and admired treated of love adventures; not a single one on scriptural or theological subjects.