silenced them by displaying his short musket. A few moments later they were surrounded by a force of one hundred men on horseback, who formed an escort. They were a loan to Lord Eric by Duke Charles. The excitement at Hœrningsholm was great when the elopement was discovered. Margaret Sture happened to look through the window at the moment when the sleigh reached the lake. At her outcry Countess Martha and Sigrid joined her. The old countess fainted on the stairs when making for the court, and Sigrid was ordered to follow up the eloping couple. Countess Cecilia found her aunt on the stairs and hastened to assure her of the mortification that she felt at the daring and unsuspected deed of her brother, also expressing some surprise at the bad manner in which it was accepted. But then the old countess became wroth, exclaiming: “Go to the devil, and may God punish both you and your brother! And if you have any part in his scheme of robbing me of my dear child, betake yourself after him, so that no shame or dishonor may happen.” Countess Cecilia hastened to her sleigh and reached Sværdsbro, where her brother was stopping, ahead of Sigrid. When Lady Sigrid arrived at Sværdsbro, she was admitted through the lines of soldiers only after some difficulty, finding tailors and seamsters busy cutting and sewing precious stuffs for clothing for Lady Magdalen and her servants, “for she left with uncovered head such as she went and stood in her mother’s house.” Sigrid tried to persuade her sister to return to her mother, who in her great sorrow was willing to forgive all if she only came back. Magdalen sat silent for a long time. Finally she said: “If you can vouchsafe me, that the lady, my mother, will grant that we shall belong to each other, since I have so dearly pledged myself to him, I shall return.” This Sigrid could not do, and Magdalen added, weeping sorely: “The last complication is then as bad as the first.” Lord Eric entered with his sister Cecilia. When Sigrid asked where he intended to bring Magdalen, he answered: “To Visingsœ, to the Countess Beatrix, my sister, where she shall remain until we obtain the consent to marry of the lady, her mother.” It was arranged that Cecilia should accompany Magdalen, and Sigrid try her best to win her mother’s consent. Magdalen sent home to her mother a piece of horn of the fabulous unicorn; “the only thing I have carried with me from my father’s house,” she added. This horn, which really was taken from the incisor of the narwhal, was in those days generally thought to be authentic and of miraculous power.