Towards evening, when the elector’s party had forgotten the whole affair, their thoughts having been dissipated by the wine, and the pleasures of a luxurious supper, the seneschal proposed that they should once more start for a herd of deer which had made its appearance. The whole party seized on the proposal with delight, and armed with their rifles went in pairs over hedges and ditches into the adjoining forest, and the consequence was that the elector and the Lady Heloise, who hung on his arm to witness the spectacle, were to their surprise immediately conducted by a messenger, who had been appointed to attend them, through the court of the very house at which Kohlhaas and the Brandenburg troops were stopping. The lady, when she heard this, said: “Come, gracious sovereign, come!” adding, as she playfully concealed in his doublet the chain which hung from his neck, “let us slip into the farm, before our troop comes up, and see the strange man who is passing the night there.” The elector, changing colour, seized her hand and said: “Heloise, what notion has possessed you?” But when, perceiving his surprise, she answered that no one would recognise him in his hunting dress, and also, at the very same moment, two hunting attendants, who had already satisfied their curiosity, came out of the house and said, that in consequence of an arrangement of the seneschals, neither the knight nor the horse-dealer knew of whom consisted the party assembled near Dahme, the elector, smiling, pressed his hat over his eyes, and said: “Folly, thou rulest the world, and thy throne is the mouth of a pretty woman.” Kohlhaas was sitting on a heap of straw, with his back against the wall, feeding the child that had fallen sick at Herzberg, with rolls and milk, when his noble visitors entered the farm-house. The lady, to introduce the conversation, asked him who he was, what was the matter with the child, what crime he had committed, and whither they were conducting him under such an escort. He doffed his leather cap, and, without ceasing from his occupation, gave her a short, but satisfactory answer. The elector, who stood behind the huntsman, and observed a little leaden case that hung from Michael’s neck by a silken thread, asked him, as there was nothing better to talk about, what this meant, and what was kept in it.