Again most cordially shaking Alf's hand, he passed into the tent. Shortly afterward the youth and his girl-boy were bid to enter. Lord Oberstein was sitting with the doctor at the field table, taking his morning draught. 'Come nearer!' commanded the general, sternly. 'What have you to disclose to me?' The voice of the questioner satisfied Alf, that it was the commander in chief whom he had caught and released on a former night; he however concealed this recognition. 'To make an end of the calamities of the city,' answered he, 'I am prepared to show your soldiers a way to enter Munster--the same way by which I have myself quitted it.' 'I recognise that voice!' cried Oberstein, springing up, and stepping directly in front of the youth. 'We have met before,' said he; 'it surely was in the outworks before the new gate, by moonlight. You were the officer who took me prisoner and then let me run? Is it not so?' 'I was very glad,' answered Alf, 'that it was in my power to save so old and merry a warrior.' 'And now are you willing to deliver the city to me?' proceeded Oberstein; 'to make a short ending to her long sufferings? You make me doubly your debtor; your reward shall be great.' 'Of myself little need be said,' answered Alf. 'My conditions are only pardon for myself and my companion, and that the conqueror of the city shall distinguish between the miscreants who have wilfully erred, and those who with honest intentions have been led astray, and spare the latter.' 'We must act according to the instructions of the diet of Worms,' said Oberstein. 'Whoever has not belonged to the leaders, and come not against us in arms, to them is given life and freedom.' 'Then should the lord bishop,' boldly replied Alf, 'have extended mercy to the unhappy refugees who have lately been fleeing from the city.' 'The bishop was exceedingly exasperated by events which accompanied the revolution!' answered the general, shrugging his shoulders; 'and an angry man does not always what is right in the sight of God.' His eyes now fell upon Clara, who had timidly placed herself in an angle of the tent near the door. 'Who is that pretty boy?' asked he. 'Some one of the bishop's pages? It is to be hoped so. Two pages were made prisoners by the anabaptists and carried off at the time they attacked our camp at the beginning of the siege. To one of them particularly the worthy bishop was attached by a truly paternal affection.' 'Those boys have also fallen a sacrifice to the barbarity of the king,' answered Alf. 'This maiden is the sister of the queen Eliza, who paid with her head for having lamented the murder of the innocents.' 'Great God, what an accumulation of crime!' cried Oberstein, while Fabricius with upraised finger reprovingly asked, 'have you brought with you a maiden in man's attire? Must there not yet remain something of the old anabaptist leaven in you, which may in time again leaven the whole lump, destroying your morals for time and eternity?'