As for Wulf, he gave the meeting scant thought as he went on his way. The weightier matters that pressed upon his brain kept mind and heart engaged while he journeyed; but his duty seemed no clearer to him when he had reached the castle than it had done at the forge with Karl. CHAPTER IX OF THE ILL NEWS THAT THE BARON BROKE TO HIS MAIDEN WARD, AND OF HOW SHE TOOK THAT SAME Baron Everhardt sat beside a table in the great hall of the castle, scowling blackly at a pile of weighty-seeming papers that lay before him. The baron could himself neither read nor write, but Father Franz, his confessor and penman, had been with him all forenoon, and together they had gone over the parchments, one by one, and the warrior noble had, to all seeming, found enough to keep his mind busy with them since; for he still sat as Father Franz had left him, fingering the huge sheets and staring at the big black-letter text that told him naught. The parchments were none other than the deeds in the matters of the estate of the baron’s ward, Fräulein Elise von Hofenhoer, regarding which estate the emperor had sent word that he should demand accounting after he had wrought order at the Swartzburg. The baron’s face was not good to see when he recalled the words of the emperor’s message. “By the rood!” he muttered, bringing a clenched fist down on the table. “The poor Swiss count were wiser to busy himself with setting his own soul in order against coming to the Swartzburg.” He sprang from his chair and paced the floor wrathfully, when there entered to him his ward, whom he had sent to summon. A stately slip of maidenhood was Elise: tall and fair, with fearless eyes of dark blue. She seemed older than her few years, and as she stood within the hall even the dark visage of the baron lightened at sight of her, and the growl of his deep voice softened in answering her greeting. “Sit ye down yonder,” he said, nodding toward a great Flemish chair of oak over beyond the table. Obediently Elise sank into its carven depths; but the baron paced the floor yet a while longer, while she waited for him to speak. At last he came back to the table, and seated himself before it. “There be many gruesome things in these hard days, Fräulein,” he said, “and things that may easily work ill for a maid.” A startled look came into Elise’s eyes, but naught said she, though the dread in her heart warned her what the baron’s words might portend. “Thou knowest,” her guardian went on, “that thy father left thee in my care. Our good Hofenhoer! May he be at greater peace than we are like to know for many a long year!”