The priestess looked upon me for a while with darkling eyes. She seemed to yield alternately to mistrust and to the promptings of cupidity. Finally, however, the latter sentiment evidently prevailed. She took a few steps away, and with a strong voice pronounced the bizarre name of a person who was not until then upon the scene. Almost instantly a hideous old hag with grey hair and clad in a blood-bespattered robe issued from the cavern. She was, no doubt, the active priestess at the inhuman sacrifices. She exchanged a few words in a low voice with Elwig and forthwith vanished in the surrounding wood, in the direction that the black warriors had followed. Again dropping on her haunches beside me, the priestess said in a low and muffled voice: "Since you wish to speak with my brother, King Neroweg, I have sent for him.--He will soon be here--but you shall not mention a word to him concerning the jewels." "Why keep him in the dark concerning them?" "Because he would keep them to himself." "What!--He!--Your own brother!--Would he not share the jewels with you, his sister?" A bitter smile contracted Elwig's lips. She resumed: "My brother came near cutting off my arm with a blow of his axe a few weeks ago, simply because I merely wished to touch part of his booty." "Is that the way brothers and sisters behave towards one another among the Franks?" "Among the Franks," Elwig answered with a face of deepening rancor, "the mother, sister and wives of a warrior are his first slaves." "His wives!--Has he, then, several?" "As many as he can capture and feed--the same as he has as many horses as he can buy." "What! Does not a sacred and eternal union join the husband to the mother of his children, as with us Gauls?--What! Sisters, wives and mothers--all are slaves? Blessed of the gods is Gaul, my own country, where our mothers and wives, venerated by all, proudly take their seat in the nation's councils and where their advice, often wiser than that of their husbands and sons, not infrequently prevails." Palpitating with cupidity, Elwig made no answer to me, and resumed the thread of her dominant thoughts. "You will, accordingly, not mention the jewels to Neroweg. He would keep them all for himself. You will wait until it is dark to leave the camp. I shall accompany you. You will give me the jewels, all the presents--to me alone!" And again bursting into almost insane peals of laughter, she added: "Gold bracelets! Necklaces of pearls! Ear pendants studded with rubies! Diadems full of precious stones! I shall look grand as an empress! Oh, how beautiful I shall be in the eye of Riowag!" Elwig thereupon cast disdainful glances at the copper bracelets that she rattled as she shook her arms, and repeated: "I shall look very beautiful to Riowag!" "Woman," I said to her, "your advice is prudent. We shall have to wait until it is night for us to leave the camp together and regain the river bank."