"I must confess, sir king," observed Drost Peter, "that this business of the robbers was of more importance than I believed; but they have now ended their lives and crimes together. If on that occasion I erred, and for a moment forgot the respect I owed my royal guest, let not this day's sun go down upon your wrath, my king. If I have lost your royal grace in consequence, suffer me at least--" "Enough of this!" interrupted the king, coldly. "I have come here to amuse myself, and not to sit in judgment every day. I am master of my own thoughts, and you shall know my determination at the proper time. Let the huntsmen strike up." Rané hastily gave a signal to the royal horn-blowers, who stood on a rising ground, at a little distance, and who immediately commenced a bold hunting-air, called King Waldemar Seier's Hunt, and to which the king was extremely partial. A painful silence followed the king's ungracious remarks to Drost Peter. Rané smiled maliciously as he filled his master's goblet, and endeavoured, by some buffooneries, to restore mirthfulness; but the king left the wine untouched, and fell into deep thought. The rapid exercise and the consciousness of his skill in the chase, as well as his anger against Drost Peter, appeared to have banished from his countenance the undecided and contradictory shades of passion which so often disfigured it; and for an instant there beamed from it an expression of true kingly dignity and greatness, while, with his hand on his ponderous sword, he regarded his three chief counsellors with the air of one who could free himself from them at any moment he chose. The only one in which he reposed any kind of confidence was Rané; but him, in his better moments, he despised, as the wretched instrument of his vilest pleasures. The power which old Sir John exercised over him, with so much prudence and consideration, seemed to him just now a crafty invasion of the royal prerogative; and Drost Peter's bold superiority he regarded as an intolerable assumption. It appeared as if the quick, heart-stirring tones of Waldemar Seier's Hunt, which he had known from his childhood, recalled the daring dreams of his youth, with the memory of the time when, by his noble mother's side, he was saluted with the name of king, and felt the blood of the Waldemars in a bold and unsullied heart. But this proud expression quickly vanished as his whole misspent life of royalty passed before him, and the painful conviction seized him that he now sat, alone and hated, in the midst of his kingdom, without a single friend. His melancholy and despondency seemed on the point of overwhelming him; but he struggled against the humiliating feeling, and a wild defiance and sternness flashed from his eyes.