“Bah!” I cried, and spat vehemently. “A few more months in this place and I shall be bewitched and befooled every hour. Well--at Rome they are wise to depend on ‘The Sins of the Germans’ to fill the Pope’s coffers. What a fearful and wonderful thing is this fear of hell fire!” CHAPTER VIII I HEAR JOHN TETZEL Moritz sent all possible apologies in behalf of his father. “An affair of the cups” explained everything to my castle-folk. The clouds so suddenly gathered as suddenly blew over. I visited no more at Schloss Blankenburg, but almost daily Moritz met me at a great oak betwixt our respective fortress mansions, and forth we rode on the hunt. The Graf wisely kept to himself. The abbess had returned to Quedlinburg. Lady Ilsa was with us often. A chameleon was she,--now the dignified, courtly dame who honored me merely by suffering me to ride decorously at her saddle-bow, now the merry-eyed girl who gave me the same familiar chatter she granted her brother, now the sedate and pious woman who told long stories of the blessed saints and the evil witches, pressed me as to the nature of “succubi and incubi,” and asked with perfect seriousness “whether she did not have an entire vocation for the convent?” At Rome I had conceitedly thought that I comprehended womankind; but I did not then know Ilsa. Life at the Regenstein was become, by this time, tolerable. Ever the northern beauty of the Harzland grew on me; the sniff of the pines, the long silences of the hills. I began to find the honest friendliness of my uncouth retainers more agreeable than the elaborate service of lips and gesture which Andrea bestowed. I even began to find a music in the German speech. The stubble on my chin was grown to a decent length. I wore clothes after the somewhat loud and full-cut fashion of the country. “Your noble Grace is become a right Harzlander like his sires,” said Adolf, one day, approvingly. Nevertheless, when summer passed into autumn, and I saw the rains destroying the glory of the greenwood, I concurred with Moritz when he suggested that I ride with him to Wittenberg. Ilsa had been asked thither for the winter to the home of her maternal aunt, the Freifau von Steinitz; and as for me, I would find congenial and advantageous company at the local court of the Elector of Saxony, the far renowned Frederick the Wise.