Kindly and anxiously then she inquired what had led him to that foreign land, and whether it might possibly be in her power to lessen that grief by which he now seemed oppressed. The youth wished to answer; but, with a mistrustful side-look at Nurreddin, he remained silent. “Speak freely,” said Bertha; “whatever a noble-minded minstrel can have to say may surely be uttered in the presence of this valiant hero.” Thereafter Aleard related, without hesitation, how he had come hither to rescue Blanchefleur; but that, after seeing the fate of her brother, Sir Folko, his wrath against the Count Vinciguerra and the merchant, Theobaldo, was so great, that he resolved no longer to hold any intercourse with them, and past the night, after the seeming death of the chevalier, in contriving how he might alone and by stratagem effect her deliverance. Not till next morning did he hear of the knight’s miraculous restoration, and the escape of both the ladies; “and now,” said he, “I am here disconsolate and alone, wandering amid people who move round me like apparitions in a mirror, or listening to sounds that find no echo in my heart. My harp indeed is left to me, and is my only companion. By that means, if I visit the houses of rich Moorish knights, I am able to live, without submitting to ignoble or wearisome toil, and by night, or early in the morning, can call back in sunny dreams the pleasures of the past. I had indeed resolved to wear away my life on this foreign shore; but when your beauty, which I had often beheld in the presence of Blanchefleur, again dawned on my sight, the ardent longing for home once more awoke painfully and anxiously in my heart. Therefore it is true, that I now wished to draw your attention to my sorrows; for I find that you are prepared for your voyage hence. If it were possible that I might go with you again into a Christian land, so the light of a new morning would gleam forth on the darkness of my fate; if this may not be, yet the sight of you now departing is at least like the last rays of the setting sun, and the night will all the sooner come to shed her veil over my sorrows.” “Nay, if it be the will of Heaven,” said Bertha, “I shall prove to you, like the early morning red, the harbinger of light and joy. This valiant champion will not, methinks, disapprove what I have proposed.” Hereupon the emir kindly took the minstrel’s hand, and said, “Whatsoever the Lady Bertha only wishes may be looked on as fulfilled, if it be in the power of Nurreddin to render her assistance. Moreover your art is dear to me for its own sake; for we Arabians are lovers of music and of song, and the fairy legends of olden time.” So discoursing pleasantly with each other, they all three came down upon the shore, now sweetly illuminated by the red morning gleams. There they embarked, and directly the mariners set sail, and the vessels moved proudly out of the harbour. CHAPTER VII.