It was on a glorious autumn afternoon, when all the air was fragrant with the odor of pine trees steeping in the warm sunlight, and dim with the hazes which were smoke-like without being smoke, that the folk of Castle Rittenberg set forth to hunt the stag.

While the hounds were baying in the courtyard eager to be off, and the sound of trampling horse's hoof and jingling bridle-rein, with cry of groom and laugh of page, came through the open window, Erna and Count Stephen stood in the hall waiting for Albrecht. At a little distance stood Fastrade and Elsa, both of whom were to ride with Erna to follow the hunt; and Elsa said to her companion, pointing to the boar-spear which still stuck in the head of the deer that hung above the chimney-place:

"If the baron can but make such another shot as that he made when he thrust that spear into the bone from the other end of the hall, may I be there to see!"

The eyes of both Erna and of Count Stephen turned to the spear, as the damsel spoke; and most vividly before the mind of the countess came up the picture of Albrecht as he had flung it on his wedding eve, full of buoyant life and of joyful love.

"I have noticed that spear before," Count Stephen said, turning toward his cousin. "How came it there? Did the baron in sooth throw it across the hall?"

"Yea," she answered; and then she was silent because there came over her a feeling that she had been untrue to her husband by the leaning toward her companion of which she had been half conscious in her secret heart.

"It was indeed a shrewd shot," observed Count Stephen, looking upward to the spear, which was high above their heads.

Erna did not reply. Suddenly there came into her mind, with the picture of that evening when the spear was thrown, the remembrance of the ring which had been given her by Herr von Zimmern and taken from her by Albrecht. She tried to recall exactly what had been said, but she had forgotten her husband's words, only half heard when they were spoken. She wondered why the ring had never been restored to her, and dimly she recalled to mind the fact that it had been engraved with symbols which had looked to her in the brief moment she had seen the jewel, strange and mysterious.

"Albrecht," she said to him when they had mounted and were riding out of the courtyard into the way which led down the hill, "dost thou not remember the ring that Herr von Zimmern would have given me on the eve of our wedding day?"

A faint shadow crossed his face. He did not look toward her, but pretended to busy himself with the bridle of his horse.

"Yes," he said, "I remember it. It was overbold of him."

"I see not that; but that is no matter now. What I was wondering was that thou didst never give me the jewel."

"Hast thou not rings enough?" he asked lightly, although Erna could see that her words troubled him. "I will give thee more jewels if so be that there were not enough in the caskets."

"But why not that ring?" Erna persisted, urged on by a secret conviction that here was some mystery. "I seem to remember that Herr von Zimmern said something about wonderful powers in that ring which other jewels have not. I would have the chance to test the matter for myself."

"The ring," Albrecht answered with a seriousness which impressed her, and which yet rendered her only the more anxious to possess the jewel, "had indeed strange powers, but they were unhallowed ones. It were not fitting that a Christian avail himself of the spells which have been wrought by sinful sorceresses."

"Thou art truly become virtuous," Erna retorted with a tone in which she had never before spoken to her husband. "Good sooth, when thou camest to Rittenberg I heard nothing of scruples so nice!"

Albrecht turned and regarded her with a glance so reproachful and so full of pain that she could not bear it. She struck her palfrey sharply with her whip, and dashed recklessly down the hill, crying out to Count Stephen, who had been in advance a little until she thus ran by him, to race with her. Tears of vexation were in her eyes as she dashed down the woodland path, and the sting of her own words wounded her to the quick. She became recklessly gay, and all through the afternoon when she was not separated from her cousin by the chances of the chase she jested and laughed with demonstrative merriment.

Through the thickets where the leaves had begun to fall, under pine boughs which had strewn the ground thick with brown spicy needles year after year until the horses' feet bounded upon an elastic cushion, past rocks violet in the sun and rose-hued in the half shadows, over meadows set with jewel-tinted autumn flowers, sped the hunt, the mellow baying of the deep-mouthed hounds ringing out upon the air, and the horn from time to time waking all the echoes into inspiring music. Erna kept well to the front. She had never ridden so recklessly, and never before had the passion of the sport so fired her blood. She was, moreover, trying to escape from the smart of the taunt which she had flung at her husband, and her palfrey flew so fast that sometimes she even led the way for the huntsmen to follow.

Cou............