I may be killed at the first assault of my virgin campaign." Master Gerard looked up quickly.

He beckoned to his daughter.

For though by no faintest gesture had he betrayed his knowledge of her presence, he had yet clearly known it all the time.
"Ysolinde," he said, "bring hither thy crystal!" The maid disappeared and presently returned with a ball in her hand of some substance which looked like misty glass.
"I have been looking in it already," she said, "ever since Hugo Gottfried came out of the Red Tower." Her voice was soft and even, with the same sough in it as of the wind among poplar-trees which I had heard in the rustle of her silken dress as she came up the stair.
"And what," asked her father, "have you seen in the crystal, child of my heart ?" He looked up at me with some little shamefacedness, or so I imagined.
"I am a dry old man of the law," he went on, "dusty of heart as these black books up yonder--books not of magic but of fact, of crime and pain and penalty.

But this my daughter Ysolinde, wise from a child, solaces herself with the white, innocent magic, such as helps man and brings him nearer that which is unseen." The maid knelt by her father's knee, and held the crystal ball in the hollow of her hands against the sable of his velvet robe.

She passed one hand swiftly twice or thrice over her brow, as though to clear away some cobwebs, gossamer thin, that had folded themselves across her vision.
Then, in the same wistful, wind-soft voice, she began to speak.