All these passed like clouds over the unquiet sea of her nature, reflecting the changing skies of circumstance, and were fitted to produce a fascination ever on the verge of repulsion even when it was strongest.

Ysolinde was the more ready of speech, but her words were touched constantly with dainty malice and clawed with subtlest spite.

She catspawed with men and things, often setting the hidden spur under the velvet foot deeply into the very cheek which she seemed to caress.

Such as I read them then, and largely as even now I understand them, were the two women who moulded between them my life's history.
I suppose it is because I am of this Baltic North that I must need think things round and round, and prose of reasons and explanations--even when I write concerning beautiful maids--forever dreaming and dividing, instead of going straight, sword in hand, for their hearts, as is the way of the folk from the English land over-seas, or, more simply still, lying about their favors, which, I hear, is mostly the Frenchman's way.
But enough of intolerable theory.
Instinctively the Lady Ysolinde spoke to our maid of the Red Tower in a manner and tone very different from that which I had ever before heard her employ, at once more equal and more guarded.
"I was told by Master Hugo Gottfried here (whose acquaintance I made at my father's house on the day after his foolish boy's prank of the White Swan) that in the Red Tower of the Wolfsberg dwelt one of mine own age, like myself a maid solitary among men.

So to-day I have come to solicit her acquaintance, and to ask her to be kind to me, who have ever been in this city and country as a stranger in a strange land." It was prettily enough said, and our Helene, easily touched, and perhaps a little ashamed of her first stiffness, put out a hand which the other quickly and securely clasped.