"It is a fine thing to believe in love." And in ten minutes I was riding towards the Wolfsberg.
As I went past the great four-square gibbet which had made an end of Ritterdom in Plassenburg, I noted that there was a gathering of the hooded folk--the carrion crows.

And lo! there before me, already comfortably a-swing, were our late foes, the two bravoes, and in the middle the dead Cannstadt tucked up beside them, for all his five hundred years of ancestry--stamped traitor and coward by the Miller's Son, who minded none of these things, but understood a true man when he met him.
I pounded along my way, and for the first ten miles did well, but there my horse stumbled and broke a leg in a wretched mole-run widened by the winter rains.

In mercy I had to kill the poor beast, and there I was left without other means of conveyance than my own feet.
It was a long night as I pushed onward through the mire.

For presently it had come on to rain--a thick, dank rain, which wetted through all covering, yet fell soft as caressing on the skin.
I took shelter at last in a farm-house with honest folk, who right willingly sat up all night about the fire, snoring on chairs and hard settles that I might have their single sleeping-chamber, where, under strings of onions and odorous dried herbs, I rested well enough.

For I was dead tired with the excitement and anxiety of the day--and at such times one often sleeps best.
On the morrow I got another horse, but the brute, heavy-footed from the plough, was so slow that, save for the look of the thing, I might just as well have been afoot.
Nevertheless I pushed towards the town of Thorn, hearing and seeing naught of my dear Playmate, though, as you may well imagine, I asked at every wayside place.
It was at the entering in of the strange country of the brick-dust that I met Jorian and Boris.