“I suppose,” said Rudolf, “George had made a real compact with Satan?”
“That I dare not just say; but certainly all was not right on his part. George must have known the dangerous ground he stood upon; he rushed into the snare with his eyes open.”
The forester and his auditors retired to rest, leaving William in a state of mental agitation, more easily imagined than described. In vain he too strove to compose himself to rest: sleep refused to visit his eyelids. But the old wooden-legged soldier, and George, and Katherine, and the duke’s commissioner, presented themselves in various groups to his heated imagination. At one time the unfortunate hunter of Prague seemed to hold up his bloody hand to him in a warning manner; the next moment the features of the wan spectre changed into the lovely, but mournful features of Katherine, who seemed to hang over her lover as if she sought to guard him from some impending evil, while near her stood the old tree-legged fiend, with an expression of hellish mockery in his face; again he seemed to stand before the commissioner, and to level his gun for the trial-shot,—the next moment he had missed, and Katherine had sunk to the ground in a faint, while her father renounced him for ever as his son-in-law, and the fiend again presented him with fresh balls, but not till his fate was decided.
So passed the night. At the earliest dawn he rose, and not without design, took his way towards that quarter of the forest where he had first met with the old soldier. The fresh sharp breeze of morning soon chased away the fever of the
