CHAPTER VIII: PASSING THE OUBLIETTE 



Who can describe the dreariness of being snowed-up all the winter with such a mother-in-law as Freiherrinn Kunigunde? 

Yet it was well that the snow came early, for it was the best defence of the lonely castle from any attack on the part of the Schlangenwaldern, the Swabian League, or the next heir, Freiherr Kasimir von Adlerstein Wildschloss. The elder Baroness had, at least, the merit of a stout heart, and, even with her sadly-reduced garrison, feared none of them. She had been brought up in the faith that Adlerstein was impregnable, and so she still believed; and, if the disaster that had cut off her husband and son was to happen at all, she was glad that it had befallen before the homage had been paid. Probably the Schlangenwald Count knew how tough a morsel the castle was like to prove, and Wildschloss was serving at a distance, for nothing was heard of either during the short interval while the roads were still open. During this time an attempt had been made through Father Norbert to ascertain what had become of the corpses of the two Barons and their followers, and it had appeared that the Count had carried them all off from the inn, no doubt to adorn his castle with their limbs, or to present them to the Emperor in evidence of his zeal for order. The old Baron could not indeed have been buried in consecrated ground, nor have masses said for him; but for the weal of her son's soul Dame Kunigunde gave some of her few ornaments, and Christina added her gold earrings, and all her scanty purse, that both her husband and father might be joined in the prayers of the Church--trying with all her might to put confidence in Hugh Sorel's Loretto relic, and the Indulgence he had bought, and trusting with more consolatory thoughts to the ever stronger dawnings of good she had watched in her own Eberhard. 
And another?
Schlangenwaldern