“The strongest,” answered Wolff.  “The first wain could not arrive before to-morrow morning.”

“You see!” cried the girl gaily.  “Just wait patiently.  When you are once mine I’ll teach you not to look on the dark side.  O Wolff, why is everything made so much harder for us than for others?  Now this evening, it would have been so pleasant to go to the ball with you.”

“Yet, how often, dearest, I have urged you in vain——­” he began, but she hastily interrupted “Yes, it was certainly no fault of yours, but one of us must remain with my mother, and Eva——­”

“Yesterday she complained to me with tears in her eyes that she would be forced to go to this dance, which she detested.”

“That is the very reason she ought to go,” explained Els.  “She is eighteen years old, and has never yet been induced to enter into any of the pleasures other girls enjoy.  When she isn’t in the convent she is always at home, or with Aunt Kunigunde or one of the nuns in the woods and fields.  If she wants to take the veil later, who can prevent it, but the abbess herself advises that she should have at least a glimpse of the world before leaving it.  Few need it more, it seems to me, than our Eva.”

“Certainly,” Wolff assented.  “Such a lovely creature!  I know no girl more beautiful in all Nuremberg.”

“Oh! you——­,” said his betrothed bride, shaking her finger at her lover, but he answered promptly,

“You just told me that you preferred ‘good’ to ‘better,’ and so doubtless ‘fair’ to ‘fairer,’ and you are beautiful, Els, in person and in soul.  As for Eva, I admire, in pictures of madonnas and angels, those wonderful saintly eyes with their uplifted gaze and marvellously long lashes, the slight droop of the little head, and all the other charms; yet I gladly dispense with them in my heart’s darling and future wife.  But you, Els—­ if our Lord would permit me to fashion out of divine clay a life companion after my own heart, do you know how she would look?”

“Like me—­exactly like Els Ortlieb, of course,” replied the girl laughing.

“A correct guess, with all due modesty,” Wolff answered gaily.  “But take care that she does not surpass your wishes.  For you know, if the little saint should meet at the dance some handsome fellow whom she likes better than the garb of a nun, and becomes a good Nuremberg wife, the excess of angelic virtue will vanish; and if I had a brother—­in serious earnest—­ I would send him to your Eva.”

“And,” cried Els, “however quickly her mood changes, it will surely do her no harm.  But as yet she cares nothing about you men.  I know her, and the tears she shed when our father gave her the costly Milan suckenie, in which she went to the ball, were anything but tears of joy.”

     [Suckenie—­A long garment, fitting the upper part of the body
     closely and widening very much below the waist, with openings for
     the arms.]