“Equalled by few,” interrupted Wolff, with a sneer.  “The men know how to praise her for it.  No paternoster would be imposed upon her in the confessional on account of cruel harshness.”

“Nor for a sinful or a spiteful deed,” replied Els positively.  “Don’t say anything against her to me, Wolff, in spite of your dissolute brother-in-law.  I have enough to do to intercede for her with Eva and Aunt Kunigunde since she singed and oiled the locks of a Swiss knight belonging to the Emperor’s court.  Our Katterle brought the coals.  But many other girls do that, since courtesy permits it.  Her train to the Town Hall certainly made a very brave show; the fifty freight waggons you are expecting will scarcely form a longer line.”

The young merchant started.  The comparison roused his forgotten anxiety afresh, and after a few brief, tender words of farewell he left the object of his love.  Els gazed thoughtfully after him; the moonlight revealed his tall, powerful figure for a long time.  Her heart throbbed faster, and she felt more deeply than ever how warmly she loved him.  He moved as though some heavy burden of care bowed his strong shoulders.  She would fain have hastened after him, clung to him, and asked what troubled him, what he was concealing from her who was ready to share everything with him, but the Frauenthor, through which he entered the city, already hid him from her gaze.

She turned back into the room with a faint sigh.  It could scarcely be solely anxiety about his expected goods that burdened her lover’s mind.  True, his weak, arrogant mother, and still more his grandmother, the daughter of a count, who lived with them in the Eysvogel house and still ruled her daughter as if she were a child, had opposed her engagement to Wolff, but their resistance had ceased since the betrothal.  On the other hand, she had often heard that Fran Eysvogel, the haughty mother, dowerless herself, had many poor and extravagant relations besides her daughter and her debt-laden, pleasure-loving husband, Sir Seitz Siebenburg, who, it could not be denied, all drew heavily upon the coffers of the ancient mercantile house.  Yet it was one of the richest in Nuremberg.  Yes, something of which she was still ignorant must be oppressing Wolff, and, with the firm resolve to give him no peace until he confessed everything to her, she returned to the couch of her invalid mother.

CHAPTER II.

Wolff had scarcely vanished from the street, and Els from the window, when a man’s slender figure appeared, as if it had risen from the earth, beside the spurge-laurel tree at the left of the house.  Directly after some one rapped lightly on the pavement of the yard, and in a few minutes the heavy ironbound oak doors opened and a woman’s hand beckoned to the late guest, who glided swiftly along in the narrow line of shadow cast by the house and vanished through the entrance.