Then, lowering her voice, she continued with loving entreaty:  “My dear, dear father, can you doubt that she was asleep, unconscious of her acts, when she did what has brought so much misery upon us?”

And, interrupting herself, she added eagerly in a tone of the firmest conviction:  “No, no, neither shame nor misery has yet touched you, my father, nor the poor child yonder.  The suspicion of evil rests on me, and me alone, and if any one here must be wretched it is I.”

Then Herr Ernst, regaining his self-control, drew back from Eva, but the latter, as if fairly frantic, exclaimed:  “Do you want to drive me out of my senses by your mysterious words and accusations?  What, in the name of all the saints, has happened that can plunge my Els into misery and shame?”

“Into misery and shame,” repeated her father in a hollow tone, throwing himself into a chair, where he sat motionless, with his face buried in his hands, while Els told her sister what had occurred when she went down into the entry to speak to the knight.

Eva listened to her story, fairly gasping for breath.  For one brief moment she cherished the suspicion that Cordula had not acted from pure sympathy, but to impose upon Heinz Schorlin a debt of gratitude which would bind him to her more firmly.  Yet when she heard that her father had given back his daughter’s ring to Herr Casper Eysvogel and broken his child’s betrothal she thought of nothing save her sister’s grief and, sobbing aloud, threw herself into Els’s arms.

The girls held each other in a close embrace until the first flash of lightning and peal of thunder interrupted the conversation.

The father and daughters had been so deeply agitated that they had not heard the storm rising outside, and the outbreak of the tempest surprised them.  The peal of thunder, which so swiftly followed the lightning, also startled them and when, soon after, a second one shook the house with its crashing, rattling roar, Herr Ernst went out to wake the chief packer.  But old Endres was already keeping watch among the wares entrusted to him and when, after a brief absence, the master of the house returned, he found Eva again clasped in her sister’s arms, and saw the latter kissing her brow and eyes as she tenderly strove to comfort her.

But Eva seemed deaf to her soothing words.  Els, her faithful Els, was no longer the betrothed bride of her Wolff; her great, beautiful happiness was destroyed forever.  On the morrow all Nuremberg would learn that Herr Casper had broken his son’s betrothal pledge, because his bride, for the sake of a tempter, Sir Heinz Schorlin, had failed to keep her troth with him.

How deeply all this pierced Eva’s heart! how terrible was the torture of the thought that she was the cause of this frightful misfortune!  Dissolved in an agony of tears, she entreated the poor girl to forgive her; and Els did so willingly, and in a way that touched her father to the very depths of his heart.  How good the girls must be who, spite of the sore suffering which one had brought upon the other, were still so loving and loyal!