If Hartmann, the Emperor’s son, were only there!  He confided everything to him, for he was sure of his silence.  Both his duty as a knight and his conscience forbade him to relate his experiences and ask counsel from any one else.

He was still absorbed in these gloomy thoughts when, just before reaching the Walch, he heard Biberli’s deep sigh.  Here, behind and beside the frames of the cloth weavers, stood the tents before which the followers and soldiers of the princes and dignitaries who had come to the Reichstag were still sitting around the camp fire, carousing and laughing.

Any interruption was welcome to him, and to Biberli it seemed like a deliverance to be permitted to use his poor endangered tongue, for his master had asked what grief oppressed him.

“If you desired to know what trouble did not burden my soul I could find a speedier answer,” replied Biberli piteously.  “Oh, this night, my lord!  What has it not brought upon us and others!  Look at the black clouds rising in the south.  They are like the dark days impending over us poor mortals.”

Then he confided to Heinz his fears for himself and Katterle.  The knight’s assurance that he would intercede for him and, if necessary, even appeal to the Emperor’s favour, somewhat cheered his servitor’s drooping spirits, it is true, but by no means restored his composure, and his tone was lugubrious enough as he went on: 

“And the poor innocent girl in the Ortlieb house!  Your little lady, my lord, broke the bread she must now eat herself, but the other, the older E.”

“I know,” interrupted the knight sorrowfully.  “But if the gracious Virgin aids us, they will continue to believe in the wager Cordula von Montfort——­”

“She! she!” Biberli exclaimed, enthusiastically waving his stick aloft.  “The Lord created her in a good hour.  Such a heart!  Such friendly kindness!  And to think that she interposed so graciously for you—­you, Sir Heinz, to whom she showed the favour of combing your locks, as if you were already her promised husband, and who afterwards, for another’s sake, left her at the ball as if she wore a fern cap and had become invisible.  I saw the whole from the musician’s gallery.  True, the somnambulist is marvellously beautiful.”

But the knight interrupted him by exclaiming so vehemently:  “Silence!” that he paused.

Both walked on without speaking for some distance ere Heinz began again: 

“Even though I live to grow old and grey, never shall I behold aught more beautiful than the vision of that white-robed girlish figure on the stairs.”

True and steadfast Biberli sighed faintly.  Love for Eva Ortlieb held his master as if in a vise; but a Schorlin seemed to him far too good a match for a Nuremberg maiden who had grown up among sacks of pepper and chests of goods and, moreover, was a somnambulist.  He looked higher for his Heinz, and had already found the right match for him.  So, turning to him again, he said earnestly: