He had left his wife with fresh courage and full of good intentions.  Now that he was forced to bid her farewell, he first realised what she had been to him.  No doubt both had much to forgive, but she was a splendid woman.  Though her father’s storehouses contained chests of spices and bales of cloth, he did not know one more queenly.  That he could have preferred, even for a single moment, the Countess von Montfort, whose sole advantage over her was her nimble tongue and gay, bold manners, now seemed incomprehensible.  He had joined Cordula’s admirers only to forget at her feet the annoyances with which he had been wearied at home.  He had but one thing for which to thank the countess—­her remark concerning the future of the twins.

Yet was he really so base that it would have been a disgrace for his darlings to resemble him?  “No!” a voice within cried loudly, and as the same voice reminded him of the victories won in tournaments and sword combats, of the open hand with which, since he had been the rich Eysvogel’s son-in-law, he had lent and given money to his brothers, and especially of the manly resolve to provide for his wife and children as a soldier in the service of some prince, another, lower, yet insistent, recalled other things.  It referred to the time when, with his brothers, he had attacked a train of freight waggons and not cut down their armed escort alone.  The curse of a broad-shouldered Nordlinger carrier, whose breast he had pierced with a lance though he cried out that he was a father and had a wife and child to support, the shriek of the pretty boy with curling brown hair who clung to the bridle of his steed as he rode against the father, and whose arm he had cut off, still seemed to ring in his ears.  He also remembered the time when, after a rich capture on the highway which had filled his purse, he had ridden to Nuremberg in magnificent new clothes at the carnival season in order, by his brothers’ counsel, to win a wealthy bride.  Fortune and the saints had permitted him to find a woman to satisfy both his avarice and his heart, yet he had neither kept faith with her nor even showed her proper consideration.  But, strangely enough, the warning voice reproached him still more sharply for having, in the presence of others, accused and disparaged his brother-in-law’s betrothed bride, whose guilt he believed proved.  Again he felt how ignoble and unworthy of a knight his conduct had been.  Why had he pursued this course?  Merely—­he admitted it now—­to harm Wolff, the monitor and niggard whom he hated; perhaps also because he secretly told himself that, if Wolff formed a happy marriage, he and his children, not Siebenburg’s twin boys, would obtain the larger share of the Eysvogel property.

This greed of gain, which had brought him to Nuremberg to seek a wife, was probably latent in his blood, though his reckless accumulation of debts seemed to contradict it.  Yesterday, at the Duke of Pomerania’s, it had again led him into that wild, mad dice-throwing.