her lover.  When she learned all that had befallen the knight, she would understand that he was no longer himself.  Els, however, had no time to listen, and promised to hear his story when he returned; but he was too full of the recent experience to leave it untold, and briefly related how wonderfully Heaven had preserved his master’s life.  Then he also told her hurriedly that the trouble which had come upon her through Sir Heinz’s fault burdened his soul.  Therefore he would not let the night pass without at least showing her betrothed husband how he should regard the gossip of idle tongues if it penetrated to his hiding-place.

Els uttered a sigh of relief.  Surely Wolff must trust her!  Yet what viciously coloured reports might reach him from the Eysvogels!  Now that he would learn the actual truth from the most credible eye-witnesses she no longer dreaded even the worst calumny.

No one appeared at supper except her father.  Eva had begged to be excused.  She wished to remain undisturbed; but the world, with rude yet beneficent hand, interrupted even her surrender to her grief for her mother.

The tailor, who protested that, owing to the mourning for young Prince Hartmann, he had fairly “stolen” this hour for the beautiful Ortlieb sisters, came with his assistant, and at the same time a messenger arrived from the cloth-house in the market-place bringing the packages of white stuffs for selection.  Then it was necessary to decide upon the pattern and material; the sisters must appear in mourning the next morning at the consecration, and later at the mass for the dead.

Eva had turned to these worldly matters with sincere repugnance, but Els would not release her from giving them due attention.

It was well for her tortured soul and the poor eyes reddened by weeping.  But when she again knelt in the chamber of death beside her dear nuns and saw the grey robe, which they all wore, the wish to don one, which she had so often cherished, again awoke.  No other was more pleasing to her Heavenly Bridegroom, and she forbade herself in this hour to think of the only person for whose sake she would gladly have adorned herself.  Yet the struggle to forget him constantly recalled him to her mind, no matter how earnestly she strove to shut out his image whenever it appeared.  But, after her last conversation, must not her mother have died in the belief that she would not give up her love?  And the dead woman’s last words?  Yet, no matter what they meant, here and now nothing should come between her and the beloved departed.  She devoted herself heart and soul to the memory of the longing for her.

Grief for her loss, repentance for not having devoted herself faithfully enough to her, and the hope that in the convent her prayers might obtain a special place in the world beyond for the beloved sleeper, now revived her wish to take the veil.  She felt bound to the nuns, who shared her aspirations.  When her father came to send her to her rest and asked whether, as a motherless child, she intended to trust his love and care or to choose another mother who was not of this world, she answered quietly with a loving glance at the picture of St. Clare, “As you wish, and she commands.”