She had listened with labouring breath to the speaker’s last words, and when Els embraced Cordula, she raised her little clenched hand, exclaiming with passionate emotion:  “Oh, if I had only been at home with you!  You are brave, Countess, but I, too, would not have shrunk from them.  I would voluntarily have made myself the target for their malice, and called to their faces that only miserably deluded people or shameless rascals could throw stones at my Els, who is a thousand times better than any of them!”

“Or at you, you dear, brave child,” added Cordula in an agitated tone.

From the day following the burning of the convent the countess had given up her whim of winning Heinz Schorlin.  She now knew that all her nobler feelings spoke more loudly in favour of the quiet man who had borne her out of the flames.  Sir Boemund Altrosen’s love had proved genuine, and she would reward him for it; but the heart of the pretty creature opposite to her was also filled with deep, true love, and she would do everything in her power for Eva, whom she had loved ever since her affliction had touched her tender heart.

Both sisters were now aware of Cordula’s kind intentions, and the warm pleasure she displayed when Els told her what the Council had determined, showed plainly enough that the motherless young countess, who had neither brother nor sister, clung to the daughters of her host like a third sister.  Old Herr Vorchtel’s treatment of the man who had inflicted so deep a sorrow upon him touched her inmost soul.  It was grand, noble; the Saviour himself would have rejoiced over it.  “If it would only please the good old man,” she exclaimed, “I would rather offer him my lips to kiss than the handsomest young knight.”

Though two of Count von Montfort’s mounted huntsmen and several constables accompanied the unusually large and handsome sedan-chair, a curious crowd had followed it; but the opinion probably prevailed that the countess’s companions were some of her waiting-women.  When they alighted in front of the watch-tower, however, an elderly laundry-maid who had worked for the Ortliebs recognised the sisters and pointed them out to the others, protesting that it was hard for a woman of her chaste spirit to have served in a house where such things could have happened.  Then a tailor’s apprentice, who considered the whole of the guild insulted in the wounded Meister Seubolt, put his fingers to his wide mouth and emitted a long, shrill whistle; but the next instant a blow from a powerful fist silenced him.  It was young Ortel, who had come to the watch-tower to seek Herr Ernst and tell him that he and his sister Metz, spite of their mother and guardian, meant to stay in his service.  His heart’s blood would not have been too dear to guard Eva, whom he instantly recognised, from every insult; but he had no occasion to use his youthful strength a second time, for the soldiers who guarded the tower and the city mercenaries drove back the crowd and kept the square in front of the tower open.