While Eva, leaning on the maid’s arm, mounted the stairs with trembling knees, Els turned to the Swiss and said in a grave, resolute tone:  “If you are worthy of your escutcheon, Sir Knight, you will not now fly like a coward from this house across whose threshold you stole with shameful insolence, but await me here until I return.  You shall not be detained long.  But, to guard yourself and another from misinterpretation, you must hear me.”

Heinz nodded assent in silence, as if still under the spell of what he had recently experienced.  But, ere he reached the entry below, Martsche, the old housekeeper, and Endres, the aged head packer, came towards him, just as they had risen from their beds, the former with a petticoat flung round her shoulders, the latter wrapped in a horse-blanket.

Eva’s shriek had waked both, but Els enjoined silence on everyone and, after telling them to go back to bed, said briefly that Eva in her somnambulism had this time gone out into the street and been brought back by the knight.  Finally, she again said to Heinz, “Presently!” and then went to her sister.

CHAPTER IX.

When Biberli bade farewell to his sweetheart, who gave him Eva’s little note, he had arranged to meet her again in an hour or, if his duties detained him longer, in two; but after the “true and steadfast” fellow left her, her heart throbbed more and more anxiously, for the wrong she had done in acting as messenger between the young daughter of her employers and a stranger knight was indeed hard to forgive.

Instead of waiting in the kitchen or entry for her lover’s return, as she had intended, she had gone to the image of the Virgin at the gate of the Convent of St. Clare, before which she had often found consolation, especially when homesick yearning for the mountains of her native Switzerland pressed upon her too sorely.  This time also it had been gracious to her, for after she had prayed very devoutly and vowed to give a candle to the Mother of God, as well as to St. Clare, she fancied that the image smiled upon her and promised that she should go unpunished.

On her return the knight had just followed Eva into the house, and Biberli pursued his master as far as the stairs.  Here Katterle met her lover, but, when she learned what was occurring, she became greatly enraged and incensed by the base interpretation which the servant placed upon Eva’s going out into the street and, terrified by the danger into which the knight threatened to plunge them all, she forgot the patience and submission she was accustomed to show the true and steadfast Biberli.  But—­resolved to protect her young mistress from the presumptuous knight-scarcely had she angrily cried shame upon her lover for this base suspicion, protesting that Eva had never gone to seek a knight but, as she had often done on bright moonlight nights, walked in her sleep down the stairs and out of doors, when the young girl’s shriek of terror summoned her to her aid.