“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: 

“Drive the bewitching vision from your mind, Sir Heinz.  You don’t know—­but I could tell you some tales about women who walk in their sleep by moonlight.”

“Well?” asked Heinz eagerly.

“As a maiden,” Biberli continued impressively, with the pious intention of guarding his master from injury, “the somnambulist merely runs the risk of falling from the roof, or whatever accident may happen to a sleepwalker; but if she enters the estate of holy matrimony, the evil power which has dominion over her sooner or later transforms her at midnight into a troll, which seizes her husband’s throat in his sleep and strangles him.”

“Nursery tales!” cried Heinz angrily, but Biberli answered calmly: 

“It can make no difference to you what occurs in the case of such possessed women, for henceforward the Ortlieb house will be closed against you.  And—­begging your pardon—­it is fortunate.  For, my lord, the horse mounted by the first Schorlin—­the chaplain showed it to you in the picture—­came from the ark in which Noah saved it with the other animals from the deluge, and the first Lady Schorlin whom the family chronicles mention was a countess.  Your ancestresses came from citadels and castles; no Schorlin ever yet brought his bride from a tradesman’s house.  You, the proudest of them all, will scarcely think of making such an error, though it is true—­”