Howbeit, if we had cherished the smallest hope without, within it failed us wholly.  As we went in my uncle was standing close by my aunt; his back was towards us, and he saw us not; but his mien alone showed us that he was wroth and provoked:  his voice quaked as he cried aloud with a shrug of his shoulders and his hand uplifted:  “Such a purpose is sheer madness and most unseemly!”

Then, when for the third time I coughed to make our presence known to him, he turned his red face towards us, and cried out in great fury:  “Here you are to answer for yourselves; and come what may, this at least shall be said:  ‘If mischief comes of it, I wash my hands in innocence!’”

Whereupon he went in all haste to the door and had lifted his hand to slam it to, when he minded him of his beloved wife’s sick health and gently shut it and softly dropped the latch.

We stood in front of Aunt Jacoba, and could scarce believe our eyes and ears when she opened wide her arms and, with beaming eyes, cried in a voice of glad content:  “Come, come to my heart, children!  Oh, you good, dear, brave maids!  Why, why am I so old, so fettered, so sick a creature?  Why may I not go with you?”

At her first words we had fallen on our knees by her side, and she fervently clasped our heads to her bosom, kissed our lips and foreheads, and cried, with ever-streaming eyes:  “Yes, children, yes!  It is brave, and the right way; Courage and true love are not dead in the hearts of the women of Nuremberg.  Ah, and how many a time have I imagined that I might myself rise and fly after my froward, dear, unduteous exile, my own Gotz, be he where he may, over mountains and seas to the ends of the earth!—­I, a hapless, suffering skeleton!  Yet what is denied to the old, the young may do, and the Virgin and all the Saints shall guard you!  And Kubbeling, Young-Kubbeling, that bravest, truest Seyfried!  Bring him up to speak with me.  So rough and so good!—­My old man, to be sure, must storm and rave, but then his feeble and sickly nobody of a little wife can wind him round her finger.  Leave him to me, and be sure you shall win his blessing.”  After noon Uhlwurm and the waggon of birds set forth to Frankfort, where Kubbeling’s eldest son was tarrying to meet his father with fresh falcons.  Or ever the grim old grey-beard mounted his horse, he whispered to Ann:  “Truest of maidens, find some device to move Seyfried to take me in your fellowship to the land of Egypt, and I will work a charm which shall of a surety give your lover back to you, if indeed he is not. . . .” and he was about to cry “gone” as was his wont; yet he refrained himself and spoke it not.  Young Kubbeling tarried at the Forest-lodge; and as for my uncle, it was soon plain enough that my aunt had been in the right in the matter; nay, when we went home to the city, meseemed as though he and his wife had from the first been of one mind.  Our purpose pleased him better as he learned to believe more surely that our little women’s wits would peradventure be able to find his wandering son, and to tempt him to return to his father’s forest home.