“It has been a moving morning, Mistress Margery.  But it will all come right.  It has come upon me as a sharp blow to be sure; and I have no longer any business here in the forest, all the more so by reason that I have children and grandchildren at home who have looked over-long for the old man’s home-coming.  I will set forth to-morrow early.  To tell the truth to none but you, I cannot endure to be away from the old place a longer space than it takes to go to Alexandria and back.  My old heart is grown over-soft and weary for an absence of two journeys.  And yet another matter for your ear alone:  You will be the wife of a noblehearted man, but mind you, he has long been free to wander whithersoever he would.  Take it to heart that you make his home dear and happy, else it will be with you as it is with my old woman, who hath never mastered that matter, and who lives alone for more days in the year than ever we dreamed the morning we were wed.”

Hereupon we went forth together; and I took his counsel to heart, and Gotz never left me for any long space of time, save when he must.

As for Kubbeling, he kept his word and departed from us on the morrow morning; yet we often saw him again after that time, and the finest falcon in our mews is that he sent us as a wedding gift; and after our marriage Ann received a fine colored parrot as a gift from old Uhlwurm, and the old man had made it speak for her in such wise that it could say right plainly:  “Uhlwurm is Ann’s humble servant.”

We now spent two days at the forest lodge in bliss, as though paradise had come down on earth; and albeit it is a perilous thing to rejoice in the love of a man who has wandered far beyond seas, yet has it this good side:  that many matters which to another seem far away and out of reach, he deems near at hand, and half the world is his as it were.  And how well could Gotz make me to feel as though I shared his possession!

On the morning of the third day after his coming, my lord Cardinal rode forth to the forest with Ann; and, inasmuch as the duties of his office now led, him to sojourn in Wurzberg and Bamberg, he could promise us that he would bless our union or ever he departed to Italy.  Albeit methought it would be a happy chance if we might stand at the altar at the same time with Herdegen and Ann, Gotz’s impatience, which had waxed no lesser even during his journeyings, was set against our waiting for my brother’s coming.  Likewise he desired that we might live together a space as man and wife, before he should go to Venice to get his release from the service of the Republic.

At the same time he deemed it not prudent to take me with him on that journey, howbeit, after that we were wed, when he was about to depart, I made so bold as to beseech him; and he plainly showed me that I had not made him wroth or troubled him whereas he willingly granted me to journey with him, and without reproof.  Thus I fared with him to the great and mighty city of Saint Mark, which I had ever longed to behold with my bodily eyes.  I never went beyond seas, yet we journeyed as far as Rome, and there, under the protection and guidance of my lord Cardinal, I spent many never-to-be-forgotten days by the side of my Gotz.