He rose as he spoke, muttering all sorts of unintelligible things, until he finally exclaimed, “Yet perhaps one might——­”

Then he looked impatiently toward the door, and asked:  “Where is the girl loitering?  Would Eve probably bite the apple of temptation also?”

“Shall I call her?” cried Wolf eagerly.

“No, no,” said the captain.  “It is sinful to disturb even our nearest relatives at prayer.  Besides, you would not believe how the maestro’s praises and the imperial gift have excited the vanity in her woman’s nature.  For the first time in I know not how many years, she overslept the hour of mass.  It was probably ten o’clock when I knocked at her chamber door.  Toward eleven there was a movement in her room.  Then I opened the door to bid her good-morning, but she neither heard nor saw anything, and knelt at the priedieu as if turned to stone.  Before going to sleep and early in the morning I expect such things, but when it is almost noon!  Her porridge still stood untouched on the table here, and to-day there is no occasion for fasting.  But I did not like to disturb her, and perhaps she would still be kneeling before the Virgin’s image if the maid-servant hadn’t blundered in to carry a bouquet which Herr Peter Schlumperger’s servant had brought.  Then Barbara started up as if a hornet had stung her.  And how she looked at me!  Once—­I knew it instantly—­I had gazed into such a marvellously beautiful face, such helpless blue eyes.  Afterward I remembered who and where it had been.  God guard me from sinning against my own child, but that was exactly the way the young girl looked who they—­it was farther back in the past than you can remember—­burned here for a witch, as the halberdiers and monks led her to the place of execution.  Susanne Schindler—­that was her name—­was the daughter of a respectable notary’s clerk, who was obliged to wander about the world a great deal, and perished in Hungary just as she reached womanhood.  Her mother had died when she was born, and an old woman had taken care of her out of friendship.  People called the lass ’beautiful Susel,’ and she was wonderfully charming.  Pink and white, like the maiden in the fairy tale, and with glittering golden hair just like my Wawerl’s.  The old woman with whom she lived—­her aunt or some other relative—­had long practised the healing of all sorts of infirmities, and when a young Spanish count, who had come here with the Emperor Charles to the Reichstag in the year ’31, fell under his horse in leaping a ditch, his limbs were injured so that he could not use them.  As he did not recover under the care of the Knights of St. John, who first nursed him, he went to the herb doctress, and she took charge of him, and cured him, too, although the skill of the most famous doctors and surgeons had failed to help him.

“But, to make amends, Satan, who probably had the largest share in the miracle, visited him with the sorest evil, for ‘beautiful Susel,’ who was the old woman’s assistant, had so bewitched the young count that he not only fell in love with her, but actually desired to make her his wife.