“My apprentices shall show the Spanish mutineer the door,” cried the old man in a harsh, stern tone; “to the burgher’s repentant son my house will be always open.”

Meantime the Eletto wandered from one street to another.  He felt bewildered, disgraced.

It was not grief—­no quiet heartache that disturbed—­but a confused blending of wrath and sorrow.  He did not wish to appear before the friend of his youth, and even avoided Hans Eitelfritz, who came towards him.  He was blind to the gay, joyous bustle of the capital; life seemed grey and hollow.  His intention of communicating with the commandant of the citadel remained unexecuted; for he thought of nothing but his father’s anger, of Ruth, his own shame and misery.

He could not leave so.

His father must, yes, he must hear him, and when it grew dusk, he again sought the house to which he belonged, and from which he had been so cruelly expelled.

The door was locked.  In reply to his knock, a man’s unfamiliar voice asked who he was, and what he wanted.

He asked to speak with Adam, and called himself Ulrich.

After waiting a long time he heard a door torn open, and the smith angrily exclaim: 

“To your spinning-wheel!  Whoever clings to him so long as he wears the Spanish dress, means evil to him as well as to me.”

“But hear him!  You must hear him, father!” cried Ruth.

The door closed, heavy steps approached the door of the house; it opened, and again Adam confronted his son.

“What do you want?” he asked harshly.

“To speak to you, to tell you that you did wrong to insult me unheard.”

“Are you still the Eletto?  Answer!”

“I am!”

“And intend to remain so?”

“Que como—­puede ser—­” faltered Ulrich, who confused by the question, had strayed into the language in which he had been long accustomed to think.  But scarcely had the smith distinguished the foreign words, when fresh anger seized him.

“Then go to perdition with your Spaniards!” was the furious answer.

The door slammed so that the house shook, and by degrees the smith’s heavy tread died away in the vestibule.

“All over, all over!” murmured the rejected son.  Then calming himself, he clenched his fist and muttered through his set teeth:  “There shall be no lack of ruin; whoever it befalls, can bear it.”

While walking through the streets and across the squares, he devised plan after plan, imagining what must come.  Sword in hand he would burst the old man’s door, and the only booty he asked for himself should be Ruth, for whom he longed, who in spite of everything loved him, who had belonged to him from her childhood.

The next morning he negotiated cleverly and boldly with the commandant of the Spanish forces in the citadel.  The fate of the city was sealed! and when he again crossed the great square and saw the city-hall with its proud, gable-crowned central building, and the shops in the lower floor crammed with wares, he laughed savagely.