d people who had dared to cast stones at the
gracious maidens, who were as pure and innocent as their saint herself.

Poor Ortel! His kind young eyes streaming with tears might have softened
a rock; but the enraged candle-dealer misinterpreted his honest emotion,
and he certainly would not have been allowed to go on so far had not rage
and amazement kept her silent. But Frau Vorkler never lost the use of her
tongue long, and what a flood of abuse of the degenerate children of the
time, who forgot the respect and gratitude due to their own mother, she
began to pour forth! But when faithful Endres, who had grown grey in the
Ortlieb service, and under whose orders Ortel was placed to help in
unpacking, commanded her to be silent or leave the house, and told her
son, instead of following her, to stay with his old employer, Frau
Vorkler proceeded to lament over the corruption of the whole world, and
did not fail to deal a few side-thrusts at the two daughters of the
house.

But here also she made little progress, for the abbess led Eva up the
stairs, and the two old family servants, Martsche representing the
guiding mind and Endres the rude strength, made common cause. The latter
upheld Ortel in his refusal to leave the house, and the former declared
that Metz must remain the usual time after giving notice. She would not
help Frau Vorkler to force the poor child into an unequal, miserable
marriage with the old miser to whom she wanted to give her.

This remark was aimed at the master-tailor Seubolt, the guardian of the
Vorkler children, who, though forty years her senior, wanted to make
pretty Metz his wife, and who had also promised the widow to obtain for
his future brother-in-law Ortel an excellent place in the stables of the
German order of military monks. Not outraged morality, but the guardian
and suitor in one person, had induced the candle-dealer to take her
children from their good places in the Ortlieb household. The widow's
fear of having her real motive detected spared the necessity of using
force. But whilst slowly retiring backwards, crab fashion, she shrieked
at her antagonists the threat that her children's guardian, no less a
personage than master-tailor Nickel Seubolt, was a man who would help her
gain her just rights and snatch the endangered souls of Ortel and her
poor young Metz from temporal and eternal destruction in this Sodom and
Gomorrah----

The rest of the burden which oppressed her soul she wa