A man may well pawn his last doublet, if he may thereby
gain a larger. He need never redeem the first, and it is given some folks
to coin gold ducats out of humbler folks' sins. Ah! If I had a fox for a
brother!"

He sang the last words to himself as it were, and vanished, seeing
certain persons of the Court.

Now I took this well-meant warning as it was intended; and albeit Ann and
I were heartsick with longing to see Herdegen and to release him from his
hiding, we nevertheless took patience. The legal guardians of our estate,
having my uncle's consent, took my Cousin Maud's suretyship, and
expressed themselves willing to pay the fine out of the moneys left by
our parents, into the Imperial treasury. And that which followed
thereafter showed us how wise the Fool's admonition had been.

The knight, Sir Apitz von Rochow, who had served as Junker Henning's
second in the fight, tarried yet in Nuremberg, and this rude, arrogant
youth had devoted himself with such true loving-kindness to the care of
his young cousin, at first in the priest's house at Altenpero and
afterwards in the Deutsch-haus in the town, that he had taken no rest,
day nor night, until the Junker's father came, and then he fell into a
violent fever. It was but of late that the leech had granted him to go
out of doors, and his first walk was to our house to show me his sorrow
for my grief, and to thank my cousin for many pleasant trifles which she
had sent to him and the Junker during their sickness, to refresh them. At
the same time he broke forth in loud and unstinted wrath against Sir
Franz von Welemisl, and gave us to wit that with his whole heart he
grudged him the fair Ursula, whose favor he himself had so diligently
sued for since the first days of the Diet. From our house he went to the
Tetzels', and then he and the Bohemian forthwith came to high words and
defiant glances.

Shortly after this, and a few hours only after my brother's penalty had
been paid into the Treasury, the two young gentlemen met in the nobles'
wine-room by the Frohnwage, and von Rochow, heated by wine and heeding
neither moderation nor manners, began to taunt Ursula's betrothed. After
putting it to him that he had left the task to Herdegen of picking up the
glove, "which peradventure he had thought was of too heavy leather," to
which the other made seemly reply, he enquired, inasmuch as they were
discoursing of marriage, whether the Church, which forbids the joining of
th