nt, recognise Lene's voice
calling him. He mistakes it for that of some teasing fellow-apprentice,
until he turns around and beholds her, as so often! with a
promising-looking basket on her arm. "I bring you something good.
Yes, you may peep. That is for my precious treasure, but first,
quick, tell me, what success had the Knight? Did you instruct him
to some purpose? Was he made a master?"--"Ah, Mistress Lene, it's
a bad case! He failed utterly and miserably!"--"He failed?..."
"Ay,--why should you so particularly care?" She jerks away the
basket from his outstretched hand: "Keep your hands to yourself!
Here is nothing for you! God ha' mercy, our young lord defeated!"
and hurries into the house, leaving him crest-fallen, an object of
mockery to his companions, who have lost nothing of the interview.
Goaded, he has finally plunged among them with punishing fist,
when Sachs's arrival upon the scene stops the disorder. The boys
nimbly scatter. David is ordered indoors. "Close the shop and make
a light. Put the new shoes on the lasts!" Both go in.

The peacefulness of evening is upon the scene. Pogner, with his
daughter on his arm, returning from a walk, comes down the lane
which divides his house from Sachs's. He hesitates at Sachs's door.
"Shall we see whether neighbour Sachs be at home? I should be glad
of a talk with him. Shall I go in?..." But he decides against it.
"Why should I, after all? Better not! When a man undertakes a course
out of the usual, how should he accept advice?... Was it not he who
considered that I went too far? Yet, in forsaking the beaten track,
was I not doing even as he does? Or, was I actuated peradventure--by
vanity?" Pogner is not easy in his mind, it is plain. He invites
his silent and preoccupied daughter to sit beside him a little
space on the stone seat under the linden in front of their house;
he tries to fortify his faltering heart with the review of his
plan for the morrow, held in the poetic light in which he first
saw and found it alluring. "Deliciously mild is the evening. It
presages a most beautiful day to shine upon you to-morrow. Oh,
child, does no throb of the heart tell you what happiness awaits
you to-morrow, when the whole of Nuremberg, with its burghers and
plebeians, its guilds, its populace and high officials, is to gather
in your presence to see you award the prize, the noble laurel-wreath,
to the master of your choice and your chosen bridegroom?" But he
speaks to the