e room with a faint sigh. It could scarcely be
solely anxiety about his expected goods that burdened her lover's mind.
True, his weak, arrogant mother, and still more his grandmother, the
daughter of a count, who lived with them in the Eysvogel house and still
ruled her daughter as if she were a child, had opposed her engagement to
Wolff, but their resistance had ceased since the betrothal. On the
other hand, she had often heard that Fran Eysvogel, the haughty mother,
dowerless herself, had many poor and extravagant relations besides
her daughter and her debt-laden, pleasure-loving husband, Sir Seitz
Siebenburg, who, it could not be denied, all drew heavily upon the
coffers of the ancient mercantile house. Yet it was one of the richest
in Nuremberg. Yes, something of which she was still ignorant must be
oppressing Wolff, and, with the firm resolve to give him no peace until
he confessed everything to her, she returned to the couch of her invalid
mother.

CHAPTER II.

Wolff had scarcely vanished from the street, and Els from the window,
when a man's slender figure appeared, as if it had risen from the earth,
beside the spurge-laurel tree at the left of the house. Directly after
some one rapped lightly on the pavement of the yard, and in a few
minutes the heavy ironbound oak doors opened and a woman's hand beckoned
to the late guest, who glided swiftly along in the narrow line of shadow
cast by the house and vanished through the entrance.

The moon looked after him doubtfully. In former days the
narrow-shouldered fellow had been seen near the Ortlieb house often
enough, and his movements had awakened Luna's curiosity; for he had been
engaged in amorous adventure even when work was still going on at the
recently completed convent of St. Clare--an institution endowed by the
Ebner brothers, to which Herr Ernst Ortlieb added a considerable sum. At
that time--about three years before--the bold fellow had gone there to
keep tryst evening after evening, and the pretty girl who met him was
Katterle, the waiting maid of the beautiful Els, as Nuremberg folk
called the Ortlieb sisters, Els and Eva. Many vows of ardent, changeless
love for her had risen to the moon, and the outward aspect of the man
who made them afforded a certain degree of assurance that he would
fulfil his pledges, for he then wore the long dark robe of reputable
people, and on the front of his cap, from which a net shaped like a bag
hung down his back, w