Countess Cordula, at whose feet several young nobles knelt or reclined,
among them Seitz Siebenburg, the brother-in-law of Wolff Eysvogel, her
sister's betrothed bridegroom.

The manner of the husband and father whose wife, only six weeks before,
had become the mother of twin babies--beautiful boys--and who for
Cordula's sake so shamefully forgot his duties, crimsoned her cheeks
with a flush of anger, while the half-disapproving, half-troubled look
that Sir Boemund Altrosen cast, sometimes at the countess, sometimes
at Siebenburg, showed her that she herself was on the eve of doing
something which the best persons could not approve; for Altrosen, who
leaned silently against the wall beside the countess, ever and anon
pushing back the coal-black hair from his pale face, had been mentioned
by her godfather as the noblest of the younger knights gathered in
Nuremberg. A voice in her own heart, too, cried out that this was no
fitting place for her.

If Els had been with her, Eva said to herself, she certainly would
not have permitted her to enter this room, where such careless mirth
prevailed, alone with a knight, and the thought roused her for a short
time from the joyous intoxication in which she had hitherto revelled,
and awakened a suspicion that there might be peril in trusting herself
to Heinz Schorlin without reserve.

"Not here," she entreated, and he instantly obeyed her wish, though the
Countess Cordula, as if he were alone, instead of with a lady, loudly
and gaily bade him stay where pleasure had built a hut under roses.

Eva was pleased that her new friend did not even vouchsafe the young
countess an answer. His obedience led her also to believe that her
anxiety had been in vain. Yet she imposed greater reserve of manner
upon herself so rigidly that Heinz noticed it, and asked what cloud had
dimmed the pure radiance of her gracious sunshine.

Eva lowered her eyes and answered gently: "You ought not to have taken
me where the diffidence due to modesty is forgotten." Heinz Schorlin
understood her and rejoiced to hear the answer. In his eyes, also,
Countess Cordula this evening had exceeded the limits even of the
liberty which by common consent she was permitted above others. He
believed that he had found in Eva the embodiment of pure and beautiful
womanhood.

He had given her his heart from the first moment that their eyes met. To
find her in every respect exactly what he had imagined, ere he heard a
single