win a wealthy bride.  Fortune and the saints had permitted him to find a woman to satisfy both his avarice and his heart, yet he had neither kept faith with her nor even showed her proper consideration.  But, strangely enough, the warning voice reproached him still more sharply for having, in the presence of others, accused and disparaged his brother-in-law’s betrothed bride, whose guilt he believed proved.  Again he felt how ignoble and unworthy of a knight his conduct had been.  Why had he pursued this course?  Merely—­he admitted it now—­to harm Wolff, the monitor and niggard whom he hated; perhaps also because he secretly told himself that, if Wolff formed a happy marriage, he and his children, not Siebenburg’s twin boys, would obtain the larger share of the Eysvogel property.

This greed of gain, which had brought him to Nuremberg to seek a wife, was probably latent in his blood, though his reckless accumulation of debts seemed to contradict it.  Yesterday, at the Duke of Pomerania’s, it had again led him into that wild, mad dice-throwing.

Seitz Siebenburg was no calm thinker.  All these thoughts passed singly in swift flashes through his excited brain.  Like the steady monotone of the bass accompanying the rise and fall of the air, he constantly heard the assurance that it would be a pity if his splendid twins should resemble him.

Therefore they must grow up away from his influence, under the care of his good uncle.  With this man’s example before their eyes they would become knights as upright and noble as Kunz Heideck, whom every one esteemed.

For the sake of the twins he had resolved to begin a new and worthier life himself.  His wife would aid him, and love should lend him strength to conduct himself in future so that Countess von Montfort, and every one who meant well by his sons, might wish them to resemble their father.

He walked on, holding his head proudly erect.  Seeing the first worshippers entering the Church of Our Lady, he went in, too, repeated several Paternosters, commended the little boys and their mother to the care of the gracious Virgin, and besought her to help him curb the turbulent impulses which often led him to commit deeds he afterwards regretted.

Many people knew Casper Eysvogel’s tall, haughty son-in-law and marvelled at the fervent devotion with which, kneeling in the first place he found near the entrance, beside two old women, he continued to pray.  Was it true that the Eysvogel firm had been placed in a very critical situation by the loss of great trains of merchandise?  One of his neighbours had heard him sigh, and declared that something must weigh heavily upon the “Mustache.”  She would tell her nephew Hemerlein, the belt-maker, to whom the knight owed large sums for saddles and harnesses, that he would be wise to look after his money betimes.

Siebenburg quitted the church in a more hopeful mood than when he entered it.