waiting outside. Each was to be borne home
separately, but both preferred, spite of the bright summer weather, to
draw the curtains, that unseen they might weep, and ask themselves how
such wrongs could have been inflicted upon the dead woman and themselves.

The respect of high and low for the Ortlieb family had been most
brilliantly displayed when the body of the son, slain in battle, had been
interred in the chapel of his race. And their mother? How many had held
her dear! to how many she had been kind, loving, and friendly! How great
a sympathy the whole city had shown during her illness, and how many of
all classes had attended the mass for her soul! And the burial which had
just taken place?

True, on her father's account all the members of the Council were
present, but scarcely half the wives had appeared. Their daughters--Els
had counted them--numbered only nine, and but three were included among
her friends. The others had probably come out of curiosity. And the
common people, the artisans, the lower classes, who in countless numbers
had accompanied her brother's coffin to its resting place, and during the
mass for the dead had crowded the spacious nave of St. Sebald's? There
had been now only a scanty group. The nuns from the convent were present,
down to the most humble lay Sister; but they were under great obligations
to her mother, and their abbess was her father's sister. There were few
other women except the old crones from the hospitals and nurseries, who
were never absent when there was an opportunity to weep or to backbite.
In going through the nave of the church into the chapel the sisters had
passed a group of younger lads and maidens, who had nudged one another in
so disrespectful a way, whispering all sorts of things, that Els had
tried to draw Eva past them as swiftly as possible.

Her wish to keep her more sensitive sister from noticing the disagreeable
gestures and insulting words of the cruel youths and girls was gratified.
True, Eva also felt with keen indignation that far too little honour was
paid to her beloved dead; that the blinded people believed the slanderers
who repeated even worse things of her Els than of herself, and made their
poor mother, who had lived and suffered like a saint, atone for what they
imagined were the sins of her daughters; but the jeers and scorn which
had obtruded themselves upon her father and sister from more than one
quarter, in many a form, had entirely esc