“Never, never, never will I give you up!” she cried, then fell in a heap upon the chair. Without more adieus I thrust aside the tapestries, and strode past many gazing menials, much amazed to see a shabbily clad man burst from the inner apartments of the Cardinal. Fortunately no one strove to halt me. In a moment I was past the last sentry, and in the street, lighted by the last sunshine of the waning afternoon. Italy and all its strange visions seemed vanished behind me. I heard the pompous Geheimrat of some Pomeranian princeling cursing in broadest Low German at the inattention of his varlets. The very oaths seemed good to hear. I strode over to a convenient beer house, and quaffed a stein of good brown Nürnberger. “Realities?” I spoke to myself; “here are the realities,--the life to live and the death to die. I have escaped from Merlin and his house of dreams.” * * * * * The crowds in the street had hardly thinned. Never, save at the Venice carnivals, had I seen greater multitudes. “Luther,” “Luther,” seemed on every tongue. “He will recant,” I heard an earnest-faced young student declaiming to a fellow; “Holy God strengthen him, but he will recant. Pope, Emperor, princes, priests are all against him. Flesh and blood are not made to endure such things, he will retract all his books to-morrow.” “And yet,” answered the second student more confidently, “when I caught his eye this noon, I said, ‘that is not the face of one whom fiend or man can frighten.’ I still hope he will stand fast.” “Ay, so I pray every hour,” rejoined the first somberly; “for the day he retracts is the blackest day that has ever set for Germany, after such a dawn of hope of better things! But--” Here we were swept asunder and I caught no more of their hopes or fears. A moment later I was behind two black-cloaked Dominicans. Easily enough one seized the thread of their talk. “I tell you, Sebaldus, this hideous leniency has already nigh wrecked the Church. A few good faggots two years ago should have ended everything. But first Caïetanus tarried, then the Pope, and now finally the Emperor. The blessed Dominic grant we see the end of this Anti-Christ to-morrow. Will they execute him here or send him to Rome?” “The legates Aleander and Forli have done their uttermost to have him clapped under arrest already, but alas! the Emperor hesitates.” “Hesitates? Great God! as a Christian prince how can he hesitate in his duty?” “Why, my dear brother, he has most unfortunate scruples about that matter of a safe-conduct which he issued.” “And _he_ hesitates to violate it? As if faith were to be kept with Turks and heretics! Let him remember how Kaiser Sigismund piously let the safe-conduct he gave to Hus be set aside, for as the King of Aragon then said, ‘Faith is not to be kept with those who have not kept faith with God.’”