"I noticed nothing unseemly in his behaviour either to Elspeth or to Ottilie von Thüringen!"
"It may be that the captain but took her to a place of safety, thinking her in danger!" said the farmer, growing more placid as the thought sprang up that there was ground for hope. "I remember a regiment staying near here the night after your hocus-pocus at Ruhla. They came at nightfall, and with the dawn, or soon after, an officer came riding helter-skelter down the hill from the Wartburg with a single soldier after him, and in half an hour they mounted and rode away. Maybe he was the very man."
"But if he brought Elspeth thither why did he not send her to you?" propounded Pastor Rad.
"Because the girl would have had more sense than to get in your path again!"
"As if I had no work of the Lord's to do, where the hosts of the Lord were drawn out unto battle?"
"Depend upon it," said the farmer, "Elspeth's in the Wartburg hiding!"
The pastor shook his head. He would have liked to know that she was. After all, there was an air of solid comfort about old Reinheit's abode, sadly marred by the lack of Elspeth's trim figure in coif and apron trotting to and fro. The more he thought of it the more he wanted to see her. At last he said—
"It may be that the Lord will vouchsafe light I will go even unto the Wartburg and question the Landgravine, if peradventure she knows where the maiden is."
"You need not darken my door again if you find her not," said Nicholas Reinheit. "She can milk against any maid, make butter against any maid or wife in the forest, bake against any, brew against any. God in heaven! she must come back. And I shan't go to the church till she does."
Pastor Rad was too much surprised to say anything. For Nicholas had been a very steadfast pillar of the Church, and it boded ill for Pastor Rad if he did not succeed in restoring the lost lamb to the fold.