Wolf left the Hiltner house behind him with the feeling that he had
upheld the cause of his Church against the learned opponent to the best
of his ability, and had not been defeated. Yet he was not entirely
satisfied. In former years he had read the Hutten dialogues, and, though
he disapproved of their assaults upon the Holy Father in Rome, he had
warmly sympathized with the fiery knight's love for his native land.

Far as, at the court of Charles, the German ranked below the
Netherlander, the Spaniard, and the Italian, Wolf was proud of being a
German, and it vexed him that he had not at least made the attempt to
repel the theologian's charge that the Catholic, to whom the authority of
Rome was the highest, would be inferior to the Protestant in patriotism.

But he would have succeeded no better in convincing Erasmus than the
learned theologians who, at the Emperor's instance, had held an earnest
religious discussion in Ratisbon a short time before, had succeeded in
arriving at even a remote understanding.

As he reached the Haidplatz new questions of closer interest were casting
these of supreme importance into the shade.

He was to enter his home directly, and then the woman whom he loved would
rest above him, and alone, unwatched, and unguarded, perhaps dream of
another.

Who was the man for whose sake she withdrew from him the heart to whose
possession he had the best and at any rate the oldest right?

Certainly not Baron Malfalconnet.