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.