"
"Unbearable fellow!" cried Ebbo, when he had latched the door of the
room he shared with his brother. "First, holding up my inexperience
to scorn! As though the Kaisar knew not better than he what befits
me! Then trying to buy my silence and my mother's gratitude with his
hateful advance of gold. As if I did not loathe him enough without!
If I pay my homage, and sign the League to-morrow, it will be purely
that he may not plume himself on our holding our own by sufferance,
in deference to him."
"You will sign it--you will do homage!" exclaimed Friedel. "How
rejoiced the mother will be."
"I had rather depend at once--if depend I must--on yonder dignified
Kaisar and that noble king than on our meddling kinsman," said Ebbo.
"I shall be his equal now! Ay, and no more classed with the court
Junkern I was with to-day. The dullards! No one reasonable thing
know they but the chase. One had been at Florence; and when I asked
him of the Baptistery and rare Giotto of whom my uncle told us, he
asked if he were a knight of the Medici.
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