Instead of injuring her, wishing her evil, and asking her to do anything wrong, he certainly had only good intentions.

He had cared for her as if he occupied the place of her own brother who fell in the battle of Marchfield.

It would have given him most pleasure--he had said so himself--to dance everything with her, but decorum and the royal dames who kept him in attendance would not permit it.

However, he came to her in every pause to exchange at least a few brief words and a glance.

During the longest one, which lasted more than an hour and was devoted to the refreshment of the guests, he led her into a side room which had been transformed into a blossoming garden.
Seats were placed behind the green birch trees--amid whose boughs hung gay lamps--and the rose bushes which surrounded a fountain of perfumed water, and Eva had already followed the Swiss knight across the threshold when she saw among the branches at the end of the room the Countess Cordula, at whose feet several young nobles knelt or reclined, among them Seitz Siebenburg, the brother-in-law of Wolff Eysvogel, her sister's betrothed bridegroom.
The manner of the husband and father whose wife, only six weeks before, had become the mother of twin babies--beautiful boys--and who for Cordula's sake so shamefully forgot his duties, crimsoned her cheeks with a flush of anger, while the half-disapproving, half-troubled look that Sir Boemund Altrosen cast, sometimes at the countess, sometimes at Siebenburg, showed her that she herself was on the eve of doing something which the best persons could not approve; for Altrosen, who leaned silently against the wall beside the countess, ever and anon pushing back the coal-black hair from his pale face, had been mentioned by her godfather as the noblest of the younger knights gathered in Nuremberg.