The young Councillor silently followed the physician to the sick bed, at whose head leaned a Gray Sister, who was one of the guests of The Blue Pike and had volunteered to nurse the patient.

The nun shook her head sorrowfully as the two men crossed the threshold.  She knew how the dying look, and that the hand of death already touched this sufferer.  Yet her kind, colourless face, framed by the white sides of her cap, quickly regained its usual quiet, placid expression.

The regular features, now slightly flushed with the fever, of the patient in her charge, on the contrary, were constantly varying in expression.  She had noticed the entrance of the visitors, and when she opened her sparkling blue eyes and saw the person to whom her poor heart clung with insatiable yearning they were filled with a sunny radiance, and a smile hovered round her lips.

She had known that he would come, that he would not let her die without granting her one more glance.

Now she would fain have nodded to him and expressed in very, very appropriate words the delight, the embarrassment, the gratitude which filled her soul, but her panting chest could give no breath for utterance.  Nay, extreme exhaustion even prevented the movement of her lips.  But her heart and brain were by no means inactive.  A wealth of internal and external experiences, long since forgotten, rose before her mind.  First she fancied that she saw Lienhard, as at their first meeting, approaching the garlanded door of St. Sebald’s with his beautiful bride, arrayed in her wedding robes.  Then she was transported to the court room and felt his hand stroke her hair.  The hours at Frau Schurstab’s when she had awaited his visits with an anxious heart came back to her memory.  Then she again saw herself upon the rope.  Lienhard was toying with the little elf below.  But what she beheld this time was far from awakening new wicked wishes, for Juliane once more wore her laurel crown and beckoned kindly to her like a dear, familiar friend.  Finally, pale little Juli appeared, as if shrouded in mists.  Last of all, she saw herself filling the jug for the sick woman and gathering the red pinks for her and Lienhard in the landlady’s little garden by the shimmering starlight.  The flowers, whose fragrance was too strong, yet which she had not the strength to remove, lay on the coverlet before her.  They were intended for Lienhard, and as she stretched her slender fingers toward them and tried to clasp them she succeeded.  She even found strength to hold out her right hand to him with a beseeching glance.  And lo! ere her arm fell again the proud man had seized the flowers.  Then she saw him fasten the pinks on the breast of his dark doublet, and heard the thrill of deep emotion in his voice, as he said: 

“I thank you, dear Kuni, for the beautiful flowers.  I will keep them.  Your life was a hard one, but you have borne the burden bravely.  I saw this clearly, and not I alone.  I am also to thank you and give you very friendly remembrances in the name of Doctor Peutinger, of Augsburg, little Juliane’s father.  He will think of you as a mistress of your art, a noble, high-minded girl, and I—­I shall certainly do so.”