CHAPTER IV.

The ropedancer, Kuni, really had been with the sick mother and her babes, and had toiled for them with the utmost diligence.

The unfortunate woman was in great distress.

The man who had promised to take her in his cart to her native village of Schweinfurt barely supported himself and his family by the tricks of his trained poodles.  He made them perform their very best feats in the taverns, under the village lindens, and at the fairs.  But the children who gazed at the four-footed artists, though they never failed to give hearty applause, frequently paid in no other coin.  He would gladly have helped the unfortunate woman, but to maintain the wretched mother and her twins imposed too heavy a burden upon the kind-hearted vagabond, and he had withdrawn his aid.

Then the ropedancer met her.  True, she herself was in danger of being left lying by the wayside; but she was alone, and the mother had her children.  These were two budding hopes, while she had nothing more to expect save the end—­the sooner the better.  There could be no new happiness for her.

And yet, to have found some one who was even more needy than she, lifted her out of herself, and to have power to be and do something in her behalf pleased her, nay, even roused an emotion akin to that which, in better days, she had felt over a piece of good fortune which others envied.  Perhaps she herself might be destined to die on the highway, without consolation, the very next day; but she could save this unhappy woman from it, and render her end easier.  Oh, how rich Lienhard’s gold coins made her!  Yet if, instead of three, there had been as many dozens, she would have placed the larger portion in the twins’ pillows.  How it must soothe their mother’s heart!  Each one was a defence against hunger and want.  Besides, the gold had been fairly burning her hand.  It came from Lienhard.  Had it not been for Cyriax and the crowd of people in the room, she would have made him take it back—­she alone knew why.

How did this happen?

Why did every fibre of her being rebel against receiving even the smallest trifle from the man to whom she would gladly have given the whole world?  Why, after she had summoned up courage and approached Lienhard to restore his gift, had she felt such keen resentment and bitter suffering when the landlord of The Blue Pike stopped her?

As she now seized his gold, it seemed as though she saw Lienhard before her.  She had already told Cyriax how she met the aristocratic Nuremberg patrician, a member of the ancient and noble Groland family, whom his native city had now made an ambassador so young.  But what secretly bound her to him had never passed her lips.

Once in her life she had felt something which placed her upon an equal footing with the best and purest of her sex—­a great love for one from whom she asked nothing, nothing at all, save to be permitted to think of him and to sacrifice everything, everything for him—­even life.  So strange had been the course of this love, that people would have doubted her sanity or her truthfulness had she described it to them.