Astonished, almost bewildered, the usually quiet statesman expressed his amazement.

The other gentlemen were preparing to examine the paper with him, when the abbot, without betraying the secret of Kuni’s heart, which she had confided to him in her confession, told Juliane’s father that the ropedancer had scarcely left the convent ere she gave up both the Emperor’s gift and the viaticum—­in short, her whole property, which would have been large enough to support her a long time—­in order to do what she could for the salvation of the child for whom her soul was more concerned than for her own welfare.

The astonished father’s eyes filled with tears of grateful emotion, and when Lienhard went with the gray-haired leech to the dying girl Doctor Peutinger begged permission to accompany them.  The physician, however, requested him to remain away from the sufferer, who would be disturbed by the sight of a strange face.  Then Peutinger charged his young friend to give Kuni his kind greetings and thank her for the love with which she had remembered his dear child.

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