and she often opened her large, blue eyes and gazed with touching anxiety at the sick woman.  This was the adopted child, Walpurga, and never had the matron beheld amongst the poor and suffering so lovely a human flower as this little six-year-old child, struggling with sleep in her affectionate desire to render aid.  The other little girl’s free hand also touched her mother, and thus these four, united in poverty and sorrow, but also in love, seemed to form a single whole.  What a peaceful, charming picture!

Frau Christine gazed with earnest sympathy at each member of this group.  How well-formed was every one! how pure and innocent the features of the children looked! how kind and loving those of the suffering mother, who was a thief, and whose tender back had felt the scourge of the executioner!

The thought made her shudder.  But when little Walpurga, half asleep, raised her tiny hand and lovingly stroked the wounded shoulder of her adopted mother, the matron, as usual when anything pleasant moved her heart, longed to have her husband at her side.  How easily, since he was so near, she could afford him a sight of this touching picture!  It should prove that she had been right to let Eva remain here.

Faithful to her custom of permitting no delay in the execution of a good resolution, she wanted to send Katterle to call her husband, but the girl could not be found.

Then Frau Christine went herself, beckoning to Eva to follow; but they had scarcely reached the centre of the room when a peal of shrill laughter greeted them from a couch on the left.

The person from whom it came was the barber’s widow, whose attack had alarmed Eva so terribly the day before in front of the pillory.  It pealed loudly and shrilly through the stillness of the night, and when the matron turned angrily to reprove the person who so inconsiderately disturbed the rest of the others, the woman clapped her hands and instantly a chorus of sharp, screaming voices rose around her.  The barber’s widow, who knew everybody who lived in Nuremberg, had recognised the magistrate’s wife at her entrance, and secretly incited her neighbours to follow her example and, as soon as she gave the signal, demand better fare and make Frau Christine, the patroness of the hospital, feel what they thought of the cruelty of her husband, who had delivered them to the executioner.

The female thieves and swindlers-in short, all the reprobate women around Frau Ratzer, whose feet had just been tied on account of her unruly behaviour in the Countess von Montfort’s presence—­obeyed her signal, and the fierce voices raised in demand and invective woke those who were sleeping farther away.  Weeping, wailing, and screaming they started up, clamouring to know what danger threatened them, whilst Frau Ratzer and her fellow-conspirators shrieked for beer or wine instead of water, for meat with the black bread and wretched broth and, yelling and howling, bade the patroness tell her husband that they thought him a brute and a bloodhound.