“I will wait here with you, my venerable friend.  Since the poor girl can live only a few hours longer, I can join the others, if I hurry, before they leave Frankfort.”

“That’s right, Lienhard,” cried Wilibald Pirckheimer, and the Abbot of St. AEgidius added approvingly: 

“You will thereby do something which is pleasing in the sight of Heaven.  Yes, gentlemen, I repeat it:  there are few deathbeds beside which I have found so little reason to be ashamed of the fate of being a mortal as by the humble couch of this vagabond girl.  If, before the judgment seat above, intention and faith are weighed with the same scales as works, few who close their eyes behind silken curtains will be so sure of a favourable sentence as this poorest of the poor.”

“Did the girl really keep no portion of Herr Lienhard’s rich gift for herself?” asked the Nuremberg imperial magistrate.

“Nothing,” replied the abbot.  “She gave the whole, down to her last copper, to the stranger, though she herself must remain here, poor, lame, and deserted—­and she had only met the sick woman by accident upon the highway.  My duty forbids me to repeat the details, and how she bore herself even while at Augsburg, but, thanks to the confession which I have just received, I shall count this morning among those never to be forgotten.  O gentlemen, death is a serious matter, and intercourse with the dying is the best school for the priest.  Then the inmost depths of the soul are opened to him.”

“And,” observed Wilibald Pirckheimer, “I think the psychologist would then learn that, the deeper we penetrate the human breast, the darker is the spectacle.”

“Yes, my learned friend,” the abbot answered, “but we also perceive that the deepest and darkest shafts contain the purest specimens of gold and silver ore.”

“And were you really permitted to find such in this neglected vagabond, reverend sir?” asked Doctor Eberbach, with an incredulous smile.

“As certainly,” answered the prelate with repellent dignity, “as that the Saviour was right when he called those who were pure in heart blessed above those who were wise and overflowing with knowledge!”

Then, without waiting for the Thuringian’s answer, he hastily turned to the young ambassador and begged him to grant the dying girl, who clung to him with tender devotion, a brief farewell.

“Willingly,” replied Lienhard, requesting the physician to accompany him.

The latter had just beckoned Doctor Peutinger to his side, to examine with him the indulgence which he had found under the kerchief crossed over the sick girl’s bosom.  It did not secure redemption from the flames of purgatory for the ropedancer’s soul, as the gentlemen expected, but for another, and that other—­the learned humanist and Imperial Councillor would not believe his own eyes—­was his beloved, prematurely lost child.  There, in large letters, was “Juliane Peutinger of Augsburg.”